What is the Collaborative Action Network?

North Sound ACH has launched a learning, advocacy, and action network, open to all community members and organizations seeking to advance a just and inclusive culture and the necessary conditions required for all community members to thrive. Together we will provide the assets, influence, and leadership for the new Collaborative Action Network (the Network).

We are using frameworks for Network members to understand and use the same language, resulting in Network members co-designing and co-creating projects that North Sound ACH will support to advance the work in the region. Trusting partners in planning, design, and implementation decisions is one way to advance equity, well-being, and belonging in the region. We trust in your guidance and judgment as we build partnerships, strength, and capacity across the North Sound region.

This collection introduces foundational concepts you will see across the Network, including learning sessions, convenings, communities of practice, and your own meetings and interactions with each other.

Vital conditions are the properties of places and institutions that we all depend on to reach our full potential. Vital conditions shape the exposures, choices, opportunities, and adversities that we each encounter throughout our lives. Each vital condition is distinct and indispensable. Together, they form an interdependent system that shapes opportunities for people and places to thrive. (Thriving Together)

The seven vital conditions for well-being and justice are: Thriving Natural World; Basic Needs for Health & Safety; Humane Housing; Meaningful Work & Wealth; Lifelong Learning; Reliable Transportation; and Belonging & Civic Muscle.

Vital conditions align with the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), turning our attention to the policies, systems, and environments that shape our lives and influence our health. We know health happens where we live, learn, work, and play–not in the doctor’s office. Vital conditions also build on the SDOH by offering us guidance and direction. For example, housing alone isn’t enough to ensure our community members thrive. We need more than shelter. We need housing that is affordable, safe, and connected to our schools and jobs.

Belonging and Civic Muscle is a special vital condition: it is both a condition itself and necessary for all other vital conditions to expand. At a personal level, people need fulfilling relationships and social supports to thrive. People need to feel part of a community, contributing to its vibrancy, and developing the power to co-create a common world. Social support from friends, family, and other networks helps us navigate challenges and reinforces healthy behaviors. People who feel connected tend to live healthier, happier lives.

At the community level, we need to feel like an important part of a larger community, with strong social ties, trust, and cooperation—making it easier to work and learn together. This connection builds a virtuous cycle: When people feel valued and cared for within the community, they are more likely to contribute and participate in creating healthy, equitable places.

The practice of targeted universalism sets universal goals for the general population that are accomplished through targeted approaches based on the needs of different groups. When we understand how we are each situated in relation to the vital conditions we all need to thrive, we are better able to meet the unique needs of our friends and neighbors—and move toward shared outcomes. Universal policies, like Social Security or minimum wage, are widely accepted but they often overlook marginalized groups. Targeted policies, like affirmative action for students of color or Medicaid, are more cost efficient and effective, but they may be viewed as unfairly helping one group at the expense of another. Targeted universalism combines the best of both approaches, targeting based upon how different groups are situated within structures, culture, and across geographies to obtain the universal goal.

Advancing equity, well-being and a sense of belonging are fundamental elements of the North Sound ACH’s work, using the framework of targeted universalism to shape and inform planning, actions, decision making, and investment. One of the key tenets of the Collaborative Action Network is sharing staffing, leadership, and funding for targeted investments, especially for those often left out of traditional investment strategies.

Belonging is based on the recognition of our full humanity, without having to become something different or pretend we’re all the same. Belonging provides the privileges of membership in a community, including the care and concern of other members. Belonging requires both agency and the power to co-create structures and institutions together (john powell). To build belonging, organizations must elevate community voice, acknowledge power dynamics, work to dismantle inequities, and value diversity and representation.

Cultivating belonging can lead to cultural transformation and preservation. For example, Children of the Setting Sun Productions Inc. is a multi-media, film, and theater arts production company that aims to make the culture and history of Native American people more accessible. They promote a strong sense of belonging through storytelling, and emphasize that “When hearts and minds are one, we’re able to learn and work together.”

Belonging, along with civic muscle, are necessary for expanding the vital conditions that all people need to thrive and for creating new legacies for well-being and justice. Belonging and Civic Muscle is one of seven interrelated “vital conditions” for well-being and justice.

North Sound ACH is committed to an ongoing journey of Tribal and Equity Learning. We asked every ACH partner to join us in this journey to learn about and build relationships with the tribes of the North Sound region, and launched that learning journey in 2017. This has since expanded to include more than 150 partner organizations, our Board of Directors, and consultants who work with our team. The North Sound ACH adopted a Land Acknowledgement Statement in 2018 to recognize the space that we inhabit and the people who add such richness to its history, and are doing some of the most innovative work in current time.

We acknowledge, with humility, that the land of the North Sound ACH region today is the territory of the People of the Salish Sea. Their presence is imbued in the waterways, shorelines, valleys, and mountains of the traditional homelands of the Coast Salish People, since time immemorial.

The eight tribes of the North Sound region are:

Lummi Nation
Nooksack Indian Tribe
Samish Indian Nation
Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe
Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians
Swinomish Indian Tribal Community
Tulalip Tribes
Upper Skagit Indian Tribe

Find out what Native land you inhabit at https://native-land.ca/