2021 Accomplishments
As we begin a new year, we have been reflecting and looking forward. 2021 was another challenging year for all of us. Yet, we leaned into each other, our community and organizational partners, and our commitment to bridging health equity and racial justice. And in doing so, we were able to accomplish so much.
At the beginning of 2021, we shared our priorities for the year: building capacity for policy advocacy; insisting on and helping to shape an equitable recovery from multiple affronts to public health including the COVID-19 pandemic, the devastating economic crisis, a barrage of racism, and an attack on our democracy, among others; and broadening the boundaries of and strengthening the country’s public health and prevention infrastructure. As we reflect on 2021, we are proud to share accomplishments that cut across these priorities, including:
- Elevating community voice: Many of our projects have been grounded in opportunities to amplify resident, youth, and community voices to lead the changes they desire for their neighborhoods. Bringing people together across a community to learn about issues, share perspectives, and act together is core to changing systems for more equitable outcomes.
- Embedding equity to advance health, safety, and wellbeing: Our 2021 work focused explicitly on advancing health equity and racial justice, both internally and externally. Internally, we continued to build staff capacity, developed our racial justice roadmap with staff input, and engaged our board in discussions about bridging health equity and racial justice. Externally, we have offered strategies to two central questions: 1) How do we bake equity into processes and systems from the very beginning? and 2) How do we meaningfully embed equity into existing systems and processes?
- Championing structures and systems in support of thriving, equitable communities: We focused on the infrastructure and ecosystems that expand the boundaries of traditional public health professionals, honor lived experience as expertise, and engage community leaders while also encouraging more public health professionals to prioritize sharing power, presenting alongside community leaders and practitioners. We did all of this with an eye to equitable recovery and the systems and structures that will support equitable health outcomes moving forward.
- Supporting equity, safety, and accountability in the implementation of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA): Our efforts drew attention to ARPA’s stated equity provisions and the resulting opportunities to advance the equitable recovery priorities of BIPOC communities and grassroots CBOs. We developed guidelines for the inclusion of equity and racial justice in public funding programs, and highlighted how locales have been leveraging their ARPA resources to invest in equity through community safety. We consulted with local health departments to support the effective launch of their ARPA funds through an equity-driven system of recovery and response. We also partnered with fellow advocacy organizations to call for greater transparency from the Department of the Treasury in the public availability of state and local recovery reports to ensure local decision-making processes are open and accessible to input from those most impacted by COVID-19. These cross-cutting accomplishments are possible because of the support of all our funders, and especially those who have invested in our capacity over many years through core operating support. In this Adobe Spark, we are proud to share more specific accomplishments in advancing equitable health, safety, and wellbeing, and a preview of what we have planned for 2022. As in the past few years, we have organized them by the interrelated strategies in our Strategic Framework:
- Shape new prevention and health equity solutions and catalyze INNOVATION (inspired by and in partnership with community)
- Build the PRACTICE of effective prevention
- Advance POLICY AND SYSTEMS change in support of health, safety, and wellbeing
- Generate MOMENTUM for comprehensive prevention and health equity
As a public health organization, we know that it matters that we step up in partnership with community members and racial justice advocates who are collectively pursuing transformative solutions designed for equity and justice. And we are so grateful to our many partners—including community members, community-based organizations, government agencies, foundations, and public health and health equity and racial justice organizations—without whom these accomplishments would not have been possible.
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Shaped new prevention and health equity solutions and catalyzed INNOVATION
Called for investments in funding and resources for CBOs to strengthen their role as vital partners to government as we continue to respond and recover from COVID-19
In partnership with ChangeLab Solutions and the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, and with contributions from 21 California community-based organizations (CBOs), we released the policy report How California’s Community-Based Organizations Filled the Gaps for Underserved Communities: Meeting the Needs of Racially & Ethnically Diverse Communities During the Pandemic. Informed by interviews with CBOs about how they pivoted to deliver crucial supports to communities, this report recommends changes in policies and practices that can help governments partner with community organizations that are rooted in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other racially and ethnically diverse communities to better meet residents’ needs. We also co-published a related blogpost in the Bill of Health at the Harvard Law School: "How Community Organizations and Health Departments Can Partner to Advance Health Justice."
This work was supported by the Blue Shield of California Foundation and The California Wellness Foundation.
