March 2013 – Recruiting and Securing Spaces for Discussion Groups

This month we’re working with the Bernalillo County CINCH (Collective Impact for Neighborhood and County Health) project to recruit 50+ participants (service providers, advocates, and community members) for discussion groups in order to get input about chronic health conditions and to discuss ideas to address these conditions on a policy level. We are recruiting people from specific communities — International District, South Valley, I-25 Corridor, African American, and Native American — that are disproportionately affected by these chronic health conditions.

In general, recruiting involves a lot of flyering, emailing, calling, face-to-face contact, follow-up, and reminders. For this project, recruiting for some of the groups has been done mainly via email and phone because community gatekeepers, or liaisons, provided us with lists of people they know personally who would be potentially interested in participating. However, we are also doing the more challenging type of recruiting which involves not having a gatekeeper and requires hitting the pavement to find and talk to potential participants.

Getting ready for multiple discussion groups throughout the county also requires securing spaces for each one. When doing this we always keep in mind times and locations that are best for the participants. Additional considerations for securing a space: participant comfort and safety, cost, audio-visual capabilities, room set-up, parking, distance to public transportation, and ease of communication with the person that oversees that space.