Community health organizing: whom are we empowering?

Current strategies for initiating and operating community health programs rely on one of two approaches. One is a predetermined, operational process. The other comes from the grassroots, beginning with involvement of the recipients of the program. This editorial chronicles how one grassroots program, begun by volunteer mothers and one community health nurse, developed into a partnership for primary health care that advocates and empowers the entire community. In the end, the editorial challenges community health organizers to ask whom their programs are empowering--the community or the organizers themselves?