role in promoting, establishing, and providing support for community coalitions that provide access to a broader spectrum of community assets. It is through these coalitions that Cooperative Extension and the community together can identify key inequities, and the social determinants of health that underlie them. Community coalitions that focus on health equity are typically made up of representatives of health and human service providers who engage with racially and ethnically diverse communities in meaningful and significant ways (Anderson et al., 2015). They can be venues for power sharing, collaboration, and group decision-making, and advance Cooperative Extension’s commitment to improving health equity. A community coalition, however, differs from an interagency council that only includes representatives of organizations which serve a particular neighborhood or group of individuals. Community coalitions also include active participation from individuals with lived experience in that community. Extension has extensive experience in mobilizing community action around a wide array of community issues including health equity (Buys & Koukel, 2018). Cooperative Extension can play many different roles within community coalitions, moving in and out of these roles as appropriate. These roles include convening, facilitating, managing, supporting, resourcing, and leading. Perhaps Cooperative Extension’s most significant role in a coalition is to connect the community to the knowledge and resources of the broader university. Additionally, Extension is well positioned to facilitate an intergenerational dimension to a coalition by bringing young people to the table as full partners in all phases of the coalition’s work. For Extension, being an effective coalition member involves moving back and forth between being a teacher and learner, at times serving as a source of expert-based knowledge, but also listening and learning from the other voices at the table. Unfortunately, some marginalized communities do not find Extension efforts, especially and specifically those that come from predominantly white 1862 Land Grant Institutions, to be deserving of their trust and engagement. This reticence is legitimate and earned, given historic and, in some cases, ongoing experiences of exclusion and harm. Within these communities, authentic efforts to build coalitions must be coupled with ownership of harms inflicted and a demonstrated commitment to change. Only then can Cooperative Extension build the trust required to create mutually beneficial relationships where they don’t currently exist. Partnerships among 1862, 1890, and 1994 designated LGU are an ever-present opportunity to demonstrate trustworthiness and build community relationships as part of an overall approach to improve health equity. Because of the ability of community coalitions to produce profound and lasting change, increasing Cooperative Extension’s role in coalition development and management s advanced
as a third central theme of the updated framework. Cooperative Extension’s Framework for Health Equity and Well Being
The graphic depiction of the framework found immediately below illustrates how a focus on the core themes can advance Cooperative Extension’s portfolio of work focused on achieving health equity and promoting the well-being of all people. Some readers will notice the visual similarities to the 2014 model, particularly in the utilization of a multi-layered, social-ecological model to show the relationships between the individual and the environments in which they live. 12
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