Abstract
The authors recount the ways in which a COVID-19 vaccination campaign that explicitly embraced strengths-based community engagement moved further away from implicitly deficit-based data and assessment strategies. The conceptual framework was developed over several years in explicit confrontation with difficulties in implementation of various earlier projects, and the vaccination campaign was an important but not final step. The paper explains the driving philosophical commitments of the project and its expanding commitment to a vision of embedded community health workers (CHWs) as the mechanism for creating visibility into the dynamics of communities as they develop in terms of their own strengths and confront barriers to better health outcomes. This paper is written from the perspective of the management team and describes how the CHWs were supported and how they facilitated engagement with community members as a precursor to the vaccination decision. Some examples of CHW interactions within their communities are provided, as still preliminary steps toward a fully strengths-based approach to community data, but the authors recognize serious shortcomings in the highly individualized approach to data collection and interpretation, especially as researchers will require more sophisticated ways to model community dynamics at larger scales.