Proposed a new approach to addressing park and green space inequities and launched a groundbreaking national initiative
In partnership with Dr. Alessandro Rigolon of the University of Utah, we authored Changing the Landscape: People, Parks, and Power. It includes lessons learned from other public health movements that can benefit the park equity movement as well as examples of promising green space equity policies. In the paper, we prioritize power building among people closest to park and green space inequities so that community residents drive policy and systems change solutions.
In follow-up, we launched People, Parks, and Power (P3), a joint effort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, led and managed by Prevention Institute. P3 represents a twelve-million-dollar investment in support of community-based organizations and base-building groups working in urban, low-income communities of color across the United States to increase park equity through local policy and systems change. We look forward to sharing more as this work moves into implementation.
Changing the Landscape was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).
Photo by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Piloted a model to prevent domestic violence and promote safe relationships
In partnership with four local collaboratives, we completed piloting a model of building the capacity of culturally-rooted, community-driven, multisector collaboratives to implement strategies that promote health equity, racial justice, and safe relationships, and prevent domestic violence (DV). This model, Safety Through Connection, will evolve in 2022 to sustain and accelerate this work in five communities that face systemic racial, gender, and economic inequities, and that have a concentration of risk factors for DV. We will support a community of practice that will engage in state-level partnership and advocacy to increase the responsiveness of state systems to community priorities for safe relationships, DV prevention, and health equity.
This work is supported by the Blue Shield of California Foundation.
Photo by CBDIO Fresno.
Published a book called Healing Neighborhoods which lays out a new framework for exploring equity in public investments
Our Deputy Executive Director published Healing Neighborhoods. In this book, Manal J. Aboelata encourages us to reimagine the role of public investments as financial tools to create the foundations for healthy neighborhoods, especially for residents who bear the brunt of unhealthy community conditions. Grounded in her personal account as a Stanton Fellow of the Durfee Foundation, Manal names systemic barriers to equitable investment, identifies six levers for tackling inequities in public investments, and puts forth a novel framework: the Nine I’s for Exploring Equity in Public Investments as a screening tool for advocates and practitioners to identify opportunities to proactively strengthen the health equity and racial justice impacts of public investments. If you are interested in learning more, you can purchase a copy from the publisher here: Healing Neighborhoods.
Manal’s Stanton Fellowship was supported by the Durfee Foundation.
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Built the PRACTICE of effective prevention
Guided collaboratives that are changing opportunities for children and youth of color to have strong mental wellbeing
In partnership with ten community collaboratives, the Hogg Foundation, and an evaluation team, we facilitate the Communities of Care initiative. In 2021, this initiative exemplified communal support in navigating challenges and loss experienced across many communities of color. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly in 2021, organizations and community leaders had to find new ways to engage, plan, dream, and share information and power in hybrid virtual settings. The strategies and tools that emerged offer new ways of thinking about connection and reaching those who are often isolated from family and community as well as agency and power.
This work is supported by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health.
Photo by Healthy Outdoor Communities and Nature & Eclectic Outdoors. (This photo was taken prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Centered racial justice in a public health approach to preventing violence
In partnership with the Big Cities Health Coalition, we released Community Safety Realized. This framework makes the unique case that we need to center racial justice in the public health approach to preventing violence to create healing and change. We are excited to see locales using this framework to guide action as they develop infrastructure to support safety. To inform infrastructure development, we also completed a statewide analysis of offices of violence prevention and developed recommendations for this structure moving forward in California.
We also facilitated a learning series for local health jurisdictions and their community and government partners on applying racial justice principles and practices to build community safety. This series, "Community Safety through Racial Justice," is built on the momentum of local health jurisdictions and cities/counties declaring a commitment to address racism as a public health crisis. To round out the series, we shared best practices for developing racial justice and violence prevention workplans that can be adapted for future use.
The Community Safety Realized framework was supported by the Big Cities Health Coalition and the de Beaumont Foundation. The California analysis of offices of violence prevention was supported by The California Wellness Foundation. The Community Safety through Racial Justice learning series was supported by the Langeloth Foundation and the CARESTAR Foundation.
