**3. General presentation of the practical project "Lenzgesund"**

Almost in parallel to the district's inclusion in the Senate "Social District Development" program, the Hamburg-Eimsbüttel Health Office also began to contribute to the district's management in 2001 with its first health-promoting activities. These activities initially focused on the situation of young families and migrants, as the Lenzsiedlung is a large housing estate close to the city center that is home to very many children, mostly of foreign background.

Two years later, in the autumn of 2003, at the initiative of the health office, the first "Lenzgesund" round table was launched, which was intended, on the one hand, to contribute to networking among the actors and, on the other hand, to serve as an interface between the actors and the population. At the round table, three to four times a year, various institutions, and individuals from the health, education, and social sectors met in and around the Lenzsiedlung, with the aim of establishing health promotion and prevention as a priority field of action for district development.

A systematic prevention program entitled "Lenzgesund" was introduced by the health office in 2005, and has since been implemented and further developed together with other collaborative partners. The core of the dynamic concept of action is the organization and coordination of networked assistance around pregnancy, childbirth, and the first years of life, with the aim of improving health status with the active participation of the residents in the neighborhood. The idea is to make a small-scale contribution to equal social and health opportunities. The objectives in detail are:


After several discussions at the round table (see below), the prevention program, which initially consisted of nine fields of action, was divided into seven fields of action (with individual subgoals and target groups) as well as two cross-cutting tasks that are to be integrated into all fields of action. These fields of action and crosscutting tasks of the prevention program are:


*Participation as a Core Principle of Community Health Promotion: General Account… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111930*


The Hamburg Institute of Medical Sociology provided scientific support for this process of developing, testing, and implementing a systematic concept of action or a prevention program for a disadvantaged neighborhood as part of Federal Ministry of Research-funded prevention research.

In the following, individual methods and approaches will be presented for the activation and participation of actors and residents in the Lenzsiedlung that have been tested within the framework of collaborations between science and practice, though it must be said, in qualification, that the procedures and methods used mainly served to generate information and gain knowledge in the research process, but, as an important "side" aspect that should not be underestimated, always necessarily also involved the activation and participation of the particular groups of people surveyed.

The following two examples, the "Expert survey" and "Resident survey," are to be seen against this background. The third example reports on successful participation culture in the context of capacity building and development for the implementation and dynamic further development of the prevention program through the "round table" in the Lenzsiedlung.
