Strengthening Partnerships between Public Health and Community-Based Organizations

Community organizations and community members, through their deep-rooted partnerships with state and local health departments, health care organizations and other organizations, come together to address the unique needs of each community.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored a need for renewed emphasis on building strong relationships between public health and communities to systematically reduce health inequities. Therefore, the CDC Foundation is leading a project to develop inclusive, community-centered recommendations that will enable public-private, multi-sector collaborations and systems-level responses to ongoing and emerging public health challenges.

With support from the Kaiser Permanente National Community Benefit Fund at the East Bay Community Foundation and in partnership with Human Impact Partners, the CDC Foundation is developing a set of recommendations and roadmap for building and strengthening partnerships between public health agencies and community-based organizations (CBOs).

Read the Recommendations

The final recommendations aim to support public health agencies in:

• Cultivating relationships with CBOs to better prepare and respond to future public health emergencies and to pursue more equitable solutions in routine practice.
• More effectively promote community health objectives.
• Sharing power with CBOs to address historical disenfranchisement in decision making.

Co-Designing Recommendations

To be relevant and actionable, our final recommendations and roadmap for strengthening public-private collaborations must reflect the varied experiences of public health department and CBO partnerships from across the U.S. To do so, we engaged representatives from a diverse group of organizations in a range of activities, including:

• Public health department and CBO 1:1 interviews.
• Consensus-building convenings to define a set of recommendations and an initial roadmap for how to implement recommendations
• Insight sessions across the U.S. with public health departments and CBOs to refine the recommendations and roadmap.

Our Partners

Human Impact Partners

National Partners:

• American Public Health Association
• Association of State and Territorial Health Officials
• Big Cities Health Coalition
• National Community Action Partnerships
• National Association of Community Health Workers
• National Association of County and City Health Officials
• National Network of Public Health Institutes
• Shared Cause
• Social Current
• Urban Indian Health Institute
• WE in the World