Reflections on National Rural Health Day
On this National Rural Health Day, we celebrate the important work taking place in rural and remote communities and share our continued commitment to improving public health. Our regional staff, based outside of the Denver metro area, who live and work in our rural and frontier communities across Colorado, give us a personal connection to the challenges facing rural communities. They also have the privilege to work with amazing local partners on important work to advance the health in rural and remote communities across the state.
In our experience, too often rural leaders and stakeholders must adapt urban-centric resources and services to fit the needs of their local communities, missing important context embedded in rural cultures, values, relationships, and needs. Over this last year, OMNI has had the honor of working with some of our rural Colorado communities to build leadership and equity capacity and to support the development of tools specifically designed for the unique challenges our communities face.
After several months of close work with the public health leaders in Pitkin County, Colorado and the Silver Thread Health District, OMNI released the Health Equity Toolkit for Rural and Remote Communities. The Toolkit fills a critical gap of resources, tools, and energy that exists in rural communities as compared to urban areas.
The Toolkit guides rural and remote public health departments in Colorado through building their internal health equity capacity. The Toolkit supports public health departments in generating a shared understanding of health equity within their organizations, creating organizational commitments to improving equity, and institutionalizing health equity practices. The Toolkit helps organizations explore equity within their organizational culture as an initial steppingstone toward creating long-term health equity focused on the foundational elements necessary for success.
Leadership Practicum
OMNI’s Learning and Development team has spent 10 years cultivating leaders in rural communities and has designed and launched The Leadership Practicum, which is a program that builds participant knowledge and skills in leadership concepts, increases self-efficacy for leadership and followership in diverse situations, and helps participants articulate a leadership plan and set out to accomplish at least one self-identified goal.
Our Leadership Practicum has supported rural leaders in several communities across Colorado purposefully situated outside the Front Range and Denver metro area, to provide greater accessibility to rural participants and build leadership capacity in the communities where our team lives and works throughout the year.
We believe that supporting the growth of rural leaders is a key strategy in addressing the unique challenges that rural and frontier communities face by amplifying the significant impact that community leaders can have on improving the overall health of their own community.
OMNI continually seeks out opportunities that allow us to accelerate positive social change in rural communities across Colorado and beyond.