Leadership development is often seen as a thing that needs to happen at a grassroots community level. There seems to be an assumption that community leaders need all the development while health care system personnel and decision-makers do not need it.

In the past, Technical Assistance (TA) primarily focused on providing support to achieve specific tasks or goals. This type of TA is traditionally done in a top-down way, with the direction of knowledge coming from foundations or advocacy organizations, down to the community.As the CSHE program began providing TA, there was a realization that the typical TA delivery method was disjointed, disconnected, and not productive. The CSHE (Community Solutions for Health Equity) program seeks to ask: what can you teach, and what do you want to learn?

With the support of the Cultural Wellness Center, Technical Assistance consultants and other partners, CSHE co-developed a new definition of Transformational TA, which expands and reframes the previous top-down way of providing TA. To break away from the belief that institutions hold all the knowledge, we support communities in embracing their role as teachers, and institutions in embracing their role as learners – achieving this is what we consider the “sweet spot”.  This space of multi-directional learning (“sweet spot”) allows people, organizations, communities, and institutions to bring something to both teach and learn. This contribution and reciprocity of knowledge is the source of transformation.

The transformation that happens in community, inevitably will require health care systems to learn from community solutions. The first step in Equity will begin when health care decision-makers invest in the development of their own institutionalized mindset to include other cultural knowledge systems of thought.