Community Partners of South Florida shared that the resident engagement continuum has been central to many of their programs for years. The continuum ensures that programs understand what their baseline is and realistically how resident-driven a program can be. This can be helpful to discern that any program can have resident-informed/driven aspects. The continuum also helps you to be honest about where you are on engaging residents and identify ways to be more responsive and make changes.

Engaging residents in the planning, design, and implementation of a community health worker (CHW) program supports your organization in advancing health equity. At its core, health equity is about removing barriers that generate negative health outcomes and requires one to work in partnership with and in support of residents who are most affected by those adverse health outcomes. A strong resident engagement strategy empowers residents to shape programs that have the potential to improve their health. Whether you are at the beginning of the process of developing a CHW program, or enhancing or adding services, resident and client engagement is key to increasing health equity, opportunity, and impact. Also core to the CHW model is building trust. Thoughtfully and consistently engaging residents throughout a CHW program can build trust and deepen your organization's relationship and reputation with community. This component outlines some key steps for your organization to explore how you can develop or improve a resident engagement strategy to advance a CHW model.

Step 1: Identify Your Place on the Resident Engagement Continuum

Utilize this Resident Engagement Continuum to identify where on the continuum your organization currently engages residents. Consider thoughtfully where your organization typically engages residents now and consider with your team what it would take to implement increased levels of engagement with residents in the planning, design, and implementation of your CHW program. As you move along the continuum, the degree of engagement and therefore difficulty increases, though the benefit and impact of the work also increase. Engaging residents meaningfully in program planning and implementation takes time and will take organizational resources.

As you are reviewing the Resident Engagement Continuum, consider this initial question:

Where are we currently on this continuum and how do we know?

Step 2: Resident Engagement Visioning

Once you and your staff have identified where your organization or department's resident engagement work sits within the continuum, consider the following questions to thoughtfully identify where your organization would like to advance on the continuum.* The recommendation here would be to do this activity with a team of staff. Though there might be a single staff member who might be responsible for implementing resident engagement activities, it is also important to create a team culture that encourages and values resident engagement. Supervisors should participate in these conversations and ensure that resident engagement work is a part of a CHW manager's and CHW staff's workplan.

Where might we want to be along the continuum? Why?
What might it take for us to increase capacity to engage residents more meaningfully?
What do we have to gain or lose to operate this capacity?
What are the results we want to achieve?
What might be some early actions we can take together? Who will take actions and when?
What will help us determine if we are successful?

See Appendix 1 to use a worksheet to chart your responses to these questions. These questions are adapted from a tool called a Before Action Review, commonly used in the Emergent Learning Framework. The Before Action Review can assist you in starting to generate a strategic implementation plan around resident engagement and coupled with the After Action Review, can assist you and your organization to continuously iterate and celebrate your progress.

"When implementing resident engagement, particularly if you or organization has not tried this before, take it slow. It takes time and lots of effort to build relationships with residents. Do not get discouraged if progress seems slow. What's important is to keep a spirit that celebrates experimentation, thoughtfully reviews actions, and when something is working, do more of what is working."—Learning lab participant

Step 3: Develop Resident Engagement Action Plan

Once your team has answered the questions above, develop a resident engagement action plan. The resident engagement action plan should include:

Resident engagement goals.
Key actions.
Key activities to move actions.
Who will lead?
Who will support?
What supports do I need?
Timeline? Start and End?
How will I know this strategy is working?

See Appendix 2 for a worksheet to develop a Resident Engagement Action Plan. Intentionally built into this resident engagement action plan is the question – how will I know this strategy is working? This question is an important one for you to consider ensuring you and your team are thoughtfully identifying what success looks like and starting to bake in a process that helps you and your team continuously learn from your implementation activities.

Step 4: Implement & Track Progress of your Resident Engagement Plan

ONE Neighborhood Builders in Providence, Rhode Island established a COVID-19 response strategy with weekly meetings with community health workers, multiple key organizations, residents and the Rhode Island Department of Health. The coalition identified community needs and coordinated activities to inform residents about COVID-19 and provide health support. They disseminated messages via newsletters, canvassing efforts, pop-up vaccination sites, mobile health clinics and radio announcements. Collectively, this coalition of partners hosted more than 77 pop-up community vaccination sites, administered more than 2,000 COVID-19 vaccines, and distributed about 287,000 masks.

As you start to implement your resident engagement plan, after every milestone of significant action taken or every two to three months host a meeting (virtual or in-person) with CHW staff and managers to consider your progress toward the implementation of the goals you and your team established to advance resident engagement. The following questions can be used to help identify areas of strength in your resident engagement work, and areas where you might need to identify additional supports or resources to advance your resident engagement work.* It is very important that there is not a punitive lens held when asking or answering these questions. Remember, this work is all about learning. The more you create a dynamic learning environment that supports improvement, the better impact you will have and the more the staff will want to continue to iterate and improve program implementation.

Questions include:

What were our intended results?
What were our results?
What caused our results?
What will we sustain?
What will we improve?
What is our next opportunity to test what we learned?

See Appendix to utilize a worksheet to chart your responses to these questions. These questions are adapted from a tool called an After Action Review, commonly used in the Emergent Learning Framework. The After Action Review is an Emergent Learning Framework tool that can help you assess the successes of your plan and identify ways you can improve the implementation plan. You can do an After Action Review by yourself, but it is suggested to do it with a team.