Action for Healthy Communities

AHC works with volunteer adults, seniors and youth in a process where people work together to get engaged, innovate and create change to improve community health and well-being. AHC has strengthened its understanding that community capacity building is a process which can bring people together, help them identify the problems and needs they share, and respond. The aim of this program is to promote the skills (people learn how to do things for themselves, which allow people learn to build the abilities that respond to new issues) and confidence of participants and develop their capacity to act together and deal directly with issues they think important.The community capacity building process is carried out by using three major strategies:

Leadership Training

This is a strategy to encourage people to use their current wisdom and offer them new formal learning activities, complemented by mentoring and experiential opportunities that increase the capacity of individuals to guide, direct, and influence others to build healthier communities for all.
Community volunteers improve their capacity to create and manage community building activities by gaining new knowledge and skills in areas such as: building bridges across cultures, barriers and stereotypes in cultures, fear of differences and conflict resolution. Leadership training is offered in a unique two-levelled approach.

• Level 1: Train community members to address issues that prevent them from getting engaged in community activities and acquire new knowledge to get involved in community building opportunities, such as the creation and running of Community Initiatives.
• Level 2: Train community volunteers to become community animators or community development promoters who train, coach, and motivate other community members to engage in community building opportunities. Some of the areas of learning are: Community development approaches, Human relationships, Cultural interactions, and Practices.

Community Initiatives

This is a strategy to support groups of at least three unrelated people to create activities that address a specific community issue that is currently affecting the well being of communities. These activities function as experiential learning opportunities, complemented by formal learning activities and mentoring that increase the capacity of groups to acknowledge their issues and address them. Group activities result in increased individual capacity to act collectively with others and transfer memorable information to relatives, friends, and others on ways to keep their lives and communities healthy.

A Community Initiative (CI) is a SEED for a community building process, watered by committed citizens interested in fostering collaboration and collective action to address issues related to community health and well being. From 2010, the following Community Initiatives have been created:

• Sudanese Women and Children Development: This initiative is designed to support newcomer Sudanese female seniors who have language barriers and limited resources. The initiatives goal is to address issue of isolation among the older women.
• Senior Latin Guitar Group: This group is aimed at providing learning to play guitar for Latin American seniors. They are seeking to target isolated and lonely seniors and connect them with other seniors.
• Day Home Care: This initiative seeks to invite 10-15 Sudanese women to give them orientation about homecare so they can develop a daycare to care for many of the children so the others can go to school, work, attend workshops etc.
• Visual Expression Workshop: This initiative is organized by a group of African artists who feel quite isolated in their work and life as artists in a new country and culture. They hope to mobilize themselves as a group, discuss what barriers they face and how to address them.

And we continue support ongoing Community Initiatives as:

• Basic Child Care
• Good Canadian
• Save and Spend
• Mom and Dad
• Youth in Creation
• Dragon's Voice Choir

Community Building

This strategy is to create engagement opportunities where people increase awareness of the meaning of community and acknowledge or develop the sense of belonging to at least one community (besides family) that is meaningful to them. This awareness usually results in increasing commitment and capacity to work collaboratively to create safe, secure, and healthy community environments where everybody can grow and develop. The Community building strategy is applied through a variety of meetings and events organized by volunteers of all ages that develop both personal and community building skills. Major events in the last year are:

• Community Dialogues: People meet in groups to discuss individuals and community issues and to learn about and share approaches to dealing with them. At the heart of each Community Dialogue is the belief that everyone has assets that can be used to address issues collectively.
• Multicultural gatherings: These events are an approach for community engagement and participation, based on the belief that everyone has gifts and strengths that with collectively are important assets for building strong communities.