Community Engagement & Public Health

Stan, Clarence, Barry, and the Health Chatter team chat with Julie Brock, owner of Julie Brock Consulting, about community engagement.

Julie is a strategist who helps individuals, teams, and organizations move from ideas to measurable action through human-centered systems. Her work draws on co-design, CliftonStrengths®, Results Based Accountability, and stress management and resiliency—grounded in deep listening, connection-making, and a willingness to disrupt the status quo so people can lead with confidence and purpose. Julie brings experience across K–12 education, workforce development, community-based organizations, business, and higher education, and holds degrees in English and Human Development.

Learn more about Julie Brock and their work at https://juliebrock.net/

Join us for an insightful conversation about community engagement.

Join the conversation at healthchatterpodcast.com

Brought to you in support of Hue-MAN, who is Creating Healthy Communities through Innovative Partnerships.

More about their work can be found at https://www.huemanpartnershipalliance.org/

Research

• Community engagement is a core aspect of public health: (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2025.308029)

• Go to communities and LISTEN

• Empower the community 

• Use new data to inform the community and accompany discussions with community 

• Build long term capacity for trustworthiness 

• Be sincere, flexible, and humble and genuinely listen. The journey to health equity is long and there is much to learn.

• Lessons learned from CDC article (https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2025/25_0189.htm)

• Go to communities to learn their perspectives, strengths, values, and priorities. This is central to intentional relationship-building, reflecting the value of community members and groups as central to planning, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining programs and research that matters. Despite funding challenges, this practice is central to trust, must be built over time, and should not be rooted in the acquisition or administration of a grant.

• Amplify and credit the community wisdom central to ideation, process, implementation, evaluation, and recommendations, including investigator status, compensation, co-authorship, co-presentation, and co-branding.

• Address institutional and organizational barriers to and needed investments in community-engaged prevention practice and research. Barriers may reflect deep-seated administrative structures that threaten efficiency and trust even among the most well-meaning, mission-aligned partners.

• Partner with health care, social service, business, faith, and nongovernment organizations to address social and political factors associated with health and health care. These potential partners are often underused, despite their services and ability to influence health priorities such as housing, workforce development, food access, and primary health care.

• Support community-led projects and infrastructure central to sustained success. Mechanisms that position communities as senior or principal investigators of prevention programs and research are essential to powering (not empowering) their leadership and sustaining their programs. This value and practice must be bolstered by partnerships and resources for rigorous and robust data collection and analysis to demonstrate impact and outcomes.

• Address and eradicate rampant health misinformation and disinformation by reimagining public health communication, in partnership with community influencers, resulting in messages that are not only accurate but attend to social motivation, lived experiences, and trusted sources across the spectrum of mass and social media communication.

• Advocate for community-led public health improvement. Community-informed data systems, metrics, and networks should not only drive responsive research, practice, and clinical care but also be the change that dismantles systemic and structural barriers to health through local, regional, and national policy.

• Practice the values of listening to understand, cultural humility to translate, and trustworthiness to build and trust.

• Respect community strengths and avoid the idea that communities lack resources and need the preconceived solutions of outside groups to solve problems within the community.