Align systems with community priorities

Communities, understand their needs and strengths best. Ensuring those communities have more say in which issues get addressed is the best way to build lasting, more equitable solutions to health disparities and domestic violence.

Currently, many public systems designed to help our society’s most vulnerable communities fail to meet their needs. To bridge this gap, these public systems need to be equipped to prioritize racial equity and work closely with the communities they serve.

We advocate for and support solutions such as community-led processes, strategic policy shift, narrative change, and collaborative efforts that bring multiple sectors together to prioritize health and well-being. By supporting stronger and more responsive relationships between communities and systems, we support greater resilience in both.

Meaningful change happens when public systems and communities are actively engaged in dialogue about the best ways to prevent health inequities and domestic violence.

Empowering communities to achieve health equity

Our work to align systems with community priorities involves working with grantee partners across the state both at the community level and systems level to better serve communities in achieving health equity.

“The chorus of voices calling out racial and economic inequality is growing louder and public systems are responding. Positive change has begun. And, if we support communities as they assert their priorities and needs, more will come."
—Richard Vezina, Senior Program Officer

Creating impact through systems change

View of a whiteboard, highlighting text that reads "Community Involved, NOT community informed"

Meaningful change is possible when community priorities are supported and enabled by systems. To achieve that, we support:

Community-led efforts to create more responsive, inclusive, and equitable health systems and domestic violence systems
Policy and practice change in systems to institutionalize racial and gender equity, and fulfill the priorities of communities
Multisector collaborations as a powerful vehicle for systems change
The development of data to better understand the root causes of health inequities and domestic violence across our state
Policy wins and resource allocations for community-led initiatives
Narrative projects that expand community power

Grantees

Grantee	Year	Grant Amount	Region
Community Partners	2023	$500,000	San Francisco Bay Area
Regents of the University of California at San Diego	2023	$240,000	South
California Common Cause	2023	$125,000	Statewide
Public Health Institute	2023	$275,000	National
Prevention Institute	2023	$160,000	Statewide
SBCS Corporation	2023	$150,000	South
Alliance for Community Transformations	2023	$150,000	Central
WEAVE Inc	2023	$150,000	Sacramento Valley
County of Contra Costa California	2023	$150,000	San Francisco Bay Area
Public Health Institute	2023	$150,000	North
City and County of San Francisco	2023	$150,000	San Francisco Bay Area
Vose River Charitable Fund	2022	$1,000,000	Statewide
Advancement Project California	2022	$800,000	Statewide
Sierra Health Foundation Center for Health Program Management	2022	$750,000	Central
Liberty Hill Foundation	2022	$500,000	Los Angeles
Sierra Health Foundation Center for Health Program Management	2022	$400,000	Statewide
Asian Resources Inc	2022	$300,000	Statewide
CivicPulse	2022	$300,000	Statewide
Tides Center	2022	$200,000	Statewide
Human Impact Partners	2022	$500,000	Statewide