Background and Purpose. A Community Health Assessment (CHA) highlights community strengths, uncovers public health disparities, and communicates critical health needs to multiple audiences. In rural and frontier communities, it can do something more: it can be a catalyst for community engagement, cross-sector partnership, and lasting trust between a health department and the residents it serves. Small, rural, and frontier local health departments (LHDs) often complete CHAs as compliance exercises, producing reports written in technical language that the communities they describe cannot access or use. This session showcases a community-driven approach developed across rural communities in the Pacific Northwest that treats the CHA process itself as an act of partnership.
Methods. The approach involves conducting surveys, interviews, and focus groups with English- and Spanish-speaking residents and community leaders, then working with local health departments and community advisory boards to develop CHA reports that speak to the community and reflect their perspectives and insight. Quantitative evidence is presented using rural-appropriate techniques — including per-1,000 rather than per-100,000 rates that more honestly reflect small-population realities — and qualitative findings are woven in through direct resident quotes in both English and Spanish. Final reports are written in plain language with strengths-based framing and translated into Spanish so the full community can read and use them.
Results. Trust and rapport building, accountability, and transparency emerged as the most important factors in both data collection and report development. Communities reported feeling genuinely represented in the findings, and local partners used the reports as shared tools for cross-sector action rather than filing them away.
Implications. Attendees will learn how to engage their community and leave with a sample engagement timeline, a plain-language reporting checklist, and reflection prompts for applying this approach in Colorado's rural and frontier context.
