Community Health Improvement and the Community Psychology Competencies

Community health improvement initiatives are strongly influenced by the local context in which they take place. Community coalitions of diverse stakeholders are expected to determine the needs of their population of interest, select an appropriate strategy, implement with quality, and evaluate for effectiveness. Many public health initiatives look toward behavioral scientists with experience in collaborating with community members. The competencies that community psychologists possess make them particularly useful contributors in these initiatives, especially when the projects explicitly focus on increasing health equity. This paper describes how community psychologists can contribute to community health improvement work by sharing our experiences in the Spreading Community Accelerators through Learning and Evaluation (SCALE) initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As part of SCALE, community coalitions are expected to develop appropriate aims and corresponding driver diagrams as well as implement quality improvement projects to help reach those aims. We demonstrate how community psychologists operationalize SCALE by working with communities of color in three distinct settings with different contextual factors: the Proviso Partners for Health (Chicago, IL), Boston Medical Center’s Vital Village Network (Boston, MA), and the San Gabriel Valley Healthy Cities Collaborative (Los Angeles, CA). We also describe how community psychologists contribute to the formative evaluation of the entire SCALE project. We note that specific community psychology competencies are applicable across diverse settings in community health improvement work. Consequently, community psychologists can contribute significantly to improving community health and advancing health equity.