Community Health Partnerships: Framing and Brokering Strategies in Three Milwaukee Neighborhoods

• In Event: 561 - Regular Session. Social Movement Organizations and Community

Abstract

Community health partnerships nationwide are redefining healthy communities as places where residents can access health care services, purchase nutritious foods, exercise in safe and attractive recreation spaces, and work in jobs that produce a family-supporting income. This paper draws on insights from social movement theory—especially framing strategies and coalition brokering—to identify factors that enhance or impede partnership development. We study three Milwaukee neighborhoods that have sought to redevelop contaminated industrial land to foster economic revitalization, improve population health, preserve natural resources, and address environmental and social inequalities. In two of the three sites, we find that brokers cultivated frames of community health and health equity that were broad enough to unify diverse stakeholders. Brokers in these sites also built and maintained momentum by creating new political opportunities, specifically by identifying short-term projects that would quickly yield tangible evidence of progress. We attribute stalled redevelopment efforts in the third site in part to the lack of a strong coalition broker who could foreground the social justice concerns of marginalized communities. But partnership formation in this location was also thwarted by political opportunities in the city at large and in this particular neighborhood, especially longstanding zoning patterns and historical trends in settlement and demographic change. Our work shows the importance of brokers and the relevance of framing strategies to partnerships that may not function as formal coalitions but nevertheless need to align the interests of diverse stakeholders. Our work also demonstrates the limitations of framing discourses as a mobilization strategy.

Authors

• Laura Senier, Northeastern University

• Cynthia Lin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Boris Templeton, Northeastern University