Community Voice In Cross-Sector Alignment: Concepts and Strategies from a Scoping Review of the Health Collaboration Literature

This article addresses a gap in the literature with a systematic scoping review of research on health-oriented cross-sector collaboration and community voice.

To support such collaboration, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation developed a cross-sector alignment theory of change. According to the cross-sector alignment theory of change, community voice is critical for helping collaboratives address community health needs. Yet research on health collaboratives offers mixed guidance on how community voice should be understood and which community voice strategies are most effective.

By scanning key academic journals, searching three academic databases, and obtaining documents from across our professional networks, the authors of this article identified 36 documents that address community voice in health collaboratives.