Shaking out the cobwebs: insights into community capacity and its relation to health outcomes.

The authors are health promotion and community development practitioners in the David Thompson Health Region of rural central Alberta, Canada. Like our peers, we struggle to carry out our practice in a way that honours the underlying values and principles of health promotion. Our experiences with two Regional health promotion programs over the past five years have led us to conclude that we must adopt and refine an emphasis upon community capacity building in our work. In this paper, community capacity building is defined and its importance for the work of health promotion and community development practitioners is outlined. We provide an overview of the literature on this subject and on related concepts such as asset based development, community competence, social capital, and civic infrastructure. Finally, we indicate some directions for further research. Ultimately, our work should provide guidance on how to deliver health promotion in order to more effectively strengthen and empower communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]