Health Equity Partners™ is the division of Comprehensive Health Education Foundation that creates healthy opportunities for people most affected by health inequities through advocacy, education, grantmaking, and partnerships.
The forces that produce health inequities are so fundamental, wide reaching, and powerful that a multifaceted approach that transforms public policies and community norms is necessary to bring about change. Our key strategies are intertwined and together constitute a comprehensive approach that addresses policy, norm, and behavior change.
Our key strategies include:
Advocacy
In order to influence health policies and practices that touch those most affected by health inequities, our advocacy efforts focus on developing coalitions and constituencies to address health inequities, obesity, and the social determinants of health.
- We convene, train and network with health and learning advocates sharing research, best practices, and resources.
- We work with organizations to increase their understanding of public policy and their advocacy skills.
- We bring together constituencies to inform policy makers about the health impact of their funding and policy decisions on communities most affected by health inequities.
- We monitor federal and state legislation and regulations in order to educate our partners on key issues.
- We partner with community organizations to develop, implement, and evaluate culturally competent and linguistically appropriate health education programs.
- We provide a bridge between research and the needs of ethnically and racially diverse communities by drawing on empirical findings and best practices, reaching out to communities in their environment, and involving them in the development of our goals and plans, matching our services to their needs, and evaluating the efficacy of our interventions.
Our focus is on establishing public housing developments as model healthy communities where it is the norm for people to be physically active, eat healthy, know and connect with their neighbors, and advocate for change in the systems and policies that affect their community. We focus on public housing developments because they are geographically distinct neighborhoods with alarmingly high rates of obesity and related chronic health problems.
- We support and enhance efforts within public housing communities to make it easier for people deeply affected by health inequities to move more and eat healthier. Our grantmaking efforts function as an incubator for creative ideas that spring from communities themselves.
- We partner with successful grantees to seek funds to expand these creative solutions.
In short we bring together foundations, government, nonprofits, and coalitions to create a social movement to eliminate health inequities.