Foresight: Designing a Future for Health is a nationwide, collaborative effort to equitable envision and create a new future for health and well being in the USA. I’ve been fortunate enough, to be the lead for my organization on this project as the Mat-Su Borough was a partner and thus a partner in the planning and preliminary data collection.
It has been a pleasure to work on this project and get to engage with community members to share their perspective and future for health. One thing that I personally love about this project was that it took a social determinants of health perspective of the word health. Really pushing people to think of health beyond just health care. Because health is so much more than just health care as we all know.
I’d really appreciate it if you would take some time to take the survey in the section below!
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Survey Link
Here is the link to add your voice to shaping the future of health: Click Here.
What’s The Survey About?
Foresight is trying to envision a better more equitable health system in the US as they understand the current system is broken in many ways. As I’ve mentioned before the US pays around 20% of its GDP on health care with worse health outcomes than most other developed countries. The pandemic has further shown how there is racial health gap throughout the US.
The survey is to collect perspectives from vast groups of people (spanning all walks of life) to gather ideas to shape and influence a more equitable national vision for health and well-being.
Foresight says on their website:
“We have looked at the big forces that will impact our health in the future. Game changing trends tell us that things like climate change, pandemics, and powerful technologies will continue to change our world in unexpected ways. Now, we are listening to thousands of people—especially those whose voices are rarely heard—who are looking at these trends to identify a fresh vision and bold new ideas for shaping the best possible outcomes, starting right now.
With a better understanding of possible futures, a clearer sense of priorities, and a set of bold ideas, FORESIGHT will work with people and organizations across the United States to start making their vision for health and well-being a reality. This will require new partnerships and mindsets, a different allocation of resources, and a radical openness to experimentation. It will also require us to recognize that communities are different and therefore how they need to implement the vision will be different.”
Just like voting, your voice can’t be heard unless you vote. Therefore, in order to envision a future of health for all, we need as many people as possible to take the survey! That means we need you to take the survey! And not only that, we need you to share the survey with your network and ask them to share it with their network.
We should try to reach people that usually don’t have their voices heard because they are the ones that suffer the most by these inequitable systems surrounding health. The more the merrier and if you had a chance to shape the future of health – why would you turn that away? This short survey can be the starting force for larger system change around healthcare around the US. And we know now more than ever we need radical system change.
You should simply take the survey because your voice matters. And in order for your voice to matter, we need to hear it by you taking the survey!
Additionally: If you have 100 or more people who are likely to take the survey in one of your networks, we’ll provide you a customized report of the findings, provided you give us a heads up so we can give you a custom link. Email us: info@foresightforhealth.org.
What I’ve Done For This Project
It has really been great to be able to work on this project. Like many things, this project was handed down to me from my supervisor.
Initially, I worked with the Foresight team and the other philanthropic partners to help give feedback on the Foresight Resident Engagement Process. From this, we did lite residential engagement in all 17 philanthropic organization’s geographies. This consisted of getting community partners agree to recruit community members to take part in a survey tool called SenseMaker. We tried to get communities that are outside of the main core of the Mat-Su Borough.
Secondly, Mat-Su was chosen among a couple other partner sites to do a Marnita’s Table Intentional Social Interaction (IZI) event. Unfortunately, because of COVID-19 the event had to be done online as a Digital Social Interaction (DIZI). However, I would say I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the event and getting to talk with other community members about health now and envisioning a new future for health. So my duties here were to get participants to attend the event as well as recruit others to be community leaders and recruit their network. Thankfully, I have worked with many different populations through my Photovoice project and other projects so I had a good amount of community connection. And the Communications team also helped out with making a webpage and running ads. Additionally, I have coordinated the food deliveries from the caterer for the DIZI and the drivers. Yes, DIZI participants got free food – how awesome!?
Lastly, I am sharing this link to get more people to take part in the survey! So please complete the survey and share it with your network!
(Related: Career Chat With The Public Health Millennial)
Survey Link
Here is the link to add your voice to shaping the future of health: Click Here.
Please feel free to reach out to someone on the Foresight team or myself if you have any more questions.
