Community Capacity Building for Health Promotion: Lessons from a Regional Australian Initiative

This paper discusses a health promotion intervention, which set out to develop local capacity to address chronic disease risk factors in a remote Australian community. Community focus groups, and researcher and community discussions, aimed to determine the community’s health concerns and build a partnership for community action. The journey from conception to reality was difficult for a number of reasons that are described here. Despite these difficulties, a range of outcomes included the establishment of an organizational structure that involved a local health promotion committee as the principal decision-maker, the establishment of a grants scheme to support locally determined initiatives and the formal incorporation of a community Health Promotion Committee(HPC) that ensured the sustainability of activities beyond the funded project period. The HPC is currently still coordinating health promotion activities. The promotion of community-ownership of health promotion activities is a complicated process; given that time, resources, expertise and community involvement require a much longer-term commitment than that currently imposed by many funding bodies.