Abstract
This article describes the collaborative efforts of the Sitka Turning Point Towards Health partnership in Sitka, Alaska. Key steps to its success include defining our terms, finding consensus, maintaining an attitude of respect, engaging people-building relationships, creating work groups, sharing leadership, committing to collaborative leadership, building in sustainability, and telling our story. We have chosen to interlace a weaving metaphor to reflect our Alaskan Native American culture and the vision of our partnership.
Our ancestors understand collaboration and pass those traditions to us. Collaboration includes the resources of the Southeast Alaska area in which we live and the relation we have with the environment and those resources. Our ancestors wove baskets and many other items using the materials-roots, barks, grasses, and other fibers they found in their home environment and village areas. Tools, like clam shells, bones, and feathers also were found close by. These items still are teaching us today. To weave a strong, functional, and beautiful basket, a weaver starts with the basics and performs each step with care and patience. The process involves selecting the perfect tree, preparing the bark, organizing the warps and wefts, planning the design, and finishing it properly so it will endure. Ceremonies to celebrate life and death share the woven items with others. In this process, we become grounded in the place we live, healthier in mind, heart, and spirit. We know that another season will bring more resources because of the respectful care and use of the environment where we live.
With six functioning work groups and a dynamic leadership team, Sitka Turning Point Towards Health is helping to weave the reality of a healthy community. Efforts are currently under way to:
* expand the leadership team
* develop a community leadership training institute
* increase collaborative opportunities for solving health concerns
* bring our story to the broader community
* publish a second Sitka Community Health Indicators Report
These successes have emerged from a change in thinking about public health and the way we relate to each other and approach the decision making process. Those in our partnership visualize a healthier community and feel a personal investment to work together to make that vision a reality.
Sitka's Turning Point Towards Health is a large, diverse partnership of individuals, health organizations, businesses, city government, tribal governments, faith communities, schools, and other agencies with a strong interest in the health and well-being of our community. In 1998, we began a process of evaluating the system that provides for the health of our community and engaging the public in planning for the future health of Sitka. Our partnership mission is "to actively engage the residents of Sitka and seize the opportunity to create a new approach to community health."
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in conjunction with the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) fund our Turning Point partnership. As part of our commitment to the Kellogg Foundation and NACCHO, our partnership created a Community Health System Improvement Plan, sometimes referred to as our Action Plan. The purpose of our plan is to create systemic change in our community's health. The plan articulated three goals that are the guiding force of our partnership:
* Create and sustain a mechanism to inform the community, and be informed by the community, in issues relating to Sitka's health and well-being.
* Develop the capacity to collect Sitka-specific community health information and improve our access to community health data from state agencies.
* Expand leadership capacities in Sitka.