Methods: community conversations
Nelson
NELSON
Community conversations (CCs) are a powerful tool that encourages critical thinking among participants, stimulates finding tailored solutions to the problem detected, and can lead to lasting community empowerment. Opportunities are created for diverse stakeholders to develop critical consciousness; an awareness of the ways in which relationships between structural contexts and our experiences come about and contribute to the difficulties people face in their everyday lives [The Nelson Mandela Foundation’s approach to CCs involves five broad stages to generate critical dialogue: Relationship building, Concern Identification, Concern Exploration, Decision making, and Reflection and Review [The CC method is not without its challenges. Given its interest in combining actors across a range of social positions within shared spaces for thinking and action, some evidence warns that consensus building can be challenging [Given the capacity for CCs to illuminate a wide range of concerns linked to health challenges, while providing a pathway to meaningful dialogue between communities and researchers, we felt the methodology could provide a more systematic approach to community engagement in the design of our intervention. We describe our approach, as well as findings generated from its use in subsequent sections.