What We Do

Healthcare – access to insurance, tests, doctors, and treatment – is only one of many systems that impact our health. Housing, environment, food, education, and other essential resources are just as critical. But these systems often exclude and oppress people of color, and fail to work together effectively to build health. By the time healthcare even has a chance to address the effects of these systems, it’s often too late to make meaningful change. As a result, health and well-being for people of color in the U.S. are defined by seemingly immutable forces like the wealth gap, disparate employment opportunities, limited and restricted housing access, mass incarceration, higher rates of maternal and infant mortality, and more.

For more than 20 years, we worked to connect communities to essential health resources like food, heat and housing. Today, we consult and innovate with community organizations – public health, local and state government bodies, local funders, local providers, health systems, and service providers – to repair and reshape the systems that dictate our health and well-being.

We work to:

• Build lasting partnerships and change power structures between health care, public health, community-based organizations and community members to enable community members to make decisions about the living conditions that impact their health.
• Expand, train and support community-based workforces who help provide food, housing, and other essential resources to families and communities that need it most.
• Design and implement shared, crisis-resilient community resource governance and data networks to offer a complete, real-time picture of essential resource availability and access.
• Fill knowledge gaps with promising practices from our innovations and others to spread adoption of racial health equity and influence long-standing policy changes.