Do you struggle
to provide ongoing support to the members of your national initiative, especially those who operate
at a great distance from your staff?
The Healthy Native Communities Fellowship recruits teams of change agents and committed
leaders wishing to deepen their ability to promote health in Native communities. The
program is intended to build skills and knowledge that can be "taken home" and
implemented locally, resulting in a stronger local response to public health
concerns in Native communities. Hands-on and highly collaborative, the
Fellowship brings participants together in four week-long gatherings
over the course of nine months and provides peer-coaching and
one-on-one support to participants.
Despite a significant commitment to training and technical assistance to teams of Native
leaders, the Fellowship was concerned about its ability to provide support to participants
during the "in-between." With Fellowship participants spread from Alaska to Florida,
faculty and staff became concerned about their ability to provide meaningful support
to Fellows during the Fellowship experience. Additionally, Fellowship faculty
wanted to be able to leave behind supports that community leaders could access
during and after the formal learning experience and for years to come. CSG
worked with the Faculty and staff of the Fellowship to develop a "Fellows
Space" - an online community where emerging leaders could gain access to
much needed technical assistance materials, share ideas, materials,
success stories and challenges and interact with faculty, staff
and personal coaches.
In addition to providing a much needed "space" for communities to interact and learn with
each other, the evaluation team assigned to the Fellowship needed a way to track and
"observe" the work being done in participating native communities. CSG worked with
the evaluation team to adapt the Fellows Space, allowing them to collect needed
data and make observations normally reserved for site visits, a traditional
option that was not possible because of the national scale of the
project.
