Strathcarron Hospice: Moving from 'community engagement' to 'community development'

We're talking to Susan High and Hannah Gray from Strathcarron Hospice near Falkirk in Scotland. Susan and Hannah have played a key role in moving the hospice from a 'community engagement' focus (a good thing in itself) to a 'community development' focus (even better). This work over the past 2-3 years has had eye-opening results and useful outcomes for their work both as clinicians and in the community.

This journey is described in Cormac Russell's paper Understanding ground-up community development from a practice perspective published in the open access journal Lifestyle Medicine. It's free to download and very well worth a read! VITC founder Mark McKergow summarises the paper and points to come of the challenges to come in his blog here.

On the call we talk about a 'three lane model' for community development. Lane 1: things the community can do for themselves, and the best way to support is to get out of the way. Lane 2: Things the community can do for themselves with a little help from outside. Lane 3: things the community needs outside help to do, and the best way to support is to keep focus on what the community wants, not what the experts think they 'should' want.

Hannah also mentions the Denny Poppies project - find out more here.

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