Overview of the Vision, Opportunity, and Inspiration through Civic Engagement (VOICES)
VOICE builds a regional-community. Too often rural communities are mired in the vestiges of old community rivalries and community-to-community competition. With North Dakota’s rural population continuing to contract in size, it becomes more imperative that rural communities find common ground by building a multi-community and regional approach to common issues. VOICE has five core areas that blend together to fashion a community development process that emphasizes the role of the community citizen.
The creation of regional task forces that are inclusive of diverse and geographically balanced membership is important to establish trust and equity for the communities and for groups within the communities. Each community must be equal and must present diversity.
Training or skill building provided to the task force members is important to reinforce their capacity, their ability to lead a community process. Emphasis is placed on change management, communication, strategic planning, and community dynamics.
Implementing an area-wide community needs assessment accomplishes the twin goals of identifying necessary input from the general public and establishing in the collective mindset of the population that our opinions, thoughts, and ideas are important. It also initiates the broader community to the process and their role in that process.
The community dialogue blends together the community input of the assessment with the leadership skills of the task force to engage their neighbors and friends in a serious discussion on “our collective community” and what will make this area a healthier community. This process is led by the community task force.
The community financial award provides a small amount of seed money that the community can use to initiate actions to implement a healthier community.
What is a healthy community? Ultimately, the community task force is charged with developing a plan to make their regional-community a healthier area. There are a number of ideas that communities can consider. The following are suggested community themes; however, the purpose of VOICE is to identify and respond to local conditions so the ideas presented below are merely intended to help communities to understand the breadth of possible issues.
Improving the conditions for low income or the working poor,
Creating a citizen council to advise area health providers on the health and human service needs of area citizens,
Addressing the physical, mental, and social needs of an aging population,
Including the perspective of youth in decision making,
Including the perspective of minority populations in decision making,
Developing efforts to address youth issues so as to create an environment that is conducive to their continued residency in the community or even attracting more young people to the area,
Creating cultural awareness and an open acceptance of diversity and inclusiveness,
Fostering an understanding for and working to achieve levels of social and economic justice for all area citizens and residents,
Adopting measures to address factors impeding the full access to all citizens to health services (i.e. financial access to insurance, transportation to care centers, etc.)
Advancing resources to address issues of domestic abuse and violence,
Attending to the needs of families and individuals with special needs adults and/or children,
Increasing the understanding of physical and mental wellness and health promotion,
Expanding efforts for alcohol and drug abuse and treatment,
Integrating area health and/or human service functions,
Extending access to necessary care,
Improving the quality of health and/or human services, and
Solidifying efforts to adapt technology to address multi-community health needs.
