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After announcing our new purpose and strategies earlier this year, we are excited to share the “how” of our new plan to advance health equity in our communities.
Because this language can be confusing, we want to define what we mean. Each of our purpose areas — People, Power, and Place — have strategies and initiatives that map out a course toward health equity.
How we define strategies
Our strategies are long-term actions to change our systems in pursuit of health equity.
How we define initiatives
Our initiatives are the individual projects, action steps, and collaborations that make up our long-term strategies. We’re excited to share these with you below.
Update on funding opportunities
While this announcement provides more information about our future work, we want to be clear that specific details about accessing our 2023 funding will not be available until later this fall.
We are committed to implementing this work, but successful change will depend not only on Health Forward, but all of our partners. Aiming for health equity, after all, is an ambitious goal which no single institution, organization, or government can achieve alone.
We look forward to doing this work, together.
People Initiatives: Equitable systems support community health.
Our approach to fostering healthy people is to center equity in all aspects of our community health ecosystem and to support innovative ideas that make it more inclusive. We focus on supporting whole-person care — the physical, behavioral, oral health, and social services required to achieve better health outcomes for all. We advocate for policies that improve health. And we ensure the people entering the health care workforce look like, and understand the culture of, the people they are serving.
Power Initiatives: Powerful communities are healthy communities.
Our approach to redistributing and sharing power with the people we serve is to advance participation in democracy, amplify community-driven movements, and strengthen small, community-based organizations and leaders.
Place Initiatives: The places we live impact how healthy we are.
Our approach to improving where we live focuses on two influential social factors: housing and digital access. This means we are focusing our work on improving access to safe, healthy, and affordable housing and homeownership. We’re also working to ensure everyone has the access and knowledge required to use digital tools.
