Exploring Local Health Departments' Readiness for Cross-Sector Collaboration and Community Engagement for Systems Change

Many national public health frameworks (e.g., the Foundational Public Health Services, the 10 Essential Public Health Services, etc.) call for public health to engage communities and collaborate across sectors for equitable population health solutions that require systems change. Cross-sector collaboration and community engagement garner more diverse perspectives and deeper understanding of the root causes of these complex adaptive challenges. Moreover, these collaborative approaches can build and leverage the collective capacity and power to effect change at various levels of the system. However, there is a gap in practitioners’ skills and perceived opportunities to learn how to facilitate the systems change required to do this collaborative work (Welter et al., 2020). To bridge this gap, the goal of this action research study was to explore how local health departments can prepare to do cross-sector collaboration and community engagement for systems change work. Study findings confirm that building readiness for this work is a function of complex and interconnected barriers and facilitators related to collaboration, workforce, funding, context/structure, and collective learning.