Supporting equity-centred engagement

A step-by-step guide with tailored resources

Introduction

Equity is an important consideration in all facets of engagement work. It emphasizes fairness, impartiality and the welcoming of people with a range of identities and ideas to be heard, valued, and understood. Inclusion and diversity are valuable elements of an equity-centred approach to engagement; they ensure that the conditions are created for all people to contribute in positive and mutually beneficial ways and recognize that some individuals and groups need focused attention and increased investment to achieve equitable outcomes.

As groups and organizations seek to bring a stronger equity focus to their engagement work, there are many things to consider and a growing number of resources to support this work. Our goal is to help you navigate the many helpful resources that exist to help centre equity in your engagement work. We offer this step-by-step guide to help you with this important work.

How This Guide Was Developed

This guide was developed through a collaboration between the Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative (PPEC) and the Public Engagement in Health Policy (PEHP) Project at McMaster University.

Resources and tools were identified through a comprehensive search conducted between June and July 2022 and reviewed across four descriptive categories (comprehensiveness, ease of understanding, functionality, and partner engagement) to curate a set of resources to support equity-centred engagement. This set of resources is not exhaustive, but our hope is that together, they provide a good starting point for groups and organizations to bring an equity focus to their engagement work. For more details about our methods and a short summary of each of the resources that appear in the guide below, please see Appendices A-C.

How To Use This Guide

This guide was mainly designed for people doing engagement work in health system and/or health policy contexts; however, we have included a small number of relevant and useful resources that have a research focus. For each step in this guide, we have included links to key resources that provide focused support for a particular aspect of equity-centred engagement and linked to the specific section of each resource that is most relevant. A single resource may appear several times, but the section of the resource will change. These resources will guide you through the key considerations for each step in the guide, and we encourage you to reflect on them in relation to the specific contexts of your organizations, the issues you wish to address, and the populations you seek to engage with.

Below is an interactive version of the tool. Hover over the circled headings to learn more about each step, and click on each sub-heading over the red pins to see the links to the corresponding resources. You may also download a PDF version of the tool.

Click on the red pins below to view the resources for each step


Last updated February 17, 2023

This guide was developed by members of the Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative and the Public Engagement in Health Policy team at McMaster University under the leadership of Moizza Ul Haq. Please visit ppe.mcmaster.ca and www.engagementinhealthpolicy.ca for related research outputs and resources.

Citation: Ul Haq, M, Dhamanaskar R, Tripp L, Rodgers J, Abelson J. Supporting equity-centred engagement: A step-by-step guide with tailored resources. Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative. Hamilton, Canada: McMaster University, 2023.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.