The Mississippi Department of Child Protective Services (MDCPS) is the primary child welfare agency in the state. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) emphasizes the importance of educators working in partnership with their communities to ensure the best outcomes for children and young people. This is an opportunity for communities to take advantage of these opportunities and promote a culture of health that will improve educational outcomes. To do this, it is essential to recover the original concept of community empowerment, which includes processes that help those with little power to exercise greater collective control over decisions and actions that contribute to social transformation and political change. However, the current dominance of many community initiatives hides the external view of supporting communities to exercise their capacities of collective control in pursuit of greater equity.
Health promotion approaches are increasingly restricted to an internal view of the psychosocial capacities of the community and the surrounding conditions of the neighborhood, neglecting the external vision of political and social transformation for the sake of greater equity. Those who implement community solutions can use methods and data in ways that include the full and fair participation of diverse communities. Power With refers to the power that arises when a community acts with other agencies or communities to achieve common ends. The most important thing will be for the most disadvantaged communities and increasing pressure will be exerted on health promotion to strengthen the inward view and focus increasingly on equipping communities to use their “assets” to manage “crises” such as COVID-19 in order to adapt to existing inequalities, rather than transforming them. To achieve this, it is necessary to understand the paths that go from empowerment to health equity and the factors that drive the depoliticization of contemporary empowerment practices.
Empowerment initiatives should aim to help communities develop and exercise capacities of collective control in pursuit of greater social and health equity. For some, the growing number of empowerment initiatives are opportunities for communities to gain power as governments engage with them to address contemporary issues. It is essential for those involved in contemporary community initiatives to resist current processes of depoliticization and strengthen the external vision of structural pathways that range from empowerment to health equity. This model, which is usually applied at an individual level, is used in studies on female empowerment and, more recently, in asset-based community development. In order for Mississippi communities to benefit from these initiatives, policy changes must be proposed that support their efforts towards greater equity. These changes should focus on providing resources for community-led initiatives, increasing access to data and methods that include full participation from diverse communities, and strengthening external visions of structural pathways from empowerment to health equity.
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