The authors present an overview of the Kaiser Permanente Community Fund’s social determinants of health initiative and its theory of change. The fund is based at the Northwest Health Foundation. The authors introduce frameworks and methods used to conduct their evaluation. The fund reached multiple sectors and established new partners and relationships, but the lack of depth may limit opportunities to make a profound and measurable difference within any speci c domain.
This article examines one community’s effort to use a large-scale civic engagement process to improve the health, safety, and education of children. The findings from this study illustrate important lessons for foundations that are funding and leading cross-sector collaborative efforts – lessons related to the importance of communication and transparency, the need for shared leadership, the limits to voluntary collaboration, and the need for a sustainable structure to maintain the commitment and effort over time.
In 1993, Sierra Health Foundation set out to see if community building could make a difference in children’s health and well-being in Northern California. The overriding assumption was that community building is an effective approach for improving the health of young children. In CPHC community building meant mobilizing residents to use the community’s assets for the common good. This paper describes the process the sites undertook and the results that were achieved in the 31 communities that participated over the 10 years of the initiative.
On June 11, 2002, Sophia King, a 23-year-old African-American woman diagnosed with schizophrenia, was shot and killed by an Anglo police officer in Austin, Texas. This event inspired the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health to search for a role that philanthropy could play in improving community conditions and healing significant rifts. This paper describes how the Foundation collaborated with the community to enact systemic changes in the mental health and other systems.
Starting in the late 80s the Institute for Medicine began calling for involvement of health professionals in the development of policy affecting health. The Partnership for the Public’s Health was designed to build the capacity of local health departments and communities to work together to improve health through advocacy and policy change. Results included 1) the extent to which building the capacity of health departments and community groups to jointly advocate for policy change led to sustained work in health advocacy 2) policy-related legacies of the initiative.
