BackgroundColombia’s universal health coverage programme has enrolled 98% of the population, thereby improving financial protection and health outcomes. The right to participate in the organisation of healthcare is enshrined in the 1991 Colombian Constitution. One participatory mechanism is the legal and regulatory provision that citizens can form user associations. This study examines the functionality of health insurance user associations and their influence on citizen empowerment and health insurance responsiveness.MethodsThe mixed methods study includes document review (n=72), a survey of beneficiaries (n=1311), a survey of user associations members (n=27), as well as interviews (n=19), focus group discussions (n=6) and stakeholder consultations (n=6) with user association members, government officials, and representatives from insurers, the pharmaceutical industry, and patient associations. Analysis used a content–process–context framework to understand how user associations are designed to work according to policy content, how they actually work in terms of coverage, public awareness, membership, and effectiveness, and contextual influences.FindingsColombia’s user associations have a mandate to represent citizens’ interests, enable participation in insurer decision-making, ‘defend users’ and oversee quality services. Insurers are mandated to ensure their enrollees create user associations, but are not required to provide resources to support their work. Thus, we found that user associations had been formed throughout the country, but the public was widely unaware of their existence. Many associations were weak, passive or entirely inactive. Limited market competition and toothless policies about user associations made insurers indifferent to community involvement.ConclusionCurrently, the initiative suffers from low awareness and low participation levels that can hardly lead to empowered enrollees and more responsive health insurance programmes. Yet, most stakeholders value the space to participate and still see potential in the initiative. This warrants a range of policy recommendations to strengthen user associations and truly enable them to effect change.

This article describes a Collaborative Intervention Project designed to prepare preservice teachers to develop, implement, monitor, and evaluate interventions for English learners (ELs) in need of academic and/or behavioral supports. Faculty from two departments, one preparing bilingual education (BE) elementary school teachers and the other preparing special education (SE) teachers for prekindergarten through 21 generic certifications, developed a process to enhance preservice teachers' preparation to collaboratively address the cultural and linguistic characteristics and educational needs of ELs. The authors describe the process through which faculty designed and implemented the project, share resources for project replication, and discuss faculty and student responses.

Although direct engagement with neighborhood espacios deepens student understanding, less is known about the benefits of this approach to bilingual teacher preparation programs. Our article addresses this gap by highlighting community walks, or caminatas, as a pedagogical approach with futurxs maestrxs bilingües (FMBs). Specifically, we propose an espacio emergente in the preparation of FMBs, and we examine how two Latinx professors used caminatas through a historically Latinx community in a rapidly gentrifying area to support the development of students' critical consciousness. Our findings indicate that the caminatas allowed students to historicize the local neighborhood, interrogate power and their own deficit conceptions of minoritized communities, critically listen to the sounds and voices of the community, and experience discomfort in nuanced ways. We argue that caminatas deepen FMBs' understanding of community assets and are an innovative way to support the fourth goal of preparing FMBs: developing critical consciousness.