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.
Our Capabilities
We create value for our partners through our core capabilities, anchored in nearly 25 years of working at the intersection of healthcare and community.
Innovation
Develop, design and/or analyze programs and practices focused on essential resources
Power Sharing & Building
Build and facilitate formal and informal, local and national networks to further racial health equity across the U.S.
Learning & Improvement
Improve quality and learn from projects and initiatives across the U.S. to share both wins and failures
Curation & Convening
Develop, design and/or analyze programs and practices focused on essential resources
PARTNER & PROJECT SNAPSHOTS
Equity in COVID-19 Vaccinations Project
Read the co-created guiding principles, the foundation of a national strategy ensure communities of color and those most susceptible to COVID-19 have the opportunity to receive safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines when they become available.
Contra Costa County, CA Project
Hear from Contra Costa Health Services around their perspective and role in some of the most innovative county-wide collaborations to improve health equity.
Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative
See how this community organization builds effective collaboration structures, pushes forward policy changes, and address racial health inequities.
Learn how we fill knowledge gaps and deliver tools and resources to a national Network of more than 1,000 healthcare practitioners, community-based organizations and health equity champions working to remove barriers to essential resources in their communities.
Data Democratization Projects in Austin, TX, San Diego and Bay Area, CA
Learn how we are working to dismantling existing structures of power around essential resource data and returning control to the people that allow it to exist.
Collaborative to Advance Social Health Integration
Read the results of our 18-month national learning and improvement collaborative with 21 primary care practices, supported by the Commonwealth Fund.
Food Insecurity and Maternal & Child Health Project in New York City
See our case study on how we supported a community-based workforce to increase the number of women connected to Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) in New York City, and how that’s driving change in state-level policies.
Intentionally Integrating Equity Webinar Series
Watch the recordings of our multi-part series addressing the risks of conflating the “social determinants of health” with address inequities, featuring racial health equity leaders from across the country sharing proven best practices, tools, and frameworks.
LEARN MORE
We are always seeing values-aligned partners and collaborations. Reach out to learn more about our work and ways we can fight for health, well-being and dignity together.