A well-designed Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) is not just about data—it is about voice, values, sovereignty, and movement. When guided by Tribal leadership, a CHNA can support informed decision-making, strengthen community trust, and advance the Tribe’s long-term vision for health and wellness. The most effective assessments are those that reflect who the community is, what it values, where it wants to go, and how it can get there. Strong CHNAs are guided by Tribal resolutions, leadership directives, or formal approvals. This ensures the assessment aligns with Tribal priorities.
Health in Tribal communities is often understood as balance—between physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, cultural, and environmental well-being.
A CHNA should reflect this broader understanding by:
- Including cultural and community strengths, not just health problems
- Recognizing the role of land, language, culture, and connection
- Creating space for community stories, not only statistics
Community engagement is a cornerstone of the CHNA process. How this is accomplished will vary by Tribe and reflect local culture. Tribal members are often engaged by a mix of surveys, listening sessions, town halls, discussion groups, and interviews. But, communication through art, imagery, or storytelling are also useful ways to “hear” from the community. More important than the methods is that everyone has the opportunity to be heard in ways in which they are comfortable and can be effective.
It is equally important to share CHNA findings back with the community for validation and interpretation. Engaging the community in reflecting on the results is a critical part of the next step, action planning.
If the CHNA is the map, then the Action Plan is the route you will take to achieve the Tribe’s vision of health. A CHNA
- Identifies priorities for programs, services, and policies.
- Supports strategic planning, resource allocation, and grant applications.
- Informs coordination across health, social services, education, housing, and others.
By bringing different parts of the community together, health care, social services, housing, education, natural resources, public safety, and Tribal leadership– to look at the same information and hear the same community voices, a CHNA helps break down silos and aligns sectors that may otherwise plan separately. When everyone is working from the same picture, the Action Plan, or often called a Community Health Improvement Plan, is more coordinated and realistic. Over the long term, this alignment is critical to advancing a unified Tribal vision for health and wellness—one where programs, policies, and investments move in the same direction and support sustainable, community-driven change.