Working Across Sectors
Article written by Shelley Argabrite, Chief Health Strategist at the Garrett County Health Department
Transparent dialogue between local health officials, agency stakeholders, and the general public continues to be a key component in improving equity and building capacity. Strategically investing in digital technologies allows people to collaborate more efficiently and work better as a team, which helps communities achieve desired outcomes. We’ve already established that dialogic communication is an essential component to true community engagement, if you missed that article check it out here.
Creating a vision for our county and incrementally measuring our progress toward the goals we set together has created a true culture of collaboration in Garrett County.
-Shelley Argabrite
In the community forum of the adaptive planning tool found at MyGarrettCounty.com, individuals have the space to openly discuss issues, concerns and suggest solutions to address what matters to them most. Community feedback on such a large scale has informed prioritization of health related topics and helped us develop ways to track our progress as we measure the work we are doing on a local level to address the most pressing health related topics.
Measuring our collaborative work is not an easy task. In Garrett County, we created a space that everyone could track their individual contributions toward prioritized health outcomes. On the Garrett County Planning Tool, this hyper local data collection is completed within Action Groups. Action Groups were created to activate sustainable mobilization of the discussions in the community forum and actualize strategies for community improvement marking an important step toward ensuring that measures reflect what is most important.
Within action groups, multisectoral partners work collectively on a strategy reporting incremental data that ensures responsiveness of the public health network in Garrett County.
-Shelley Argabrite
Ready to learn more and start building your community platform on our open source stack? Check out our free plugin template at: https://population.health.blog/garrett-county-planning-tool/
Article written by Shelley Argabrite, Chief Health Strategist at the Garrett County Health Department
population.health.blog 