2023 Symposium Recap & Future Updates
Dear Stewards,
Recently we hosted our annual PAHS symposium, Stewarding the Story: Toward a Healthier Future in Uncertain Times. We were thrilled to share the day and thankful for attendees' time and energy in this shared pursuit of better health and health stewardship for all.
We are also thankful for and inspired by our keynote speaker, Clarence Jones. Clarence shared his experience of stewardship through the crucial lens of community and community-building, based on his work with Hue-MAN. Clarence highlighted the importance of relationships that allow for hard conversations while helping us to develop necessary skills in order for everyone to be heard.
Last year, we had asked hard questions surrounding the definition of stewardship and health stewardship. This year we dove a little deeper, exploring how you may see stewardship at the level of the individual and the collective, and, finally, your own role as a steward. We cannot thank you all enough for your willingness to take part in the breakouts! We appreciated your willingness to engage with complicated questions that lack right or wrong answers.
Here are some of our takeaways from the symposium—please feel free to respond to us with more of your own:
Stewardship and stewards exist in many facets of our lives, even when it’s not necessarily recognized or named as such. These actions and experiences can carry different or additional meaning when viewed through the lens of stewardship.
We can learn much from taking time to observe the world around us. By taking time to slow down and look at the most simple definitions of what we see, we can start to pull out key facets of our shared experience that connect the processes of working together and acting in our best interests.
Stewardship exists both individually and collectively. It just takes a simple awareness of how our actions ripple out to affect health and others. However, within that collective and collaborative process, our inner voice still matters and has expression.
The stewardship archetypes are not rigid and nor fixed. Sense of roles can also change depending on what position a person is in, like a patient vs. educator. For example, health professionals expressed feelings as if they move between roles of giving, gatekeeping, guiding, etc. in a single patient interaction.
Community building is not easy as it takes a lot of time, persistence, and trust. It takes trust, honesty and listening between those who are trying to cultivate a community space. Listening and learning come from being honest with yourself about your purpose and with others about theirs.
As for what’s next for PAHS, we’ll soon be announcing an online community platform where you and others interested in health stewardship can engage with us and each other around these ideas and initiatives. Do follow us @umnpahs on social media and subscribe to our blog for updates on the online community platform. We are also still curating personal health narratives for our website and a possible future anthology. Finally, we’ll be sharing more on our blog in the coming weeks and months, including useful resources for better understanding the link between narrative and health stewardship, as well as opportunities for direct action (and if you have resources or news to share, we’d love for you to send those our way). For both health narratives and news/resource items (as well as for questions), simply email us at steward@umn.edu.
We look forward to continuing to ask complex questions and discuss this important conversation together in the year ahead. Meanwhile, until we see you again, please be safe and be well!
Warmly,
The PAHS Team