Healthy Communities Conversation on Strengthening Health Promotion Capacity among Indigenous Communities: Summary

This is a summary of the conversation facilitated by the Centre for Healthy Communities on January 30, 2024. The Healthy Communities Conversation focused on how we engage and collaborate with Indigenous communities in the planning, implementation, evaluation, and sustainability of Indigenous-led health promotion programs and strategies.

Summary:

• Building community-led health promotion programs begins with building relationships. Culturally responsive approaches to evaluation can encourage capacity building, empowerment, and ownership and can influence shifts in understanding and awareness of barriers and opportunities for communities to lead program implementation and evaluation. 
• An important piece that supports the success of community-led health promotion programs is working with community champions. Establishing authentic and respectful relationships with community champions is necessary for implementation success and sustainment of the health promotion program.
• An understanding that much of the current systemic issues experienced by Indigenous communities is due to settler colonialism. Viewing these systemic issues through the community context is critical (e.g., lack of resources/infrastructure and the community’s specific culture and history). 
• For health promotion programs in Indigenous communities, centering Indigenous knowledge systems and perspectives in the development of initiatives, strategies, and programs is necessary for continued community involvement and sustainment. This can be done through engaging with Elders and Knowledge Keepers. Approaches that create a space for Western and Indigenous ways of knowing to come together, such as a two-eyed seeing approach, can facilitate this process. 
• Indigenous communities need time to work on projects collaboratively as there are other pressing community needs and they have limited capacity and resources. It’s important that researchers and health promotion practitioners approach data collection in collaboration with Indigenous communities 
• There is a difference in outcomes for Western health promotions programs and Indigenous health promotion programs. Researchers and health promotion practitioners will need to nurture the ethical space between both. Creating space for this dialogue may be helpful to illuminate differences in values toward health promotion, given that many people are all embedded in this structure.
• Having communities define capacity-building can support community sovereignty and community-owned/led health promotion programs. Program evaluation with Indigenous communities takes a strengths-based—rather than a deficit-based—approach by focusing on small positive changes that occur and could lead to larger impacts over time.