Research and Development
Now Live: Our R&D Living Archive
We design for an equitable world with an anti-racist approach to innovation. For the first time, we’re sharing our portfolio of projects and innovation processes as they emerge in real-time to inspire others to invest and/or partner locally in the design and testing of new solutions that ensure health, dignity and well-being.
The Challenge
Advancing racial health equity requires us to slow down, listen and work together with those most impacted by oppression. We work in partnership with organizations invested in their communities. Through this process, our prototypes reveal fresh insights and approaches. Together, our work remains forward-looking and focused on community-driven change.
Billions of dollars
Critical barriers
include low community engagement and little to no design by community members.
Tools developed
by people with lived experience have a greater likelihood of creating meaningful change.
Our Approach
We use an innovation pipeline process to record our learnings and amplify best practices. From that we develop promising concepts. Then we take these concepts and build them into local prototypes with our community partners.
Our Projects
Investing in Community Innovators
We developed the inaugural “Makers Residency,” an incubator to fund and guide community leaders as they develop innovative solutions to inequities faced in their own communities.
Integrating Community Promoters Into Hospital Care Teams
We developed a new system of measurement to support the work of promotoras (Spanish-speaking community health members). With a more effective mechanism to assess institutional readiness, promotoras can better support the neighborhoods they serve.
Designing New Ways to Assess Food Security
We are designing a new measure for food security that more accurately captures the creative and unseen ways communities feed themselves.
Empowering Caregivers to Shape Their Own Future
We designed, tested and now manage a digital ethnographic tool called Sensemaker. This innovative avenue to uplift caregiver voices will help us gain unique and vital insight about the caregiver experience.
Expanding Scope of Coverage for Medicaid Patients
We are analyzing data from a countywide Community Information Exchange to better understand what influences social determinants of health hardships among community members.
For more information about research & development
Sheena Nahm McKinlay
Vice President of Research & Development
For partnership and investment opportunities
Eileen Lin
Director of Philanthropic & Business Partnerships
Our Work
We are driving meaningful change to achieve racial health equity. Learn more about our work.