Building Multi-sector Partnerships: Combining Approaches to Achieve Our Policy Goals

Jerome, Kitty

Thursday, August 16, 2012: 2:30 PM

3501C (Kansas City Convention Center)

Kitty Jerome, MA , National LGBT Network for Health Equity, Florence, MA

Mr. Dan Carrigan, BA , Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, Berkeley, CA

Rhonda Smythe, MPH, MS, RD , Trailnet, Saint Louis, MO

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this presentation attendees will be able to:

Cite solid examples of multi-sector partnerships with mutual benefit to diverse policy goals in the community.
Identify the steps to furthering their relationships with community members working toward other (non-tobacco) healthy community goals in order to work collaboratively to achieve multiple objectives.
Identify potential challenges to this approach as well as strategies for overcoming them.

Cross Cutting Program Area(s): Tobacco Control Policies and Increasing Diversity/Eliminating Disparities

Audience: Individuals with extensive experience in tobacco control.

Key Points: Collaborative multi-disciplinary approaches to improving community health are increasingly seen as a renewed focus in public health. Past approaches that concentrate specifically on improving one area of health (smoking or obesity) have less synergy and political will than a holistic community approach that considers all social determinants of health. Creating an environment that encourages and supports all facets of health through multi-sector leadership can lead to increased political cooperation. Decreases in national funding make it necessary to utilize all possible resources and work with untraditional partners to move our policy goals.

Educational Experience: Experts from multi-disciplinary fields will provide context and incentives for a multi-sector approach, and present concrete examples of several communities currently working within the collaborative model. Participants will break out into groups with specific exercises to guide discussion of the opportunities and challenges to increasing collaboration across fields. The larger group will reconvene to share ideas and presenters will wrap up with additional resources for participants.

Benefits: Public health means improving and protecting the health of the population and is not limited to one field or one health behavior. Pooling the expertise and strength of multiple public health sectors can lead to big gains in reducing tobacco use and obesity, improving sustainable health outcomes in the community. In this period of economic downturn and hyper-partisanship, engaging diverse stakeholders for the purpose of community health may be more politically palatable than single-issue initiatives.