Building Capacity. Building Power. Citizen Power.

Capacity for best health ebbs and flows. That's life. Some call citizen capacity - "patient engagement." But that's too weak. Growing and sustaining citizen capacity is citizen power. Our personal and community health depends on it.

Four Stories
I'm going to tell you four stories:

I'm unsteady when tired. I get tired more often. I'm more likely to fall when tired. My capacity diminishes. I resort to mobility aids to increase my capacity. First one cane, then two canes, now occasional wheelchair.  Preventing injury maintains my capacity. Mobility aids build my capacity. At the same time maintaining and building capacity sustains hope in me. Hope creates capacity. It's reinforcing.  I am one person building my capacity.

When I was 16 (I know, I'm old), I started preparing for the draft. I went to a church for draft counseling and enrolled in a course that trained people to be draft counselors. It started me on a career of obtaining profound knowledge of the law and regulations to manage within them.  I ended up counseling young men for almost two years. It served me well in my own mission not to be drafted. I built personal capacity, personal power, and guided others to exercise their power.

I'm podcasting now. I joined a community - The Podcasting Fellowship. The sponsors of the community, Seth Godin and Alex DiPalma, created a seven-week course about podcasting and a platform for about 330 international aspiring podcasters to learn together and support each other. About 90 of those original participants are still meeting, six months later, learning and supporting each other. Somewhere between 90 and 250 of the 300+ are actively podcasting. Sustainable community capacity building.

Garrett County, MD Health Department (population 30,000) created a platform for promoting the collaboration of almost 40 groups of local residents working together to solve the problems afflicting all communities, most with larger populations and resources – drug misuse, loneliness, immunization, food insecurity, oral health, medication management, maternal/fetal health, chronic disease management, transportation, homelessness. Community capacity building. Leveraging their resources!
Build Citizen Power for Best Health
Synonyms for capacity include competence, effectiveness, efficiency, potential and POWER. As in life, capacity ebbs and flows. Power ebbs and flows. I care about citizen capacity and citizen power. Some call it engagement, as in patient engagement. But that's too weak. Building citizen capacity adds to the base of community capabilities and sustains it.

Where do we need to build citizen capacity?

First and foremost - Habits for best health (personal and community)
Coordination of care
Policymaking
Planning care
Caregiving
Informed decision-making
Paying for healthcare
Team building
Leadership
Storytelling, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, writing
Advising governance, design, operations, and learning across healthcare
Community services
Community accessibility
 Lot’s of opportunity for building citizen capacity

Success Factors for Citizen Power
What does it take to sustain citizen capacity building? Sustaining capacity is cultural, habitual, and repetitive. Here's my partial list of success factors:

Community (any definition) self-identifies a problem and is dying to solve it
Common values, common language, trust
Content in byte-sized (and bite-sized) pieces sensitive to people's most comfortable learning style
Small support groups, mentoring
Doing, more than listening
Any level of participation works
Continual learning
Ongoing synchronous (face-to-face or voice-to-voice) and asynchronous (participate when convenient) sharing and feedback
Transparent governance - how the capacity building process is managed
New blood welcomed
Have fun doing it

Yes! Citizen Power-Good for what ails you.
Closing