Developed an online toolkit to prevent suicide and trauma during catastrophic events
In partnership with the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), we developed a new online toolkit that shares strategies for preventing suicide and trauma during catastrophic events including the COVID-19 pandemic, adverse weather events, or other disasters. The toolkit includes online learning modules, suicide prevention planning interviews with agency leaders, and a new social media video about Building Healing Communities. We also led peer learning forums on trauma-informed systems and prioritizing equity and community wellbeing in the wake of catastrophic events in partnership with the National League of Cities and Dr. Howard Pinderhughes at UCSF. Finally, we worked with CLASP and RTI International to update the CDC’s Technical Package for Suicide Prevention for use during periods of infrastructure disruption. Together, these efforts demonstrated the importance of broadening the audience that is ready to take a role in preventing suicide and trauma, and the growing demand for culturally relevant approaches to prevent suicide.
This work is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Cooperative Agreement No. 6 NU38OT000305-02-03. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Department of Health and Human Services, or the CDC.
Photo by Broomfield Youth for Youth.
Strengthened policy-advocacy capacity to ensure the built environment supports early childhood development
On behalf of First 5 LA, we co-designed the Built Environment Policy Advocacy Fund (BEPAF), a grant program to develop the policy-advocacy capacity of resident leaders and organizations in Los Angeles to promote built environment policies that support healthy childhood development. Through training, peer learning, and technical assistance, LA community members gained skills to advocate for parks and open space, active transportation, public transit, and food security in the county’s most under-resourced communities within the changing context of the global pandemic.
This work was supported by First 5 LA.
Photo by the Office of Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis. (This photo was taken prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Released a ‘Backpack’ that curates community-led strategies for creating social connection
The Making Connections Backpack is a comprehensive guide to creating gender- and culture-relevant community-level approaches to improving mental health and wellbeing. It’s filled with strategies and lessons learned from five years of the Making Connections initiative. The COVID-19 pandemic eroded the “pillars of wellbeing”—factors that our partner communities have identified as foundational for community mental health and wellbeing: belonging / connectedness, safety, trust, dignity, hope / aspiration, and control of destiny / self-determination. Although the Backpack was not specifically developed for the context of the pandemic, its content and the journey of the coalitions that carried out this work in diverse communities throughout the country can inform efforts to address intensified social isolation.
This work was supported by Movember.
Photo by fortherock / CC BY-SA 2.0.
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Advanced POLICY AND SYSTEMS CHANGE in support of health, safety, and wellbeing
Informed the direction of a new administration
Leveraging the opportunities presented by the Biden-Harris administration, our federal policy priorities and advocacy actions sought to build and strengthen bridges across public health, racial justice, and health equity—publicly and behind the scenes. Across our efforts, we emphasized ways to amplify equity narratives, highlight on-the-ground practice implications, and elevate community leadership and power. For example, we met with administration officials and federal agency representatives to highlight the elements of a public health approach to community safety centered in racial justice. We leveraged our platforms and influence to connect federal officials to community leaders and organizations championing community safety. We also joined in efforts led by immigrant rights and children’s advocacy colleagues to advance legislative action on immigration as a public health issue from endorsing the LIFT the Bar Act to calling for the inclusion of a pathway to citizenship through Build Back Better legislation.
NOTE: Prevention Institute relies only on unrestricted funds to support our limited grassroots and direct lobbying efforts.
Photo by Steffan Limmen on Instagram.
Supported philanthropic partnerships in embedding racial justice and health equity into their practices
In our role as long-term strategic advisors for the Convergence Partnership, we launched the Convergence Partnership Podcast Series in partnership with PolicyLink and Working Narratives. The Podcast Series stands out as an innovative philanthropic approach to disrupt conventional grantmaking norms by replacing written grant reports with a non-extractive and mutually beneficial process. Each episode centers the leadership of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color communities in developing solutions towards a just recovery from the pandemic, advancing housing justice, strengthening democracy and civic participation, and securing safe housing for LGBTQ and gender non-conforming people.
We also facilitated the California Funder's Workgroup on Prevention and Equity comprised of Blue Shield of California Foundation, The California Endowment, The California Wellness Foundation, St. Joseph Community Partnership Fund, and Wellbeing Trust. In 2021, the funders' collaborative advised the California Surgeon General on opportunities to accelerate progress on community-based strategies to protect children from adverse experiences and foster supportive environments that help children and families to be more resilient in response to adverse childhood experiences and heal from trauma that has occurred. Their advice built on work we partnered on in 2020, Beyond Screening: Achieving California's Bold Goal of Reducing Exposure to Childhood Trauma. In the latter part of the year, the Funder’s Workgroup intensified its focus on budget accountability, identifying opportunities to advance health equity and racial justice in the context of California’s budget surplus and ARPA allocations to the State.
