Health Promotion or Social Innovation?

To which professional communities do I belong?

This is the question I’ve been wrestling with for the past two weeks. I’m at the 20th IUHPE World Conference on Health Promotion in Geneva, which as its name suggests, is a gathering of academics and practitioners in the health promotion field. Last week, I was in San Francisco and Portland meeting with colleagues in the design field and in the social consultancy field. Next week, I’ll be in London, spending time with colleagues in the social innovation field.

I’m generally weary of professional labels because, as I’ve learned in both our youth and family projects, the expert model can be a real barrier to bottom-up change. The language, customs, and culture of a profession is by, design, exclusive and, as a result, hard to shift.

That said there’s real value in sharing what we know with like-minded people, and feeling part of a larger collective. I have to say I don’t feel a part of the health promotions collective. And that’s OK. I’ll actually be speaking about the role of critical questioning later today when I give one of the closing keynotes.

It’s not that there aren’t big overlaps between the health promotions world and what we do at InWithFor; we’re both about prevention and empowerment. It’s that we don’t find it particularly useful to distinguish between ‘health’ and everything else. We work on big social problems, some of which manifest themselves in health systems and appear as troubling health indicators. But we’ve always found solving the problem is about removing the issue-based lens and putting on the people-based lens. Breaking the world up into segments–health, housing, environment, etc.–is generally pretty foreign to people. It’s not how they tend to see their worlds. As I’ve discussed before on this blog, I’ve worked on teenage pregnancy projects where the solution had nothing to do with ‘health’ as a teenager would define it; the solution had to do with fun and pleasure. ‘Healthy living’ wasn’t these young people’s primary motivator so using the ‘health’ lens would have actually been counterproductive.

This is why the ‘social innovation’ and ‘social consultancy’ disciplines tend to resonate a bit more for me. They are issue agnostic. They are about the process of making change. Yet they lack what the health promotions field has: some rigour and agreed upon conceptual underpinnings. Both the social innovation and consultancy fields (if you can even call them fields) are new and lacking in a conceptual framework. That means they are strong on enthusiasm and pretty weak on tangible impact. They are still all about ideas, not evidence, and my hope is that they learn to balance both.

Ultimately, I want to be part of a collective that focuses on impact over particular tools or approaches. I want both practical and theoretical knowledge to be organised around questions of, what difference do we make, how, and why? In the meantime, I’ll keep asking the questions to whoever is gracious enough to listen.

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