Community organization and development for health promotion within an urban black community: a conceptual model

The community organization and development process is not new and has its roots in social action ideology from the 1960s. The difference between the 1960s and the 1990s is in bringing together of target community consumers with representatives of private and public sector resources (with consumers in the majority), to form a community coalition board. This community coalition board must make policy decisions. Combining these community organizers and development techniques with the mission of health promotion is a viable methodology for addressing the needs of medically underserved and unserved communities. The approach is a multifactorial one, as illustrated in Figure 1. The Health Promotion Resource Center at Morehouse School of Medicine seeks to combine the ideology of community organization and development with culturally sensitive and linguistically appropriate health promotion curriculum materials and intervention strategies. Within the HPRC lies the Statewide Coordinating Center for Georgia which has been funded by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Its mandate is to assist minority and poor communities in Georgia in developing community-based health promotion initiatives which address the areas of cancer, cardiovascular disease, adolescent pregnancy, substance abuse, and violence and unintentional injury. Our strategy in carrying out this mandate is the community organization and development model described in this article.