What Community Empowerment Means to Roots

Roots Community Health focuses on the health of its patients and the entire community. A healthy community requires access to basic services, economic vitality and community empowerment.
When outsiders are the only entities providing and profiting from goods and services rendered to a neighborhood, the result is political and economic disempowerment, and a loss of input and control over basic services and service delivery. Community empowerment requires that its people have the ability to speak on their own behalf and provide their own direction. This empowerment must then be passed on to subsequent generations in order to continue shaping the future of the community and to preserve communal autonomy.
Community empowerment and self-direction are of paramount importance when it comes to the provision of medical care. Roots Community Health leaders believe strongly in fellow community health centers, clinics and private doctors who make up the “Safety Net” in East Oakland. To that end, Roots has formed Roots Community Health Alliance, which aims to preserve and expand these critical points of access to care.