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Investing in Community Health

We will only achieve health equity when the drivers of health—quality affordable housing, equitable economic opportunities, climate-resilience infrastructure, and more—are available in all communities. Health institutions can harness assets such as financial resources, land, expertise, and relationships to strengthen community investment partnerships to create these conditions. This page provides the information that health sector institutions and their potential partners can use to develop impactful strategies.

FOCUS AREAS

Community Health

Case Studies

Six teams from health institutions around the country participated in Accelerating Investments for Healthy Communities from 2018-2021. Their ongoing projects to support community health through impact investment have paid dividends–the results are continuing to compound. See what they accomplished and how:

Partnering on Community-Based Shared Priorities

A city’s neighborhoods have their own unique goals and needs. Nationwide Children collaborated with residents of different Columbus neighborhoods to identify their shared priorities, then worked with like-minded partners to achieve them.

Collaborating on a Preservation Pipeline

Preserving existing affordable housing is critical to keeping communities affordable over the long term. In Pittsburgh, UPMC For You and its community, development, and government partners created a pipeline of preservation projects and new funding options to support them.

Catalyzing the Enabling Environment to Prevent Displacement

Development projects that threaten displacement can become opportunities to maintain and even increase homes and jobs. In response to the construction of the Metro Purple Line in Prince George’s County, the Purple Line Corridor Coalition went into action, using policy to catalyze funding for community needs.

Toolkits

Whether you are a health sector institution looking to lead this work or a community developer or leader looking for health sector investment, the toolkits below will help you map out your journey to achieve your community’s goals. Utilize these toolkits to engage with the local community and like-minded partners, build systems-level strategies, and work across departments of your institution in new ways.

A toolkit for hospitals

Investing in Community Health

This toolkit is designed to help health care organizations look at their resources in a different light, expand their efforts to support their communities, and maximize their impact on community health by harnessing the power of their investment capital.

Building a Health Sector Investment Partnership

From Silos to Collaborations

This toolkit presents presents frameworks and tools for leaders who seek to build sustainable, deep partnerships with health partners to address systemic inequities in disinvested communities. These tools are the lessons learned from the Health Partner Investment Learning Lab, a collaboration between the Center for Community Investment and NeighborWorks® America, which was designed to help community development organizations partner with health institutions on upstream investments in affordable housing.

Mobilizing Health Institutions to Invest Upstream

Listen to Kaiser Permanente’s vice president of strategy for Community Health, John Vu, talk through how community investment can take the mission of your health system beyond the walls of hospitals and unlock the human potential of your organization to address local needs. Kaiser Permanente was a participant in CCI’s Accelerating Investments for Healthy Communities initative.