Toolkit for Community-engaged Wellness Mapping.

Community-engaged projects have become one of the preferred ways to build capacity, conduct research, and promote social change in a variety of fields. Our project, Health Resilience among American Indians in Arizona, began as a research initiative to identify resilience strategies used by community members in their search for a healthier life. Previous research showed the need for improving patient-provider communication in relation to wellness, health, and strategies for a healthy lifestyle; therefore, an in-depth look at patient-provider communication is also a part of the research objectives. Our research team included community members, academic personnel, and students. We developed a Wellness Mapping toolkit to engage team members in a process of data collection and analysis in a mixed-methods project design. We used the Wellness Mapping toolkit in a variety of community settings, and with groups of people of different ages, educational backgrounds, and languages. The use of this Wellness Mapping toolkit helped team members with varying levels of training to collaborate in a process of research and analysis. Through the use of the toolkit the team achieved data collection and provided an opportunity for capacity building among members. The authors find these tools flexible, easy to use, and easy to adapt to several endeavors, and hope the tools can be of use for other community initiatives and projects.