The Teach for Health mission: To improve community health globally, utilizing innovative context-specific strategies and best practices to support and assist partnering local organizations in developing integrated and sustainable community health training programs.
Who We Are: Teach For Health was founded by a group of medical and nursing students at the University of California – San Francisco in Fall 2009 to collaborate with local partners to train community health workers in San Ramon, Nicaragua. Its membership has since expanded to include graduate students and professionals in Hawai‘i, Mexico and Nicaragua. Its scope has also expanded to assist other organizations with similar goals on curriculum and evaluation in programs in Guatemala, Mexico and Kenya.
Values:
Community: TFH recognizes that the determinants of health flow through and between social networks, and firmly believes that communities are the most knowledgeable about their own health. Projects that aim to improve health and wellbeing should maintain community ownership and input to the greatest extent possible.
Equity: TFH believes that communal decision-making will generally lead to better health outcomes over the long term. But TFH also believes that the benefits of public health interventions should not exacerbate existing inequalities or create new ones. It is vital that the needs of the marginalized, poor or vulnerable are prioritized in program design and implementation.
Partnership: TFH always co-manages projects with local partners or acts as a consultant rather than “owning” projects. Wherever possible, broad coalitions will be built and community advisory committees will steer projects that TFH is involved with, linking already existent resources.
Participation: TFH strives to maximize the discrete points of participation in the program development cycle, from problem identification and assessment through evaluation and advocacy. TFH is interested in the application of participatory methods such as Problem-Based Learning and “community diagnosis” in community health worker curriculum. TFH also strives to include as many voices of different groups within communities, particularly marginalized groups.
Innovation and adaptability: Improvements in health come through infrastructure matched with training. TFH is non-dogmatic in its approach. Where possible, TFH strives to use low-tech methodologies and is more interested in finding the right fit of a method in a given setting than mandating a particular ideology, model or approach to its projects. In some cases, this may mean applying social marketing methodologies is appropriate to incentivize health behavior change, while at other times social activism approaches are more appropriate. Additionally, TFH recognizes that great heterogeneity exists within and between the communities it works with, even in cases in which culture, religion, ethnicity and occupation appear similar. For this reason, appropriate program delivery will depend upon the specific context, meaning that in some cases training youth to be health promoters may be the best strategy while in other training may be more effectively delivered through schools, clinics, churches, health fairs or directly to households.
Follow-through / sustainability: TFH will strive to assist in the development of systems with long-term support and exist strategies, utilizing the Training of Trainers paradigm and other methodologies that build local capital for training.
Assessment and Evaluation: Knowing the context and attempting to measure unintended impacts is vital to the success of any program. TFH utilizes a combination of epidemiologic and anthropologic methods to assess health issues within the communities it works in and to evaluate and continuously improve its programs through an iterative approach. Also, despite flexibility in terms of models used for different projects, utilizing and building the evidence-base for what works and does not work in community health programs, including testing and applying promising models, is an integral part of TFH’s work.
Empowerment: TFH aims to support communities to identify and solve their own health problems. This is not meant to imply a lack of support from the public sector but rather to maintain, to the greatest extent possible, community ownership and input in public health programs, whether they are small and community-generated or larger social programs.
Goals:
- To help communities identify and solve their own health problems
- To assist grassroots public health programs in matching training with infrastructural interventions
- To promote integration of existing resources and build human capital
- To determine what works and what does not work in community health programs and to be a resource for other groups with similar goals
Programs and Projects:
- Training Health Promoters in San Ramon, Nicaragua
- Evaluating Health Promotion Videos in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala
- Partnering With Mexican NGO Cantaro Azul on Hand Sanitation Training Program in Mexico
- Consultant to Organic Health Response on Health Promotion Program in Mfangano Island, Kenya