Social Health is Our Priority
Curandi: Social health is our priority.
In today's community, do you see disease, dysfunction, and disorder -- or -- the lack of health, vitality, and social harmony? The distinction is vital because each leads to a different place. The first tries to fix the problem; we grow a solution in the second. Do we want to return to an idealized vision of an imagined past, or are we building a better future in a constantly changing world? History and entropy argue going back is chaos.
This blog begins a new series about Curandi. We start with why the focus is local human and social service integration. It will explain how social health is a step in a new direction and introduce the need to embrace the precursor of life: complexity. Each article in the series will explain the specifics of our social innovation and how that supports Curandi's members today.
What is health? Our mind immediately jumps to medical care, but as is often the case, the most critical issues are frequently the most overlooked and ignored. We tend to assume some things take care of themselves. And that might have been true when we had fewer distractions and our dependence on each other was obvious.
Before Sir William Osler introduced modern medicine to the world in 1889, humanity had successfully expanded its domain for over 75,000 years. We are the earth's dominant species because we can work in large numbers across vast distances around shared beliefs, principles, or values to persevere and prevail. We succeed because we are social. And that is the foundation of everything we are and do in this world.
Why it matters: Today, the community is in trouble from multiple directions. Anyone with eyes can see the social instability at the base growing. Every system built on that base is compromised and at risk --- healthcare, education, government, business, and more.
Curandi's focus is the critical infrastructure of local human and social services. The future of these organizations, those they serve, and the sustainable success of everything depends on getting this right. That means looking hard at how social health fundamentally differs from physical health.
Physical health is inherently individualistic. Medical physicians can take advantage of the fact that human biology is stable --- glaciers are racers compared to human evolution. But medicine's ability to see the whole problem within the patient is the real advantage. The first makes the situation more predictable, and the second makes understanding possible. Thus, expertise and skill alone can improve the patient's physical health.
On the other hand, social health is more than the individual. Interdependence within the human network produces system-level behavior that is adaptive, self-sustaining, and capable of learning. This complex systems behavior influences every individual, regardless of race, color, creed, or education, more than any individual acting alone will change the system. This emergence of a separate and different collective behavior is a fundamental nature of complex systems.
Problems arising from complexity require solutions based on complexity. More importantly, aligning our work with life's core processes will put the wind at our back.
In the next blog, this will become more concrete as we describe the model, the underlying science, and how the current implementation is making a difference for Curandi's member organizations.
Curandi's purpose is to improve the ability of human and social services to achieve better outcomes for those they serve.