Engage! Community Organizing, Coalitions & Infrastructure

Healthcare activists need communities to affect change. Considering public-private partnership with NCQA’s Digital Measurement Community with Ben Hamlin.

Proem

Activists seek to inform and nudge change for the better — political, social, cultural, healthcare, service change. I’m a patient-caregiver activist learning and sharing what works to make safe health choices and decisions, now in these times of a pandemic. Activism involves groups of people, communities — few to no changes arise from a single person. Successful, sustainable community activism depends on building coalitions and infrastructure.

A couple of weeks ago, I introduced a new community movement: Person-First Safe Living in a Pandemic. We need to build coalitions and infrastructure. Actually, we need partnerships (coalitions) to build infrastructure because we have no funding source. Movements need infrastructure, whether they have a funding source or not. So, we seek partners who can offer infrastructure. What is infrastructure? For Person-First Safe Living, infrastructure includes a central point of contact, like a website; channels of real-time and asynchronous communication — real-time, like Zoom; asynchronous like Facebook, Twitter, email; and a repository of resources — a searchable library like Google Docs, Wikipedia…