Highlights
Community engagement is important and helps to improve public health work, build community trust and resilience, and reduce community stress.
It’s Worth It…
Make no mistake, community engagement is important! Effectively engaging with communities can be a labor-intensive effort for everyone that is involved: ATSDR, STLT partners, and community partners.
However, community engagement helps you:
- Gain a better understanding of people’s concerns and needs
- Encourages participation in your work
- Promotes the delivery of public health findings that people can use to make health decisions
- Delivers public health information that helps people adopt behaviors to protect their health
In addition, community engagement activities:
- Can build trust
- Minimize the negative secondary impacts of a public health response
- Reduce community stress, and
- Strengthen community resilience.
Community engagement helps to improve public health work. When community input and insights are considered; investigation design, data collection and analysis, health interventions, and information sharing activities improve. It can also help public health professionals avoid ethical pitfalls and make way for long term partnerships. Finally, effective community engagement can help identify areas for improvement in how research findings are used to bring about change. This insight may ultimately lead to the general public being more receptive to public health work and reaping greater benefits.