Blog

Photo used with permission from The California Endowment This guest blog, written by Jennifer Ito, USC Equity Research Institute, offers reflections related to a recent CSSP Learning, Equity, and Power (LEaP) session, “A Foundation’s Path to Power Building and Health Equity: Lessons from The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative.” Learn more about LEaP here [...]

The Parent Leader Network (PLN) provides a space for parents in EC-LINC communities to collaborate with and support each other, represent the parent perspective, and advocate for parent voice and leadership in early childhood systems. Idalia Rios, a PLN Steering Committee member, is a community organizer in Santa Ana, California, and has been fighting alongside [...]

Photo used with permission from The California Endowment This guest blog, written by Shao-Chee Sim and Jennifer Mineo, Episcopal Health Foundation, offers participant reflections on a recent CSSP Learning, Equity, and Power (LEaP) session, " A Foundation’s Path to Power Building and Health Equity: Lessons from The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative.” Learn more [...]

Our growing understanding of the factors that ensure the heathy development of young children within strong families focuses both on the foundational relationships of Early Relational Health (ERH) and on the contexts and resources of families within the communities as articulated within the Community Resilience Public Health Model 3.0. These synergistic frameworks come together with [...]

Photo used with permission from The California Endowment This guest blog, written by Traci Broady, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, offers participant reflections on a recent CSSP Learning, Equity, and Power (LEaP) session, "How Funders Can Help Build Community Power: Lessons from The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative.” To learn more, watch a recording [...]

Under the banner “Learning, Equity, and Power” (LEaP), the Center for the Study of Policy (CSSP) hosted a series of conversations sharing insights from The California Endowment’s 10-year, 14 community Building Healthy Communities (BHC) initiative. This conversation about BHC was facilitated by Anand Sharma, CSSP Senior Associate, and featured Sandra Witt, Managing Director of Power [...]

“There's nothing like waking up and worrying if today they're going to turn a utility off or wondering how much time you have to come up with the money to prevent that from happening,” Patricia, a mother of four in Michigan told us. For her, economic security would mean “not having to beg and borrow [...]

It was a rainy Saturday along the Monterey Peninsula in October 2012, yet a line of adults, young people and small children snaked around the building and out to the parking lot. It was the Grand Opening of the Cesar Chavez Library, a $3.0-million project that renovated the existing library and expanded it with approximately [...]

“What do you actually need? How can I actually help?” These are the questions Nai Pharn, a Community Health Worker (CHW) at UCSF Benioff’s Children’s Hospital Oakland, found herself asking while meeting for the first time with an overwhelmed mother about renewing her CalFresh benefits. When the mother began getting teary-eyed, Pharn paused and asked [...]

For over 10 years, beginning in 2010, The California Endowment (TCE) invested $1.75 billion and partnered with 14 communities across California as well as many state-level organizations and alliances, on Building Healthy Communities (BHC), an innovative initiative to achieve more equitable health outcomes. During that period, BHC deployed communication and narrative change strategies more proactively [...]