July is Minority Mental Health Month, a time to bring awareness to the importance of achieving mental health and wellness in communities of color, along with addressing barriers that prevent people of color from seeking and remaining in care.
Let’s say you’re an organization interested in developing an awareness campaign related to positive mental health and wellness outcomes in communities of color.
Your organization’s expertise rests on the mental health side, but you identify potential barriers, based on feedback from your program participants, that may become a barrier to someone with a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health issue staying in care.
When we’re not feeling at our best, many aspects of our lives take a dive. One of which is oral health. We don’t typically connect oral health to mental health, but some mental health conditions like dementia and schizophrenia have increased decay and gum disease as a consequence of bacterial infection rather than erosion, attrition, or abrasion. Also, people experiencing stress or anxiety may also experience higher levels of bruxism (teeth grinding), temporomandibular joint disfunction (TMJ), and gum disease due to life stressors.
Partnering with an oral health organization or your local dentist office to address this may sound like a completely random campaign, but it may be a powerful campaign just off the strength of how random it sounds.
Many nonprofits and community groups like to conduct SWOT analysis. If you’re not familiar with the practice, it’s a strategic way to identify what’s a strength, weakness, opportunity or threat to the organization, both internally and externally. One perceived weakness or threat is recognizing that there are others who have your characteristics, think the way you think, and are “already doing the work”.
That may be true. But how can this move from being a weakness or threat to being a strength or opportunity?
My suggestion: Find your unlikely allies.
An unlikely ally is someone that, on the surface, we don’t think can be connected to our cause, but they may have a particular strength we benefit from once we do a deeper dive into what their skills are and how we can marry them to our own.
While there may be others already doing the work, there’s a specific way you do the work that makes you stand out. Your unique perspective can be the deciding factor on how many people get onboard with your program, strategy or campaign.
Plus, when you think beyond the people and groups closest to you and start to identify the outlier people and groups who have different skillsets that you can benefit from, it brings you to the top.
This activity is ideal for:
- Anyone interested in creating a program, strategy campaign or initiative on a larger scale
Here’s what you need:
- Sheets of paper or an erasable whiteboard
- Post-it notes
- Writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers, or dry erase markers)
The steps:
Take your preferred writing utensil and either a sheet of paper or erasable whiteboard and divide the space into four equal sections.
Next, at the top of each section, label the sections from left to right as follows:
- Name of campaign
- Our unlikely ally…
- We bring…
- We work together by…
After labeling each section, use your post-it notes to answer the following prompts:
- Name of campaign: What is the context of your campaign?
- Our unlikely ally: Who is your unlikely ally, and what skills, resources, connections, and knowledge can they bring within the context of your campaign?
- We bring: What skills, resources, and knowledge can you bring to the campaign?
- We work together by: How can you build out this campaign together using your combined skills, resources, and knowledge?
Place the post-its under the corresponding section, and it’ll look something like this:
Let’s process what we have:
Now that you have the context of your awareness campaign, identified who you want to work with, and how you can use your individual and collective skills, resources, and knowledge to make this campaign a success, spend some time fleshing out how potential activities this campaign can work. Use these as your talking points when it comes time to approach your unlikely ally.
Key takeaway
Doing a deeper dive into finding your unlikely allies helps us to think outside the box to create programs, campaign, strategies, and initiatives that can be very beneficial for our communities are they can many intersecting issues. Try this activity and let me know how it goes for you.
Raise Your Voice: What is one way can you partner with an unlikely ally to address an emerging issue? Share below in the comments section.
