THRIVE: A toolkit for community-led initiatives to address health equity

Using Freireian approach to educating communities for self-advocacy, the Tool for Health and Resilience in Vulnerable Environments (THRIVE) seeks to enable the raising of community consciousness of their critical role in addressing social determinants of health. The original THRIVE tool was developed with funding from the Office of Minority Health (HHS) between 2002 and 2004. The tool was successfully piloted in an urban, suburban and rural setting between 2004 and 2007. In 2010, a partnership between the National Network for Public Health Institutes and Prevention Institute received additional support from OMH to update the tool, develop a training for health practitioners to coach communities across the nation in locally led efforts to address the social determinants of health, and also to update the toolkit that is available on-line. A focus of THRIVE II is to develop appropriate training methods that build on the diverse strengths of communities across the nation. Attendees will be presented with the work to date, lessons learned, and how these learnings have been incorporated into THRIVE II. Results from THRIVE I and the first training sessions from THRIVE II will be shared as well as the plan for increasing community focused dissemination of project results and tools for local use.