Community Engagement Coalition

Working to cultivate a community where everyone in Greenville County has the opportunity to belong and reach their fullest health potential.

Coalition Priorities

The Community Engagement Coalition brings together residents and partners to build trust, share power, and ensure that community voices help shape decisions that impact health and well-being. We focus on listening deeply, removing barriers like language access, and supporting community-led research and advocacy that reflects the lived realities of Greenville County.

Building Community

Change starts with trust, built one relationship and one honest conversation at a time. The Community Engagement Coalition brings residents into the rooms where decisions are made, ensuring those decisions are grounded in the wisdom of the people who live here.

A resident-led advisory board made up of community members who bring lived experience, cultural insight, and local knowledge to the table. HEAL Board members don’t just inform LiveWell’s work — they help lead it, shaping strategies, identifying barriers, and ensuring that community priorities move from conversation to action. By centering the people most affected by decisions that shape daily life, the HEAL Board helps drive solutions that are more responsive, more lasting, and more connected to what Greenville County actually needs.

The HEAL Support Council surrounds HEAL Board members with a network of established community figures and partner organization leaders who offer sustained support, guidance, and connection.

Research & Evaluation

The best data tells a story, but only when the right people are helping tell it. The Community Engagement Coalition partners with residents as researchers and leaders, turning community experience into evidence and evidence into action.

What does it actually take for community voices to influence local decisions? That’s the question at the center of Project AMPLIFY, a partnership between LiveWell Greenville and Furman University’s Institute for the Advancement of Community Health. Through two interconnected research projects, AMPLIFY trains and supports residents as research leaders while examining how community input shapes policy — building evidence that community-guided approaches lead to more equitable, lasting change.

Developed in partnership with Furman University’s Institute for the Advancement of Community Health, the Roots and Research Board places community members, not institutions, in the lead. Board members completed practical research trainings, developed shared agreements, and are now shaping the questions that matter most to Greenville’s communities — what gets studied, how data is collected, and how findings are used. This initiative is supported by the American Heart Association and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Access & Civic Voice

When people can participate in their own language and navigate systems with confidence, trust grows. The Community Engagement Coalition works to remove the barriers that keep too many residents from being heard in the decisions that shape their daily lives.

Language should never be the reason someone can’t participate. The Community Engagement Coalition designs its meetings and public spaces to be fully bilingual — English and Spanish — with live interpretation provided so everyone can listen, speak, and be heard. That commitment extends beyond Coalition walls: the HEAL Board has worked to expand interpretation access at the Greenville County Tax Office, helping ensure public services are accessible to all residents.

Being part of a community means being part of its decisions. The Community Engagement Coalition works to make that possible for residents who have historically faced barriers to civic participation — whether through language, access, or systems not designed with them in mind. Through bilingual voter outreach and partnerships like the one with the League of Women Voters, the coalition has helped increase voter registration in communities like White Horse Road, because civic voice belongs to everyone.

GET INVOLVED!

  • To learn more, email Rut Rivera, Community Engagement Director.
  • Keep up with the work by subscribing to our newsletter below and @livewellgreenville on social media!