Continued engagement with your partners is key to progress. The Minnesota Department of Health’s Principles of Authentic Community Engagement provides a framework for building meaningful, equitable partnerships between organizations and the communities they serve through trust and shared power. Consider these six themes as you develop your team:
The goal of authentic engagement is to work with communities, not to do things to communities.
It is critical to make certain that you have asked and listened to the community with whom you are working to ensure it is their voice that is being represented, not yours.
There is a tremendous tendency for physicians to want to speak for their patients. While this can certainly be appropriate at times, it is critical to truly engage the actual members of a community in defining their community’s problem(s) and developing the solutions to them.
“The belief behind community engagement is that the people impacted by the problem have some of the best solutions. They help us understand how they experience the system through their lived experience and that’s something we cannot learn anywhere else. When those experiences and their voices become part of the solution it becomes a pretty amazing partnership.”
— Keith Harris, NICHQ Director
In this video, Dr. Michael Foxworth, II, shares insights from his work partnering with a local school district to connect families to medical homes. He emphasizes that “engagement with the community is extremely important” to build trust and foster meaningful connections to improve health outcomes.
Recognizing a safety concern for families needing to travel by bus to clinic, pediatricians at a local clinic in North Carolina partnered with their county’s transportation department to advocate for relocating a bus stop to the same side of the road as the clinic.
Changes were made as a result of collaborative meetings, data sharing, and community input.
11/26/2025
American Academy of Pediatrics