PRIMER

Community engagement is an expression that has been forward-thinking as a useful approach for improving people's health and as a means of enabling a population to proactively be the stewards of their lives - and thereby improve their own health. The process of engaging communities poses multiple challenges and until now there was not a way to "e;co-communicate"e;. How should we activity and in an inclusive way co-communicate? And how can we know which approach or process, or method would be most appropriate for diverse populations and micro-communities? In order to begin framing answers to these questions, we need to understand what community engagement is, where the concept came from, and how it is proposed to work. This book will reveal some of the different perspectives and agendas that have combined around the term "e;community engagement and population health"e;; and how Communities in Collaborative Conversation is a different approach to engagement where the strategy is focused on the members of the stakeholder community and a proactive level of involved in the design of interventions.