From Community Innovations 2020, February 13, 2020
Building Health Partnerships
Build Healthy Places Network (Network), with funding from The Kresge Foundation, has launched Community Innovations to deepen outreach to and learning from local community development organizations that serve low-income communities and people of color. Community Innovations has a three-pronged goal: to enhance the Network’s understanding of how best to support local organizations’ cross-sector efforts; to connect local organizations to other peer organizations and the larger national dialogue, resources, and tools; and to embed capacity within organizations to undertake health strategies and engage with healthcare.
Background and Overview
The roots of poor health and poverty are the same. For decades, healthcare and community development have been working in the same places, sometimes with the same people, and often not together. Since 2014, the Network has been connecting sectors through convening, translating, training, and highlighting common aims. Through our work, we have found many organizations in each sector ready to engage with the other. Those organizations with the greatest amount of capacity and support have been most able to access the resources and network needed to accelerate that collaboration. Meanwhile, many smaller and lower-resourced community development corporations have not been included in the national dialogue, resulting in less access to the tools and networks that can facilitate developing a cross-sector strategy or capacity to engage healthcare in their neighborhood investment efforts.
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