Building Healthy Communities (BHC) has been the signature initiative of The California Endowment (TCE) for the past 10 years. It has combined continuous investment in leadership and organizing capacity-building and advocacy campaigns in 14 historically disinvested communities, with related state-level and regional policy campaigns and coalition building. BHC has remained far from static in its emphasis and goals, evolving over time in response to the community priorities and successes of the initiative. As the University of Southern California’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (now the USC Equity Research Institute) has noted, “what had been considered a means to change has become the change that BHC seeks to achieve, marking what we call a ‘pivot to power.’”1 Thus, “power-building”2 became a core BHC function and outcome—focused on addressing critical equity issues in the 14 communities and across the state.
TCE is transitioning to a new phase of long-term funding to further evolve and extend the impact of successful strategies emerging from BHC. As it does so, it is expecting the power-building momentum achieved to be sustained. For this expectation to be met, it is important to develop a deeper understanding of what is in place and what is needed to continue advancing power-building in each of the BHC communities. To that end, beginning in the fall of 2018, a team from the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), led by Shiree Teng and Audrey Jordan, began exploring the following questions:
• What has been learned about sustaining and evolving power-building in BHC sites?
• What are local priorities for continued resident and youth power-building?
• What are the capacities in place and needed for continued momentum?
• What are TCE’s roles in helping sites to sustain and/or evolve their work?
• What are the implications of the lessons for continued sustainability and evolution of power-building? (author abstract)
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