The Community Engagement Program was established within the South Dakota Department of Health (SD DOH) in April 2023 to address growing needs in community engagement, partnership development, social drivers of health, priority populations, and cultural competency. Following a reorganization of the Division of Family and Community Health in September 2024, the program transitioned to the Office of Community Engagement (OCE), becoming a key resource across all areas of the Department. OCE is currently engaged in a strategic planning process to define its priorities and clarify its role within the agency. The finalized plan is expected to be released in summer 2025.
Community Engagement Programming
A Community Health Worker (CHW) is a frontline public health professional who is a trusted member of, or has a deep understanding of, the community they serve. This connection enables CHWs to act as a bridge between health and social services and the community, improving access to services and enhancing the quality and cultural relevance of care.
The Office of Community Engagement holds monthly calls with each of the nine tribes in SD. These calls include representatives from tribal health departments and Indian Health Services (IHS) and provide a platform for meaningful discussions between SD DOH staff and tribal partners. These meetings focus on staffing updates, programmatic and outreach efforts, new data and tracking insights, successes, challenges, available resources, funding opportunities, and upcoming conferences and training.
These regular calls have strengthened relationships between SD DOH and tribal partners, fostering increased collaboration on critical public health efforts, including sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing, treatment, and contact tracing; epidemiology and data sharing; and opioid and suicide prevention initiatives.
- Resilience Resource Hub by Rural Opportunity Institute: This hub offers a library of free resources focused on community engagement, systems and design thinking, and resilience in rural communities.
- Community Engagement Toolkit from HUD Exchange: This provides strategies focused on people and a roadmap to address community needs, ideas, and visions for guiding public investments.
- FEMA’s Guide to Supporting Engagement and Resiliency in Rural Communities: This guide discusses outreach and engagement activities, including mitigation planning that addresses the unique needs and considerations of rural communities.
- RURAL.gov Resources: This website provides a range of resources developed exclusively for rural communities, including individual residents, tribes, Native Americans, and Alaska Natives.
- Community Engagement Resources - MRSC: This page highlights a variety of approaches for obtaining public feedback and involving residents in shaping plans and programs.
- Community Engagement Resource Guide - NNLM: This guide includes tools to better engage and meet the needs of specific communities, as well as examples and templates for easy reference while planning, implementing, and evaluating engagement.
- Collective Impact Forum: Collective impact is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions addressing health disparities by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change.
- Community Tool Box: This page is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change. It offers thousands of pages of tips and tools for taking action in communities.
- South Dakota Good and Healthy Community Health Needs Assessment and Improvement Planning Toolkit: Supports a community-driven process for improving communities’ health throughout South Dakota. The core process steps provide a broad view of community health needs assessment and health improvement planning actions and will guide your community through the how-to, what-for, here-we-are, and now-what stages of a community health needs assessment.