Community Engagement & Collaboration at Living Waters for Equity
Community Engagement & Collaboration at Living Waters in Charlotte NC is transforming how communities connect by using an equity-first approach to design programs that close racial and ethnic gaps in behavioral health outcomes.
In a neighborhood where families of different racial and ethnic backgrounds walk past one another every day but seldom connect, mental health concerns are quietly growing. A local faith leader notices that some congregants are battling stress, trauma, and behavioral health issues, yet they aren’t accessing available help. At the same time, service providers struggle to adapt because they don’t always reflect the cultural experiences of the community. This gap is where Living Waters steps in.
Why an Equity-First Approach Matters
When we talk about designing programs that truly move the needle on disparities, the phrase “equity-first” isn’t just a buzzword; it means starting with the lived experiences of underserved groups and ensuring that every step is built for them, not simply added on. Living Waters focuses on closing racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic gaps in behavioral health outcomes by harnessing its service model of Community Engagement & Collaboration to engage, empower, and equip.
Rather than waiting for individuals to come to a clinic, Living Waters brings trusted networks together, including faith communities, local leaders, and congregations, to create accessible spaces. The organization connects and mobilizes individuals, organizations, and networks to move closer in thinking about mental, physical, and emotional health, act to improve health and healthy behaviors, and partner with communities in new ways to reduce disparities in behavioral outcomes.
This engagement model matters because behavioral health outcomes are not just about treatment; they’re about culture, trust, access, and connection. When a program is built in collaboration with the community rather than imposed on it, relevance increases, stigma decreases, and sustainable change becomes possible.
How Living Waters Designs These Programs
- Faith Leader and Congregation Engagement
Living Waters partners with faith-based organizations and houses of worship because these institutions already hold trust in the community. Their services include clergy and pastor engagement, collaboration with faith leaders, and education and training for faith-based organizations and congregations.
By tapping into these trusted platforms, Living Waters helps open doors for conversations about mental, emotional, and physical health in culturally sensitive ways.
- Trauma-Informed, Community-Driven Events
Living Waters runs trauma-informed engagement events, community empowerment events, faith-based roundtables, and small-group workshops. These create safe spaces where people can talk about behavioral health, acknowledge past experiences, and begin healing collectively. By situating programming in familiar, faith-linked environments, barriers to access and engagement are lowered.
- Technical Assistance and Capacity Building
Beyond hosting events, Living Waters offers consulting and technical assistance to equip community leaders and organizations. Their role is not simply doing the work for the community but enabling the community to lead and sustain efforts.
This means building local capacities for outreach, partnerships, and health promotion so that disparity reduction doesn’t rely solely on external actors.
Measuring Impact: Bridging from Activity to Outcome
One of the most important parts of an equity-first approach is having measurable impact. Living Waters supports this by aligning engagement efforts with real disparities in behavioral outcomes and ensuring programs are designed with clear goals.
By engaging faith communities and training congregational leaders, Living Waters improves community knowledge about behavioral health, increases the referral and support networks for those at risk, and reduces stigma. Over time, this can show up as increased uptake of services, a reduction in untreated trauma, and improved mental and emotional wellness in underserved groups.
By designing programs with built-in collaboration, Living Waters ensures that the people most affected are co-creators rather than just recipients. That makes measurement more robust because you’re tracking things that matter to the community, such as the number of leaders trained, the number of events held, and the number of participants in workshops, and linking those to longer-term changes in community behavior, wellness, and reduced disparities.
Why Community Engagement & Collaboration Works to Close Gaps
- Trust builds access. When engagement happens through community or faith partners, people are more willing to participate.
- Culture-aware design reduces drop-off. Programs that respect culture, language, and lived experience have higher uptake.
- Local capacity means sustainability. Rather than one-time initiatives, Living Waters builds infrastructure so communities carry work forward.
- Holistic framing captures multiple outcomes. Because Living Waters connects physical, emotional, and behavioral health, the outreach is more comprehensive.
- Networked partnerships amplify reach. By mobilizing individuals, organizations, and networks, the interventions spread further and faster.
These factors all point to how an equity-first posture, starting with disparities and designing backwards from community needs and assets, helps move beyond “nice programs” to “programs that count.”
Bringing It Together: Living Waters’ Role
Living Waters’ Community Engagement & Collaboration offering is positioned as a bridge between public and private sectors, faith-based partners, and community networks. Their mission emphasizes a commitment to the growth and development of their most important asset, the people.
In practical terms, this means they provide consulting and technical assistance to faith communities and community leaders, enabling them to co-create meaningful interventions. By designing programs that start with the question, “Which groups are being left behind?” and then asking, “How do we engage trusted community structures?” Living Waters ensures that efforts to improve behavioral outcomes are grounded in real-world context. The result is measurable collaboration, shared ownership, and a narrowing of outcome gaps.
FAQs
- What is community engagement & collaboration?
It means working with local people, faith leaders, and networks to design and deliver programs rather than services being handed down. For Living Waters, it means mobilizing individuals, organizations, and networks to act together on mental, physical, and emotional health. - How does this approach help reduce disparities in behavioral health?
Underserved racial and ethnic groups often face barriers such as trust and access issues. By engaging through trusted community partners and designing programs that reflect cultural realities, Living Waters helps ensure these groups are reached, engaged, and supported. - Can success be measured with this model?
While specific metrics vary by program, the model tracks engagements, leadership capacity built, and changes in participation and access. Over time, this links to improved behavioral health outcomes and reduced gaps. - Why involve faith-based organizations?
Faith-based organizations often hold longstanding trust, cultural relevance, and deep community reach. They are natural conveners and supports. Living Waters uses these partnerships to create safe, accessible health engagement spaces. - What role does technical assistance play?
Living Waters doesn’t just run one-off events. They consult, equip, and empower community leaders and organizations so that engagement and collaboration become embedded and sustainable, not just a single program.
By focusing on an equity-first lens, designing programs grounded in trusted networks, and measuring outcomes that matter, Living Waters sets a clear path toward reducing racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic gaps in behavioral health. Their Community Engagement & Collaboration service is both a strategy and a commitment to ensure every person and community is supported, empowered, and part of the solution.
Join Living Waters to support community collaboration
Living Waters serves as an independent link to faith-based communities to collaborate and partner with public and private sectors. We assist communities to establish and implement new goals.