Articles
We Don’t Wear Our Best Pants
Posted: 03.15.07 by to HP/HP
In his play An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen wrote, “When you go out to struggle for peace and liberty, do not wear your best pants.” That idea is something Ed Maibach, Lorien Abrams, and I had in mind when we first started developing the Healthy People/Healthy Places Framework for Public Health. Our goal was to introduce a new, systematic way of thinking and doing that brings about constructive social change.
The Healthy People/Healthy Places Framework for Public Health was originally developed to integrate public health communications/marketing with emerging social-ecological models of health. Since that time, it has been adapted to serve as a model for planning public health interventions seeking to bring about changes in health behavior and health outcomes at both a macro and micro level. Simply, anyone who has the charge to invest their organization’s resources in changing the way people live, learn and grow for the better should see Healthy People/ Healthy Places as their definitive field manual.
Most of all, we want to make this a simple, engaging and friendly approach — even though the authors themselves are somewhat bogged down in the concept of it all. We want our readers to feel something more than they feel when they’ve read any other good academic or conceptual piece about marketing or social marketing. We want them to feel like we understand their passion. We want them to feel like they’ve just joined an enlightened cadre of social change activists. Smart, street savvy, and action-oriented, with our feet on the ground and our eyes on the prize. When we work for social change, we don’t wear our best pants.