Box 4:

Enabling Meaningful Community Involvement in Decision Making

Sheffield has used a wide range of innovative mechanisms to ensure that community engagement and empowerment are constant threads in its approach to decision making:

“To ensure citizens have a local voice to influence key decisions, Sheffield established 12 Area Panels who engage with local neighbourhoods in decisions that affect their quality of life. The Health Partnership Network is a well-established Voluntary and Community Sector network of over 700 organisations… [It] feeds directly into the Healthy City Partnership through five representatives who communicate with the sector via regular newsletter bulletins and bi-annual events. The network provides a powerful mechanism by which the sector can challenge, contribute to and lead the development and delivery of both the strategy and activities to tackle health inequalities.”

Izhevsk has prioritised the participation of a wide range of NGOs in its decision-making processes:

“[We have enabled community participation in decision making by] involving the people in the participation in working groups on preparing of the Health Profiles; in working groups on preparing of the City Health Development Plans; in different kinds of activities (round tables, actions, meetings, conferences) concerning health. The vivid example was the City Forum of Health for choice of the city priorities in health… Known and authoritative public organizations (pensioners, the ecological organizations, children’s and youth’s NGOs)… were involved in this work.”