Community Health Action Network

Background

Public health has often faced challenges to sustaining authentic, mutually beneficial and appropriately funded partnerships with CBOs. Public health and philanthropy are working to shift mindsets on how we do our work by building effective partnerships and relationships to support sustainable community transformation. With support from Kaiser Permanente’s Community Benefit Fund, CDC Foundation staff conducted a thorough landscape assessment, including a 50+ document review, in-depth interviews and insight sessions with more than 144 representatives from local and state health departments and CBOs and the engagement of 11 national associations and used these findings to develop a series of recommendations for health departments to strengthen partnerships with CBOs. CBOs and health departments identified the need for more time and meaningful engagement with each other, opportunities to learn about each other and a space for examining systems that may make health opportunities uneven for some communities.

Project Aim

With support from Genentech, a member of the Roche group, and the Kaiser Permanente East Bay Community Foundation, and in partnership with Dr. Nicole Alexander Scott and Facilitating Power, the CDC Foundation will develop a Community Health Action Network (CHAN), an applied learning hub to co-develop and test strategies with community leaders and partners from the public health and healthcare sectors to strengthen partnerships, build the long-term capacity and sustainability of CBOs and strengthen the capacity of health departments to meaningfully partner with CBOs.

 CDC Foundation will partner with the following CBO, public health department and healthcare partners, known as "triads," to assist in translating the recommendations into actionable steps:

South Carolina Triad

• Upper Midlands Rural Health Network
• South Carolina Department of Public Health
• Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Health – Lancaster Division  

The South Carolina triad will co-develop and align metrics for the health department and local hospital partners' community health needs assessment.

Hawaii Triad

• The Institute for Human Services, Inc.
• Hawai‘i State Department of Health
• The Queen’s Medical Center 

The Hawaii Triad will co-develop an app to strengthen data management and operability between the CBO, health department and hospital systems to improve case management for persons experiencing homelessness.

New York Triad

• Buffalo Center for Health Equity
• Erie County Health Department
• BestSelf Behavioral Health

The New York Triad will conduct a gap analysis to inform a collaborative model for addressing adolescent mental health and systemic educational factors contributing to health disparities.