Re-Visioning Community Mobilization Training: Centering Indigenous Knowledge, Culture, and Self-Determination

Community mobilization is a self-determined process where communities draw on their culture, strengths, and resources to advance shared priorities for wellness. The Kahnawà:ke Schools Diabetes Prevention Program (KSDPP) is a long-standing example, recognized for its success in community health promotion. The Community Mobilization Training (CMT) was developed from the KSDPP model to share best practices for mobilization with communities across Turtle Island. The original CMT integrated Indigenous values and culture with Western planning models, including the PRECEDE–PROCEED framework, the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, and Social Cognitive Theory. While these models offer useful constructs, over time, both communities and research team members have recognized that privileging these Western frameworks within the CMT overshadowed Indigenous values that were implicitly present and essential. The time has come to strengthen the community-based foundations of the training and shift away from these models, leading instead with Indigenous culture, values, epistemologies, and practices, placing community self-determination at its core. In response, we are revitalizing the CMT to be explicitly grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems, while retaining Western program planning, implementation, and evaluation concepts where they align with Indigenous approaches and are valued by communities. Guided by Indigenous knowledge translation frameworks (e.g., Smylie et al.), our approach emphasizes respect, relationship, and reciprocity, ensuring that the CMT remains culturally resonant and supportive of community-led health promotion. Our re-visioning is informed by multiple data sources: talking circles on cultural grounding; surveys assessing community readiness; and interviews with researchers, participants and facilitators. Using a realist evaluation approach, we are developing a program theory to describe how mobilization unfolds when driven by Indigenous ways of knowing and doing. By rooting the training in Indigenous strengths and knowledges, the revised CMT better captures the realities of communities and the central role of culture in driving collective wellness across Turtle Island.

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