Lessons for Community Health Leaders
These are lessons gleaned from the RWJF Community Health Leaders program by RWJF senior program officer Constance Pechura and former CHL Awardee Peter Lee.¹ (See Program Results on Community Health Leaders.)

• Be quiet and listen. Too often health professionals and groups decide what the problems are in a given community without street-level confirmation. They are also often surprised that the communities do not take advantage of the "wonderful" programs they have established. Getting information from community individuals and groups before establishing an intervention may be difficult, but it is a critical step in serving that community.
• See beyond the obvious. Many health leaders have a vision that is larger than medical care and incorporates a sense of the complex relationships among physical, social, economic and other aspects of life in a community. Health work focused too narrowly on one specific problem or a specific intervention can miss important opportunities for change.
• Network to build bridges. Networking essentially involves building bridges to varied community subgroups, and persuading people from communities, agencies and programs to contribute collectively to the solutions for community issues. Many of the Community Health Leaders awardees found that they needed to build bridges across language, institutional and other barriers. They were able to bring a variety of stakeholders to the table and help them see their relations to one another and to their communities.
• Take care of yourself. Many community health leaders forget that self-care is a valuable skill that protects and strengthens their programs and vision. Some Community Health Leaders award recipients have found effective methods to reduce stress; others have been helped to recover from their own trauma by their community health work, and still others have used their experiences in survival and self-care to inspire their community health work.

¹ Pechura CM and Lee P. "Beyond Theory: Lessons from Community Health Leaders." CORO Leadership Review, June: 60–67, 2000.