30 Years of Health Leads

Health Leads started with a simple, radical premise: that a doctor’s prescription for food is just as legitimate as a prescription for medication. In 1996, Rebecca Onie launched Project HEALTH at Boston Medical Center, stationing college student volunteers at hospital “help desks” to connect patients and families with the resources that actually shape health.

The model showed promise — and also revealed where more testing, evidence and refinement were needed. In 2010, Project HEALTH became Health Leads, launching the Advocate Bootcamp and Health Leads Reach™, one of the earliest social needs software platforms. Over this era, we trained more than 10,000 advocates in health systems and clinics across the country.

With the model proven, Health Leads set out to make the business case – demonstrating improved patient outcomes and measurable cost savings for health systems. In 2014, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation committed $16 million, their largest single-organization grant at the time, to advance Health Leads’ vision. The field was beginning to catch up.

By the end of this phase, more than 4,000 volunteer alumni were spread across the U.S., with 76% of them working in healthcare and 54% working in under-resourced communities. The team fielded over 1,000 requests from 65% of the top-ranked hospitals in the U.S.

Health Leads set out to make addressing social needs a standard part of healthcare, accelerating partnerships with health system leaders to drive integration of essential resource strategies at scale. This phase is defined by spreading tools, data and knowledge across the field, and co-creating resources like the Essential Social Needs Roadmap.

When CMS introduced the first government-funded, clinic-based social needs interventions in 2016, it validated what Health Leads had been building toward for two decades. But even as the field grew, Health Leads was learning something harder: operating programs wasn’t the same as changing systems.

Under the leadership of current CEO Alexandra Quinn, Health Leads made a deliberate choice to evolve, sunsetting its Advocate workforce program and Health Leads Reach™ technology. The new direction: support communities in designing their own locally-owned resource networks, rather than running programs from the outside. Equity moved from implicit to explicit, formally centered in Health Leads’ vision, mission, and values.

Our work expanded beyond screening and resource navigation in healthcare settings to focus on strengthening the community organizations, trusted workforces, and local systems that address the root causes of poor health. Across primary care, maternal health, housing, and technology, new tests of change grew from long-standing partnerships — all centered on shifting decision-making power to communities.

When the pandemic hit, everything Health Leads had learned about community trust, resource gaps, and systemic inequity became urgently, visibly true. With a strategic framework centered on racial health equity and community-led innovation, Health Leads launched the Vaccine Equity Cooperative to ensure community-based workforces had what they needed to not only address immediate health challenges, but the deeper and more complex systemic barriers to health.

After the pandemic, Health Leads began investing more deeply in community-driven innovation — supporting caregivers, community-based organizations, and local leaders to define the problems that matter most, test new ideas, and shape the systems and tools meant to serve them. 

Building on three decades of learning, Health Leads is entering a new chapter and deepening its work alongside caregivers, community leaders, trusted local workforces, and partners across health, public health, policy, and technology — advancing solutions designed by and for the people most impacted by health inequities.