Health

The LAMP Lens: A Field Guide

This resource explores the critical importance of engaging your community’s expertise, experience, and wisdom while pursuing public health goals.

The LAMP Lens: A Field Guide

In this resource, Interfaith America Fellow Dr. David Tillman writes practically and poignantly about the critical importance of engaging your community’s expertise, experience, and wisdom while pursuing public health goals. This field guide is not just about getting buy-in from community members or increasing health literacy. It is about how to build the kind of true, reciprocal partnerships that are essential to the flourishing of our communities.

Readers can expect a comprehensive account of what it means for anyone who cares about public health to be effective in this work, complete with practical details and advice. It is useful as a full-length primer that offers an asset-based approach to identifying and addressing our most trenchant health challenges together.

What does this resource offer?

This resource explores a variety of topics pertinent to faith and health work. Among its most prominent offerings are:

A yardstick to evaluate community health and identify missing pieces
Practical advice to your community’s different perspectives: lived experience, academic research, moral wisdom, and professional expertise (LAMP)
Stories of people working together that are both inspirational and instructive
A thorough accounting of challenges encountered by those engaged in this work, how they overcame them, and what they wish they would have done differently
Case studies from the field
Discussion and reflection questions for personal or communal contemplation

How should I use this resource?

This resource is valuable when read in its entirety by students, professionals, and experts alike. Should you desire to use excerpts of this resource on their own or sequentially in an educational setting, consider breaking it up into the following three sections:

3 modules

Part 1: Introduction and Background for LAMP

In the opening section, readers become acquainted with the author, his work, and the important questions this guide attends to. It introduces the LAMP lens as a heuristic to shape meaningful collaboration. It also offers a case study and reflections about how this way of seeing community partnerships differs from other approaches.

Part 2: Exploring the Lens

 In the second section, the guide shifts focus to each dimension of the LAMP lens and includes tips for recruitment and empowerment of partners in each way of knowing.  Additionally, this second section looks at the strengths and unique contributions of each dimension and offers thoughts for facilitating co-creation of projects that combine the disparate perspectives. Finally, each chapter in this section ends with some key takeaways and questions that might be useful to teams ready to engage partners from across the four areas.

Part 3: Lessons We Learned the Hard Way and Conclusions

In the final section, Dr. Tillman shares challenges that his team has encountered and provides practical advice for what might be done to avoid them. Reflection questions are included throughout this section to prompt contemplation and discussion about where these elements may be present in one’s own work.