Dylan Sagan,
Reflection Paper,
The original goals of the project were to create a handbook that outlining the benefits of using Community Defined Health™ (CDH™) and ABCD principles within any given community. This workbook is designed for community and citizen leaders, neighborhood associations, healthcare practitioners, healthcare facilities, and health professions education institutions–essentially any groups interested in developing and maintaining a strong sense of connection and belonging between and among its people. The CDH™ process is meant to be used as a cyclical method to capture a community’s voice, thus this workbook works to emphasize the importance of the process of applying this ideology. The process is the outcome, so that was a major goal of this project as well. Finally, the third goal of this workbook was to highlight the outcomes and why they matter. Without having outcomes, it is hard to garner support for a methodology that is so looked down upon by our quantitative biomedical approach to medicine, thus these outcomes help to show the benefits and sustainability to using a more qualitative approach to medicine and health within a community. Overall, the goal of this project and my role were to help create an accessible workbook for those seeking this type of knowledge. The workbook aims to redefine health within communities and how it is perceived. Therefore, it’s essential to capture the true essence of CDH™ while ensuring readability of all levels.
Assessing the complete achievement of these goals remains challenging, as the handbook is still in progress. However, I believe our current progress indicates not only goal achievement but also surpassing expectations. It is hard to know how long it would take to write a handbook, but we have spent over a year writing this while balancing all our lives. We have edited and reedited many sections, but this is ultimately to optimize the goal of accessibility and readability. We still have our weekly meetings and come to them ready to talk about ideas that may make a section more permeable to those across the nation. We currently are writing the last chapter of the handbook and are searching for a publisher. There is going to be an epilogue to talk about what all we have learned about this process and what my supervisors learned from being a part of the CDH™ in the community they worked with. There have been many tangible goals from this project, and it is exciting to see us work this whole project through. I knew that I needed to see this through and could not leave without helping throughout the entire workbook. We created such a strong relationship where I learned so much about ABCD and what it means to give to others in communities, and I was able to teach them about what I knew and my experiences as a college student. This fellowship did not only create an amazing opportunity for dissemination of
health knowledge, but it created a lifelong relationship for me with both ABCD itself and the supervisor I am working with. I am beyond humbled to say how close I have gotten with them, and that this relationship is one that will last a lifetime.
This project, although has gone smoothly, has had a few challenges. Technology itself is always a challenge, and it created some speed bumps on the road to success. Finding times to meet up with one another was always a challenge as there were many external events happening for us that would get in the way of us meeting and moving forward on the project. These were some of the more surface level problems. Additionally, we encountered challenges in recollecting events from their community engagement experiences. Since it did happen decades ago, some memories and papers were lost, so we had to work with the connections they had to glean more information about the lost fragments of their journey. This added to the time it took to write the book, but it also allowed us to all learn more and bring people to the calls who also worked on the team in Saginaw during this period. Although they seemed like problems, these inconveniences turned into opportunities where we connected and created more knowledge with many people from the project, including community member themselves. We also have the technical issue of finding a publisher who will publish this. Although it is a current issue, we are working diligently to find a solution to this problem and are confident that we will find someone who will publish it.
This project has had some immediate impact on social equity. For example, this project has taught me ABCD, and had led me to bring ABCD ideologies into my classes where I even presented to my class on this topic. It inspired my one professor to change how he handled a program for college freshmen, so that inspired change on multiple levels and allows for some form of sustainability. Some long-term impacts of this project are that it will inspire people when it does become published. We have spent many hours perfecting the language used within this workbook to ensure that it will not only reach people across the nation, but also leave a lasting impact. The medium of a workbook also coincides with sustainability as this process itself can be saved and operationalized differently for each community and person that reads it. CDH™ aims to redefine health for sustainable community well-being. Treating health more like a blank slate allows for progress to be made by the communities and gives voices back to minority communities who so often have their voices stripped from them. Writing this workbook has been such an impactful experience as I have had the opportunity to not only learn from stewards of ABCD, but also take these experiences and apply them into my own life. I can talk with my family, friends, jobs, and every aspect of my life about the ABCD approach. This workbook will hopefully inspire people to do the same and use word of mouth the spread the news of this new equitable way to view health and give power back to those who have been stripped of it.