Our Approach
At Lake County Build a Generation, we use four main approaches in order to impact health and well-being in our community and yours:
1. Field and Capacity Building: People are what drive community change. So we focus on finding and strengthening the leaders in a community. Field and capacity building is the foundation of all of our work.
2. Community Organizing: We believe that the people closest to the problem always have the best ideas for how to fix it. So we support individuals who are most impacted by community health issues in their work to effect change.
3. Coalition Building: We help provide structure and processes so that people and organization can come together to work on an issue efficiently.
4. Community Research, Planning and Evaluation: We work with community members to better understand the root causes of community health issues, to identify ways to address these issues–and to evaluate our progress toward a shared goal.
Our Role in the Work
Our work always takes place with and for the community. When working with community members, Lake County Build a Generation plays four key roles:
- Create Space for Problem Solving: By creating shared space where difficult conversations can happen, we provide support for the kinds of conversations that help communities move forward.
- Build relationships: Some people say that this work “moves at the speed of trust.” We work to build relationships across a community, especially between community members who may not already know each other.
- Maintain the momentum of the work: Those of us doing the work in a community are so often the same people trying to hold down a job, raise a family, or fulfill volunteer commitments. At LCBAG, we help ensure the work of building community health and well-being moves ever incrementally forward, even amidst the rush of everyday life.
Our Desired Outcomes
We work toward four outcomes:
- Empower Leadership: At the heart of all of our work is one main goal: to help community members identify–and use–their own unique leadership skills in service of a healthier, happier community.
- Develop Programs: Working with community and other agency partners, we develop programs in order to fill community gaps.
- Develop policy and systems change: We work to change and develop laws and systems that will best support a community’s collective vision for its future.
- Develop infrastructure: Sometimes a building, a playground, a website or a new organization can make a huge difference in community members’ access to health–and happiness.
Theory of Change
Lake County Build a Generation’s Theory of Change explains all about how we do our work–and what we hope to achieve.
