We’ve been heartened to see growing excitement and buy-in around community engagement from the healthcare sector. Healthcare stakeholders believe engaging community members and people with lived experience is the right thing to do — but they often don’t know how to do it.

INSPIRE (Initiating National Strategies for Partnership, Inclusion, and Real Engagement) seeks to fill that gap. We are a collaborative and coordinated team of organizations and people with lived experience committed to advancing the practice of authentic community engagement in the U.S. healthcare system.

A new roadmap for effective community engagement in healthcare

Phase 1 of INSPIRE consisted of a year-long research process to:

• Determine the current state of community engagement in the US healthcare system

• Identify a set of recommendations for what healthcare organizations, funders, policymakers, and people with lived experience can do to implement more and better community engagement

These insights and recommendations were published in the INSPIRE phase 1 report, A roadmap for effective community engagement in healthcare.

Our goal is for the roadmap and recommendations in the report to be implemented across the country. Use our toolkit to share the report with your colleagues, organizational leadership, partners, and network.

What’s next?

During phase 2 of the INSPIRE project, core team members are focusing on implementing the recommendations in the phase 1 report. We are working together to directly implement the recommendations and to produce and publish additional resources and tools to support other organizations and communities in turning the recommendations into action.

Stay tuned for more! If you are interested in discussing this work, please reach out to Taylor Brown at [email protected].

Community Engagement Assessment and Practice Library

The Community Engagement Assessment and Practice Library , developed by the INSPIRE team, asks you to answer questions about your organization to receive tailored guidance on strengthening your organization’s approach to building partnerships with people with lived experience (PWLE). Your results will provide customized links to articles in the Practice Library, intended to support professionals leading efforts to partner with PWLE by providing actionable guidance and real-life examples.

Organizations can use INSPIRE’s Community engagement assessment and practice library to see which engagement practices they can put into action now and which strategies might take more time to develop. It can be part of strategic planning, annual reviews, or quality improvement cycles, helping teams track progress, celebrate growth, and decide what to focus on next. This makes the assessment and practice library a practical tool for strengthening engagement over time, not just a one-time activity.

The Practice Library includes 35 specific practices that underlie authentic community engagement across topic areas that include:

• Creating strategies and goals for engaging PWLE
• Building authentic and impactful relationships with PWLE
• Building organizational infrastructure for engaging PWLE
• Measuring and evaluating your work with PWLE