Community Development Work Needed to Improve Wellbeing

How would you assess your personal wellbeing? Today? At the present time? In the past year? Is it getting better or worse? What is the wellbeing of your local community? Now? A year ago?

Today, the United States lags far beyond other developed countries in the assessment of personal and community wellbeing. In fact, cogent arguments exist for the development of National Wellbeing Accounts as analogues to our National Economic Accounts.

However, progress is being made. Like its predecessor, the Healthy People 2030 Committee stressed the importance of assessing wellbeing for the U.S. population. And, today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is piloting a wellbeing measure for implementation as early as 2022.  

Our personal wellbeing reflects the evaluations we make about our life. Components include how we evaluate our physical and mental health, our social network and support, our work and financial situation, our housing and environment, our spiritual life, and our happiness. Community wellbeing reflects the evaluation residents make of similar factors in their community.

A low level of personal wellbeing is associated with less happiness, and even a shortened life. Low levels of community wellbeing, due to poverty, exclusion, racial, gender and age discrimination, among other factors, can and do have a very negative impact on the personal wellbeing of all who reside in that community. Thus, these negative social and physical determinants of health influence both community and personal wellbeing.

Important community development work to address these social and physical determinants is underway in the U.S., as well as in Canada and Australia. In the U.S., this work is funded by the Hogg Foundation in five rural Texas counties .

Important lessons already have been learned from this work. Primary among them is the principle that communities must become empowered to address their own problems. This can be promoted by fostering egalitarian networks, inviting historically excluded groups to participate, working with emergent leaders, and hosting communitywide events to celebrate successes.

We must make progress in addressing historic disparities based in race, gender and disability. To accomplish this, we must engage in community development work, and we must use personal and community wellbeing as yardsticks not only to determine how well people are living, but also to assess the progress of our efforts. The public health field led by the American Public Health Association is ideally suited to lead this essential effort.

Ron Manderscheid, PhD, is the former president and CEO of NACBHDD and NARMH, as well as an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the USC School of Social Work.