Health isn’t just about what you can achieve on your own. You’re going to be influenced by the people and culture around you, whether it’s in a good way or a bad one. If you want the best outcomes, you’re going to need to make sure the community support is there.
At its best, community can be a powerful tool for health. It means people don’t have to struggle on their own. They offer each other reassurance and push each other forward when an individual might be flagging. Services can be targeted to communities to ensure the largest range of people can access what they need.
The flipside of this is that poor health outcomes can become embedded in communities as well. Things like poverty tend to accumulate in certain places or among specific groups of people and can be very difficult to overcome. Underserved communities are more likely to see their health outcomes continuing to get worse.
So how do you make the most of a community? On a wider level, government and charitable programs try to ensure communities have access to the housing, education and employment opportunities that everyone needs for a basic quality of life. These sorts of programs improve individual wellbeing by strengthening the community around them.
For you as an individual, you might not be able to make major structural changes to society, but you can still try to build or improve your own community. Sometimes, just being able to communicate with people in similar situations can provide relief. Thanks to the internet, it’s much easier for you to reach out and find those facing familiar challenges and share ways to tackle them.
That’s because communities come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. You might think it just means the people living in the same area as you, but it could be anyone with whom you have a situation in common. When you’re online, you can become part of communities that are spread all around the world – perhaps you have a rare disability or just don’t know anyone with the same health problems as you. Someone, somewhere in the world is going to have had a similar experience, and you may be able to join forces with them through the web.
Communities sometimes exclude people, but they’re also how we tell we’re not alone. That’s incredibly important.