Our Convergence Partnership work was supported by PolicyLink as the program director and fiscal sponsor for the Convergence Partnership. Our coordination of the California Workgroup on Prevention and Equity is funded by The California Endowment and Blue Shield of California Foundation.
Partnered with seven communities to significantly advance local and statewide policy
In partnership with the St. Joseph Community Partnership Fund, we have facilitated the Intersections Initiative since 2017. Guided by input from residents and key stakeholders, the community partnerships advanced health equity and racial justice, often by addressing intersecting determinants of health such as housing, education, economic and workforce development, immigration, community trauma, and civic engagement.
At its core, the Intersections Initiative was about building the capacity of community partners to work upstream for the long haul, with the formal implementation period ending in late 2021. In addition to building the capacity of backbone organizations and coalitions, engaging community residents in their own power, and planning for long-term sustainability, the partnerships made significant contributions to advancing local and statewide policy including:
- Securing ARPA dollars to be allocated to community-level health priorities by submitting letters, op-eds, and having direct conversations with county supervisors;
- Helping to guide equitable distribution of vaccines in high-need communities;
- Developing a community-centered policy platform to address disproportionate COVID-19 impacts on students of color;
- Submitting collective support letters for housing policy priorities, especially eviction moratoriums; and
- Advocating for state resources for workforce development at the local level.
This work was supported by the St. Joseph Community Partnership Fund.
Served as the co-lead for the Mental Health title of the Health Equity and Accountability Act
We partnered with the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) as co-leads on the Mental Health title—Title VI—of the Health Equity and Accountability Act (HEAA). Together we proposed additions and revisions that emphasize legislative opportunities to improve mental health and wellbeing across communities of color by addressing the disproportionate impacts of ongoing trauma and structural racism, including impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic and adverse climate events. HEAA will be re-introduced by the Congressional Tri-Caucus in the Spring of 2022.
NOTE: Prevention Institute relies only on unrestricted funds to support our limited grassroots and direct lobbying efforts.
Photo by Sarah Mittermaier.
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Generated MOMENTUM for comprehensive prevention and health equity
Asserted the importance of healing, justice, and connection for mental health through a national conference
At a time when we were all navigating increasing challenges to our mental wellbeing, we partnered with the Hogg Foundation to bring people together from around the country to learn from community-driven approaches in support of children and youth of color through Young Minds Matter. This conference was an opportunity to virtually connect through arts, community-building, and dialogues on healing to strengthen and improve the mental health and wellbeing of children, youth, and families. As the event coordinator, we presented a theme and invited community collaboratives, residents, and organizations to submit presentations that were important to them and that reflected what they wanted to say about children, youth, and community mental health. The event opened opportunities for expression and sharing power that emphasized the importance of tapping into the richness of community expertise and experience.
This work was supported by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health.
Partnered to create a framework for investing health system bond funds
Beginning in the Fall of 2021, we joined Everyday Impact Consulting and Health Innovations Group as part of the consultant team retained by The California Endowment (TCE) to co-design a process for eliciting stakeholder and subject matter expertise to create a framework for investing health system bond funds. The process included an Advisory Committee, three Technical Advisory Committees (Health & Wellness, Health Workforce and Health4All), five community discussion circle cohorts, two roundtables, and input from TCE’s Health Board Pod. Through these structured efforts, more than 100 individuals provided input, which was synthesized into the final framework. Early in 2022, TCE will receive recommendations for its health system bond priority investments.
This work was supported by The California Endowment through a contract to Everyday Impact Consulting.
Strengthened support for equitable investments to advance a just recovery in California
A significant focus of our California-wide work in 2021 centered on moving public systems to increase investments in historically disinvested communities. With the influx of $43 billion in flexible state and local recovery funds via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and a historic State surplus, we developed the briefing paper Investing in Equity: Designing Public Funding Programs for a Just Recovery in California (in press), to identify strategies that local and state governments can take to “bake” equity into every stage of a public funding program—from design to implementation to oversight and evaluation. Along with representatives from The Raben Group, The California Budget & Policy Center, and Advancement Project CA, we participated in a webinar titled Leveraging the American Rescue Plan for Equity in California, where we outlined how ARPA could be used to resource BIPOC communities and grassroots CBOs to address longstanding inequities across key determinants of health, including access to affordable housing, parks and open space, and clean air. We also joined racial justice, housing, public health, and labor coalitions and co-led ENACT Statewide Advocacy Day to secure state-level tenant protections, invest in paid sick leave, establish new funding to pilot equity-focused solutions to community safety, and leverage more than $50 million in new cannabis tax funds to support local youth leadership for prevention and equity.
