Participation as a Core Principle of Community Health Promotion: General Account and Examples

One of the key principles of the Ottawa Charta is participation. Community health interventions should involve the community, i.e., residents and local actors. In Hamburg, we tried to put this principle into practice during a project initiated by the municipal health service in a disadvantaged quarter with about 3000 inhabitants. The contribution starts with an account of the meaning of participation in health promotion (1) and gives an overview of participation methods in general (2). The next part contains a short account of our project (3). Five examples are presented in part four: a survey with key actors and two approaches to listening to residents’ perceptions of capacity building in the neighborhood. Another survey of residents was meant to explore the use of health promotion offers and the preparedness to get involved. The last example is the round table of local actors as a sort of steering committee for health promotion interventions (4). Key findings of the examples are: Surveys do result in valuable information for the local actors. The expressed willingness to participate is larger than the actual participation. Opportunities to participate (in surveys and at the round table) are welcome by local actors. In the last section we discuss the advantages, problems and some illusions concerning participation in health promotion (5).