Engaging Community Partners: Toward Common Ground

In this episode, Andrea is joined by Sarah Haanstra from Toward Common Ground and Anna Vanderlaan from Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health to talk about engaging Wellington Guelph community partners in a community planning model.

Toward Common Ground (TCG) is a community planning model that brings together 13 leaders from social and health services to respond to shared needs and gaps in Guelph and Wellington. TCG does not have a “backbone” organization: it is guided by a steering committee, made up of member organizations that contribute resources (such as staffing, dollars etc.) and is not bound by any single mandate. A steering committee keeps a bird’s eye view of wellbeing in its broadest form: the social determinants of health, physical and mental health at the community level. No one organization’s logo is bigger than anyone else’s logo!

As Manager of TCG, Sarah is connected to many organizations and partners across Wellington and Guelph. As part of her role, she heard about a number of organizations working separately to address Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Sarah brought those organizations together to work collectively, now known as the ACEs coalition. Following a Call To Action Day, the ACEs coalition conducted a local survey to measures ACEs and resilience to provide a baseline for the work of the coalition. Community partners were involved in designing the survey: in a great example of a “win: win” situation, the local Ontario Works office were interested in knowing how ACEs might have impacted their clients. A question was added to the survey to provide this information, and in return the OW office promoted the survey to their clients.   

There are several key factors that contribute to TCG’s success:

• Partners are committed to the greater good in community, and the concept that health and wellbeing is not determined by any one factor. Partners understand the need to push levers in different places to have a collective impact.
• Partners are willing to be flexible, nimble and responsive to community needs. This means that priorities might occasionally shift to accommodate new work.
• Partners trust that organizations’ mandates are set aside for the common good, and partners also trust in the process until there is clarity on what’s next.
• Partners have identified the individual strengths that sit around the table and trust the partner with that expertise to lead those pieces.
• Partners are engaged and re-engaged in continuous communication, with formal and informal updates.

To end the episode, Anna and Sarah provide advice for those seeking to work as a community planning model. Anna’s advice is to spend time up front to build a collective or shared vision. The ACEs coalition spent time to build a theory of change that grounds the work of the coalition, prior to beginning more concrete action. Sarah’s advice is to be deliberate about what one meeting or one gathering means in terms of the bigger picture: one step leads to the next and leads to a little more clarity – and to the common vision.

To learn more about Toward Common Ground, visit their website at http://www.towardcommonground.ca/en/about/about.aspx. Visit the ACEs Coalition website at https://acescoalition.ca/.