Welcome to Social Action for Health (SAfH)!

SAfH is a community development charity, which works alongside marginalised local people and their communities towards justice, equality, better health and wellbeing.
We currently operate mainly in East London with 9 full time staff and 120 part time and sessional staff, local people trained by SAfH to work with their community in their mother tongue, including Bengali, Somali, Turkish / Kurdish, Congolese, Gugarati, Urdu, Arabic, and English.

Four values shape our work:

• We start with the people
• People have the right to take control of their own lives
• People’s health can be improved by tackling isolation, poverty, racism and unemployment
• Healthy communities are good for the whole society

Our approach to the complexity of community development is described by our “SAfH Spiral of Participation” which is built on the recognition that there are different levels of social organisation and engagement:

Grass roots work - we engage with local people on the issues that concern them:

• Promoting access to public and community services - we improve people's knowledge of their entitlements to public services
• Encouraging local people to take more control of their lives and their health and well-being - we teach people to manage their own health
• Working together - we help communities to organise
• Forging alliances - we link community groups for mutual benefit
• Building networks - we sustain services of use to local people such as the provision of information and advice
• Influencing policy - we promote the engagement of communities in policy negotiation and take local people's agendas to decision makers
• Changing practice – we seek to improve the way services are provided so that marginalized people can take their place in the mainstream

SAfH runs approximately 20 projects a year, between them covering 5 areas of work:

• Community development (eg. developing community action on particular estates)
• Health information (eg. Health Guides informing people about how to use services)
• Self management (eg. Lorig self management courses for people with chronic conditions)
• Networks and alliances (eg. Information and advice to people in health settings)
• Research and Influencing policy (eg.death management in the Muslim community)

SAfH history

The Tower Hamlets Health Strategy Group (THHSG) was set up in response to a health enquiry in Tower Hamlets, undertaking many ground breaking projects. In 2000, THHSG changed its name to Social Action for Health.

To read a PDF version of our Working With Communities leaflet, please click here.

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