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Welcome to your Community Health Access Toolkit!

This toolkit is intended to help communities extend the gains in health equity and access that have emerged as a result of community-led responses to the COVID-19 crisis by providing a step-by-step guide for convening, designing, and facilitating a collaborative workshop.



Understanding the workshop flow

The workshop provided in this toolkit asks participants to complete the following three activities.

Activity 1
Confirming Barriers

Participants confirm the barriers to healthcare at the community level by examining the health challenge as a "journey".

Duration
40 min.

Activity 2
Prioritizing Initiatives

Participants discuss and prioritize the best community-led initiatives that help bridge the gaps in health equity.

Duration
30 min.

Activity 3
Sustaining Gains

Participants identify strategies to sustain gains in community planning and health equity.

Duration
35 min.



How you use this toolkit can vary depending on your participant groups


  • If only community leaders (public health officials, county planners, mayors, etc.),
    see     use case #2

  • If only BIPOC community members,
    see     use case #3

  • If a mix of community leaders and BIPOC community members,
    s    ee use cases #1, 2, and 3

Use case #1

To provide an opportunity for collaborative problem-solving


Use case #2

To provide an opportunity for community leaders to better understand the experiences and needs of their BIPOC community members


Use case #3

To allow BIPOC community members to share their experiences with each other and, working together, produce actionable recommendations for their community leaders



Ready to run a workshop?

Let's get started! The Community Health Access Toolkit is a seamless guide for your team to easily bring this workshop to life in four easy steps. In each of the pages below, you will find instructions and templates to help bring this workshop to life in your own community!

This workshop will take 4 weeks long

Step 1
Initiate

Before you begin the workshop, we've listed some key questions to ask yourself.

Step 2
Design

Use the provided templates in this section to help with designing your workshop.

Step 3
Facilitate

Use the provided session deck and materials to help with facilitating your workshop.

Step 4
Share

Upon finishing the workshop, you can synthesize and share the outputs.



"This health equity toolkit has changed our approach with how community can continue to support each other."



CommuniVax Logo

CommuniVax is a national coalition of social scientists, public health experts, and community advocates who seek to strengthen the community's role in an equitable COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

Bridgeable Logo

Bridgeable is an award-winning service design consultancy. We work with individuals and organizations to create a more human world, one experience at a time.



How this workshop was created:

This workshop combines social science research and design thinking to help communities translate research on barriers and enablers to vaccine confidence, and promising community solutions into sustainable solutions to long-term health equity issues.

This toolkit is the result of a partnership between Bridgeable, CommuniVax and the Maryland Center for Health Equity at UMD.

We have built this toolkit based on feedback from a pilot community workshop that we ran for Prince George County (PGC) in Maryland in May 2021. The workshop looked at the barriers and enablers to health equity that were at play during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in PGC and how the gains in health equity from the vaccine response could be sustained forward for other long-standing community health challenges.