This is the final article in a series of three highlighting health education and community organizing strategies from the Safe and Healthy Children Training-of-Trainer (TOT) Curriculum.
In rural communities, farmworker families may be directly exposed to toxins such as pesticides. Children may play in fields with poor air quality as a result of machinery exhaust and reside in substandard housing with environmental hazards. Children’s growing bodies and minds make them uniquely vulnerable to environmental toxins and hazards. It is important that health advocates and outreach staff work together to help communities prevent and reduce exposure to environmental hazards.
Creative and collaborative measures are needed to address environmental health issues. Collaborating with community partners and stakeholders is a great way to tackle the specific concerns your community faces. Bringing local groups and agencies together offers strength to your organization. Whether you are working to reduce asthma among children or educating vulnerable farmworker families about pesticides, working with partners can help your organization more effectively address some of the challenges it faces when tending to your community’s environmental health needs.
Collaborations represent opportunities to tap unique and different strengths of key stakeholders. Collaborations can help maximize resources and increase your outreach opportunities and scope. For example, you may work with your local Head Start agency to conduct a community needs assessment and staff training on air pollution in your community. To aid in this endeavor, a local family resource center may assist in disseminating the needs assessment survey; they may also provide a space to accommodate the environmental health training.
You may already collaborate with community partners to reduce children’s exposure to environmental hazards. Some of these collaborations may be informal in nature, whereas others are more formal. Although formal and informal collaborations are different, they can both be effective. To ensure collaboration effectiveness, it is important to consider using collaboration tools to help guide intentional partnerships. In some cases, using proper tools to formalize a working partnership can help make the relationship more successful.
What is a formal collaboration?
A formal collaboration is an official commitment between your organization and another organization to work together for a specific purpose. For example, you may collaborate to reduce children’s exposure to environmental toxins in your community. Collaborations avoid duplication of efforts, allow agencies to share resources, and are mutually beneficial. Benefits of collaborations include funding opportunities, reduced costs, shared materials, easier access for clients, shared knowledge of environmental health issues, sense of community and team-building, higher productivity, and more. Collaborations are established by exploring common goals and community needs. Formalizing collaborations may require a few steps. Though outreach workers can begin the steps toward forming such relationships, generally agency directors may be the most appropriate people within your organization to handle the process and agreements.
How to formalize collaborations
Collaborations can be formalized with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). MOUs are documents delineating the framework of cooperation and partnership between two organizations and are commonly completed with the participation of an organization director or supervisor. Many activities and agreements of a preexisting partnership can be explicitly stated in an MOU, such as providing an environmental health training in collaboration with Head Start teachers or working with a local family resource agency to conduct focus groups with community members. An MOU can lend credibility to a collaborative process, make it official, and establish a foundation of accountability.
It’s important to note that “formal” collaborations do not have to hinder your work as grassroots organizers and can be an important tool in helping you better direct your work with community partners. To learn more about using MOUs, other tools to support collaborations, or to view a sample MOU, contact Health Outreach Partners or look for our release of the Safe and Healthy Children Training-of-Trainer (TOT) Curriculum coming out later this year.
About the Safe and Healthy Children Initiative
Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Health Outreach Partners (HOP) and the Academy for Educational Development (AED) launched the Safe and Healthy Children Initiative, a pilot project funded by The WK Kellogg Foundation to address environmental health concerns among migrant and seasonal farmworker families. The Safe and Healthy Children Initiative is enlisting the support of outreach staff, health educators, and clinicians across the country to work in partnership with local communities to help teach families simple ways to protect the health of their children.