Post From News
Share this post!
OAKLAND, Calif. and WASHINGTON—Today the Build Healthy Places Network (BHPN) and the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP) released Where Health Meets Place: A Guide to Community-Driven Health Plan and Community Development Collaboration, a resource showing health plans and community development organizations how to find each other, build trust, and invest in what communities say they need. It comes shortly after the enactment of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the first major bipartisan housing package to clear Congress since the 1990s.
The guide, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, helps health plans and community development organizations move beyond one-off projects toward lasting, community-centered partnerships that address the root causes of poor health—housing instability, economic insecurity, and limited access to services.
The report notes that social, economic, and environmental conditions drive up to 80 percent of health outcomes, even as the U.S. health sector spends more than $1 trillion annually treating related chronic diseases. It offers practical financing strategies, policy levers, and measurement tools to help sectors collaborate effectively and advance health equity in historically disinvested communities. One peer-reviewed analysis of a health plan cohort of high-needs patients whose health costs were nearly 20 times the plan average found care expenses dropped more than 45 percent after members moved into permanent supportive housing.
“Decades of disinvestment and redlining took capital from communities, but not their capacity,” said Colleen Flynn, Co-Executive Director of Build Healthy Places Network. “Communities have been organizing around their needs for generations. To meet those needs, neither a health plan nor a community developer is the answer alone. What works are partnerships that start from the premise that residents hold agency over what gets built and how. The partnerships in this guide were built by people who found each other, built trust, and got to work.”
Community development is one of the largest forces shaping American neighborhoods, and one of the least known outside its own field. It moves more than $200 billion a year into places that banks and markets have long passed over, financing affordable housing, health clinics, grocery stores, and job training. More than 6,000 community development corporations, many rooted in the Civil Rights movement, work alongside, roughly 1,400 community development financial institutions assemble the complicated financing these projects require.
At the same time, health plans have long recognized the outsized influence that the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Accordingly, they have increasingly worked to address health-related social needs through housing initiatives, employment programs, nutrition programs and more.
Where Health Meets Place bridges the gap between the two disciplines. It is organized around the Vital Conditions for Health and Well-Being framework from the Rippel Foundation, which marries the individual needs a plan sees in its member data with the community-level systems change work needed to create healthy, vital neighborhoods.
“Safety Net Health Plans and community development organizations share the goal of serving disinvested communities, and each of us holds something the other genuinely needs,” said Margaret A. Murray, CEO, ACAP. “This guide shows in practical terms how a health plan can leverage its balance sheet, its data, its convening power, and its name recognition with partners who know how to build.”
The guide’s case studies document case studies that work, including:
The ROAD to Housing Act creates ground on which the two sectors can build together, including three years of funding for disaster recovery block grants, expanded rental assistance, rural housing preservation, more room for private capital in affordable housing, and the Whole-Home Repairs pilot. But the law authorizes programs without appropriating money for them, and is silent—by design—on decisions about which projects move first, in which neighborhoods, and on whose terms. Those gaps are exactly where partnership does its work, and where this guide is designed to help. It walks partners through the tools that close funding shortfalls and keep community priorities in the driver’s seat: pooled funds, revolving loans, program-related investments, participatory decision-making, and the braided capital that carries a project from authorization to groundbreaking.
Download the report in full here.
About Build Healthy Places Network (BHPN): BHPN sits at the intersection of community development, finance, public health, and healthcare. Our vision is communities where health, opportunity, belonging, and well-being are accessible to all people. Our mission is to unite across sectors to advance community leadership and build the conditions for health, opportunity, and belonging. BHPN is a program of the Public Health Institute in Oakland, California. For more information, visit BuildHealthyPlaces.org.
About the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP): ACAP represents 92 health plans, which collectively provide health coverage to more than 30 million people. Safety Net Health Plans serve their members through Medicaid, Medicare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Marketplace and other publicly-sponsored health programs. For more information, visit communityplans.net.