Listen First, Lead Together: Advocacy and Power Dynamics

Ronda Alexander on strategies to build inclusive health coalitions, manage power dynamics, center marginalized voices, & design sustainable governance.

Summary

In this episode of Health Hats, host Danny van Leeuwen talks with Ronda Alexander, a community health advocate and skilled facilitator, about the challenges of building and maintaining effective health coalitions. Alexander shares her journey from attending Detroit’s innovative Henry Ford Academy to working with Ford Partnership for Advanced Studies on workforce development, ultimately finding her calling at Vital Village Networks in Boston, where she spent seven years supporting national coalitions focused on health equity and early childhood wellbeing.

The conversation explores practical ways to manage power dynamics in cross-sector collaborations, from setting group norms that encourage real participation to designing decision-making processes that balance speed and sustainability. Alexander stresses the critical importance of listening to marginalized communities—those “furthest from opportunity”—and making sure they have real seats at decision-making tables, not just token representation.

Key insights include strategies for inclusive facilitation, such as incorporating quiet reflection time, small group discussions, and developing shared talking points that coalition members can take back to their organizations. Alexander advocates for proactive governance planning, comparing effective coalition building to chess strategy, where groups think “seven to eight moves down the board” to prepare for inevitable challenges.

The episode wraps up with Alexander’s call to action for health advocates: start by listening to the communities you want to serve, trust what people tell you about their needs, and design systems that place those most affected by health inequities in leadership and decision-making roles.

Click here to view the printable newsletter with images. More readable than a transcript, which can also be found below.

Contents

Table of Contents

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Production Team

1. Kayla Nelson: Web and Social Media Coach, Dissemination, Help Desk 
2. Leon van Leeuwen: editing and site managementresil
3. Oscar van Leeuwen: video editing
4. Julia Higgins: Digit marketing therapy
5. Steve Heatherington: Help Desk and podcast production counseling
6. Joey van Leeuwen, Drummer, Composer, and Arranger, provided the music for the intro, outro, proem, and reflection, including Moe’s Blues for Proem and Reflection and Bill Evan’s Time Remembered for on-mic clips.

Podcast episode on YouTube

Inspired by and Grateful to: 

Jan Oldenburg, Ellen Schultz, Tomas Moran, Susannah Fox, Betsy Neptune, Tania Marien

Links and references

Ronda Alexander

Henry Ford Academy

Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village

Ford Partnership for Advanced Studies

Vital Village Network

The Networks of Opportunity for Child Wellbeing

Dr. Renee Boynton-Jarrett

B’More for Healthy Babies

Marginalization refers to the inequality certain individuals face in society due to power imbalances built into our systems.

Episode

Proem

Learn with People on the Journey toward Best Health. That’s my tagline. Let’s break it down. Learn with People implies endless curiosity with the people I travel with. Makes sense, I’m a networking extrovert who learns best with others. I prefer to travel with selected peeps (my team). Best health means accepting current circumstances and maximizing abilities, function, and spirit. So, we’re headed to a relatively better place, or at least the best possible health given whatever circumstances of the moment. A journey typically involves a destination (goals), tactics, and costs. The only guaranteed person on the team is me, you, or us, depending on whether it’s community health. Otherwise, the team is constantly changing. Who’s on the team, who’s off? Travel implies choices. Right, left, up, down, stop, rest, shop, eat. We can’t continue without making decisions together.  Decision-making means power, group dynamics, and trust-governance. I broke all this down to get to governance, small group governance. After 50 years in health care, I’m still a student of governance.  How do we, as mission-driven teams, attain our health goals with the power we possess? How do we collectively nurture healthy group dynamics with transparent and somewhat equitable power?

Just as my next-door neighbor, Ronda Alexander, was about to move, I learned that we shared an interest in community advocacy, governance, and power dynamics. And where was she moving? Back to Detroit—my old neighborhood. Small world. I took the opportunity to record a chat with Ronda before she left.

When did you first realize health was fragile?

Ronda Alexander: It was becoming a parent. When you become a parent, you’re responsible for somebody else’s health. And up until then, I’ve been relatively healthy all my life. I had taken it for granted. But I think recognizing that I have this little human that I’m responsible for and have to make sure to keep them healthy, and that was a time when I was like, oh wait, health is, it’s tricky. It can change at any moment. My kiddo has nut allergies. They had an egg allergy, and they have asthma. And so, just things I hadn’t paid attention to before caused me to think about the environment around me. I think another thing that helped me realize health was fragile was recognizing the interconnection between physical health and the community and environment around you. When I started working for an organization focused on health equity, I learned that the social determinants of health — your community, your environment — have a significant impact on your health. And that answered so many questions for me.

Vital Village Network

Health Hats: Can you tell us about some of the organizations you’ve been working with?

Ronda Alexander: For the last seven years, up until about two months ago, I worked for an organization called Vital Village Networks, based out of Boston Medical Center. The focus of that organization is health equity and child wellbeing, but from a community leadership standpoint. Upon joining the team, I was responsible for building a national learning community called The Networks of Opportunity for Child Wellbeing, supporting and working with 10 coalitions from across the country across 10 states who were working on various aspects of health equity. We’re working on some specific innovations in their communities. Centered on prenatal to eight. So early, early childhood. Moving from preschool to elementary school, what does that mean for families, and what does it look like?

Leadership, Impact, and Measurement

Some coalitions focused on birth equity and birth justice, while others focused on community leadership or community grant-making. They all approached it from different lenses, but one key aspect was conducting research and measuring the impact of their work on their respective communities, as well as examining the collective impact.

In addition to helping them determine what we’ll work on together, we also need to figure out how to uplift the folks we’re saying we want to help and support, putting them at the center and in positions of leadership and power. We also asked, “What does it mean to measure that, and how do we design systems of measurement together?” We designed survey questions to understand how people would tell stories and what that process looked like, co-designing those evaluation tools.

Data Storytelling

We recognized that research and data can come from a variety of places. It can be stories, it can be numbers, it can be a combination of the two. And that folks in the community, folks most impacted, can have some ownership over that. We often would do workshops on building capacity, helping folks