A portion of this work was supported by The California Endowment, The California Wellness Foundation, and the Blue Shield Foundation of California. NOTE: Prevention Institute relies only on unrestricted funds to support our limited grassroots and direct lobbying efforts.
Featured amazing leaders and communities through multimedia formats
Prevention Institute’s Moving Upstream podcast team produced several podcasts early in 2021, including Community safety through investing in youth: Harris County youth justice community reinvestment fund, #WhyWeCantWait: A New Deal for Youth, and Policy priorities for the Biden/Harris Administration. We also added new videos such as Building Socially Connected Communities, Building Healing Communities. Through podcasts and videos, we were excited to lift up the voices and perspectives of communities and community leaders.
This work is supported by funders across all of our program areas and specifically include the Langeloth Foundation, Affirm Cares, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (under Cooperative Agreement No. 6 NU38OT000305-02-03; contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Department of Health and Human Services, or the CDC.).
Moving into 2022
Inspired by our successes and steppingstones from 2021 and previous years, our 2022 priorities are:
- Systematizing prevention for racial justice and health equity across systems and sectors;
- Building bridges between health equity and racial justice; and
- Strengthening our organizational capacity for impact.
1) Systematizing prevention for racial justice and health equity across systems and sectors: Building on The California Endowment’s foundational investment in our System of Prevention framework, we will continue to champion systems, policies, and narratives that support an equitable recovery and equitable health, safety, and wellbeing in the long-term. For example, with support from The California Endowment and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, we will advance a System of Prevention for Racial Justice and Health Equity in 2022. As part of this, we will launch our explorations of resistance as essential to systematizing prevention for racial justice and health equity. Centered around a visual timeline, this analysis explores how historic and present-day resistance movements counter-balance oppressive policies, practices, and norms to slow down / block the production of inequities and create new trajectories and opportunities for health and justice. We are also pleased to partner with the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) on a multi-year initiative entitled Advancing Racial Justice for Health: Operationalizing Racism as a Public Health Crisis, supported by a planning grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And we are grateful to the Skoll Foundation for supporting another collaborative effort with BCHC, this time to advance equity in public health infrastructure.
As we look at systems change to support equitable and just health outcomes, we will apply the analysis across our topical work and engage key sectors along the way. For example:
- In our park equity and land use work, we will launch a learning circle with park, recreation, and conservation leaders; complete an equity analysis for Washington State’s Recreation and Conservation Office; and in partnership with Equitable Cities and CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity (DNPAO), build the capacity of local government and other public sector agencies to implement equitable transportation policies and investments.
- In our safety portfolio, we are partnering with the Annie E. Casey Foundation to identify best practices and opportunities for lifting up community-centered, racial justice-oriented narratives around community safety.
- In our wellbeing portfolio, we will work in partnership with the California Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission to create common ground to advance county behavioral health support of community defined evidence practice and advance equity in mental health outcomes.
2) Building bridges between health equity and racial justice: We assert that people working to advance health equity and those working to achieve racial justice share common ground and bring unique and complimentary skillsets to realizing a more just and equitable society. In 2022, we aim to make significant strides by aligning practitioners across fields for greater impact. We plan to train practitioners using the Building Bridges curriculum, complete a Racial Justice Roadmap for local health jurisdictions, launch a national initiative comprised of 14 power-building organizations aimed at achieving park equity, and complete our Investing in Equity briefing paper as a tool for engagement, advocacy, and product development.
3) Strengthening our organizational capacity for impact: We turn 25 in 2022, and as we look to make an ever-greater impact in the world, we want to bolster our own capacity. We will focus on implementing our racial justice roadmap; update our strategic framework, Health Safety and Wellbeing for All 2018-2022, with more attention to measures and metrics; and we look forward to growing our staff capacity through hiring.