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Download the playbook, Partnerships for Health Equity and Opportunity: A Healthcare Playbook for Community Developers.
Download the Four-Step Path to Community Development-Healthcare PartnershipTM, a part of the playbook to help you assess existing partnerships or create a roadmap to new collaboration.
Watch our latest Network Commons discussion about this resource and other community development-healthcare partnerships happening in the field here.
In the United States, we spend nearly $3.5 trillion on medical care each year, with more than 80 percent spent on treating chronic disease — most of which is avoidable and concentrated among those living in low-income communities. Thus, over $1 trillion is spent every year on treating avoidable disease created by conditions of poverty, which can negatively affect the health of future generations.
What if we changed the paradigm from treating to preventing and reinvested that $1 trillion towards eliminating the intergenerational transmission of poor health and poverty? What would it take for prevention to encompass not just diet and exercise, but other dimensions like financial health, stable housing, access to healthy food, education, even community empowerment and agency?
We created this resource, Partnerships for Health Equity and Opportunity: A Healthcare Playbook for Community Developers, because we know that community development can be part of the answer. As stewards for the communities they serve, the community development sector develops and finances the physical spaces, infrastructure, and essential services needed to live a healthy and productive life and can serve as an action arm for advancing population health and health equity.
While community development and health professionals have traditionally worked in relative isolation, they have come to share common ground. Both are increasingly recognizing that partnerships and collaboration can mean more comprehensive impacts on community health. However, the full range of resources and expertise that each sector brings, and what the opportunities and pathways to partnership include, may not be fully understood, especially since collaboration is still relatively new.
This playbook builds on the work of the many practical tools that exist to advance cross-sector healthy communities efforts. For community development corporations (CDCs), community development financial institutions (CDFIs), affordable housing developers, and other community development organizations, this action-oriented resource offers guidance to approaching healthcare systems and exploring untapped healthcare partnership opportunities that deepen the impact of community development efforts. For hospitals, health caresystems, public health, foundations, and others, this resource outlines the community development sector’s potential role in addressing the social determinants and improving population health, and provides a tool to start the internal conversation with leadership about potential cross-sector collaboration.
Use this playbook to help you:
By joining forces to address the full range of dimensions of health, the community development and health sectors can achieve an unprecedented scale of prevention and advance good health, well-being, and opportunity for all. Let’s change the paradigm together!
For more information or to find out how the Network can help you use this resource, please contact our team.