Building Healthier Organizations (BHO) is a peer review process leading to accreditation. It is a process for organizations to evaluate their services and systems against acknowledged standards that support sustainability and learning.
Accreditation recognizes the need for organizations to demonstrate formally to their funders and the public at large their ability to function within basic, accepted parameters. However, BHO is more than an accreditation process. It is also a system to promote learning, improvement, excellence and innovation.
What is a healthy organization?
COHI believes that healthy organizations are those prepared to manage change in creative, innovative, productive ways without sacrificing quality. Healthy organizations:
• Are client-centered – respectful of and responsive to immediate concerns and to how clients are affected by the wider context in which they live.
• Support optimal outcomes for individuals, families and communities.
• Promote client and community participation in the organization – from governance to planning to service delivery.
• Create a positive work environment – one that supports continuous learning and improvement and encourages innovation.
• Are accountable to stakeholders including clients, communities and funders.
• Actively address barriers to service and ensure quality regardless of client characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, race, geography and socio-economic status.
BHO FRAMEWORK
BHO is based on a conceptual framework, a way of thinking about the work and workings of not-for-profit organizations. This framework recognizes that organizations are complex and dynamic entities, continually responding to changes, needs and demands emerging from various quarters -- whether inside or outside the organization.
The BHO tool seeks to understand the relationship between what an organization strives to do -- its overall mission -- and the systems and activities put in place to realize that mission. BHO examines how all parts of the organization are working together -- in concert -- towards a common set of goals and to realize the organization's purpose. BHO look at the whole organization, and breaks it down into a system of inter-related parts or components, using a systems approach to organizational development and health.
Here is a BHO Fact Sheet with more information.
