Community organizing and public health: a rapid review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Advancing health equity is a global priority within public health, requiring a focus on structural determinants of health and power imbalances. Community organizing is one strategy to cultivate community power and advance health equity by challenging oppressive systems. While examples of public health partnering with community-organizing groups and utilizing organizing methods can be found in the literature, these strategies remain an underdeveloped area for practice. This rapid review aims to uncover the benefits, challenges, and outcomes of governmental, non-profit, and academic public health partnering with community organizers and/or applying community-organizing methods. METHODS: A rapid review was conducted using PubMed and Cochrane databases. Articles were included if they focused on public health applying community-organizing methods and/or partnering with community-organizing groups, and if they reported benefits, limitations, and/or outcomes for community and/or public health. Eligible articles were primary research, practice reports, or systematic reviews, and were published between 2000 and August 10, 2023. Articles were excluded if they were published outside of Canada, United States, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand; not in English or available online; and unrelated to public health and community organizing. RESULTS: Twenty-four articles met inclusion criteria, including 17 primary research studies and seven practice reports. Topics varied, with environmental health and justice being the most common. Three quantitative articles investigated social capital. Qualitative outcomes revealed 10 themes describing seven benefits and three challenges for public health. Benefits include increased public health effectiveness, set or changed priorities, built community power, enhanced data collection and research, policy changes, built community capacity, and increased social capital. Challenges include administrative barriers, approach differences, and challenges associated with community organizing. Overall, the evidence base reveals a scarcity of research on public health partnering with community organizers or utilizing community-organizing methods. CONCLUSION: The review underscores the capacity of community organizing to advance health equity, enhance public health effectiveness, and contribute diverse benefits to communities. It emphasizes the value of community-organizing partnerships and methods as promising approaches for public health practice, revealing alignment in addressing social and structural determinants of health. The full French translation of this article is available via https://nccdh.ca/fr/resources/entry/community-organizing-and-public-health-a-rapid-review .
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.022 | 0.023 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".