Assisting Bridging for Health communities move from ideas to action to achieve meaningful and sustainable health improvement

The Foundation's initiative, Promoting Innovations in Bridging in States, Regions, and Communities, was designed to foster innovative approaches to bridging public health, health care, and other sectors in communities, regions, or states that can create sustainable system changes to collectively advance a Culture of Health.This grant provides incentive funding for the seven sites in the RWJF initiative, Bridging for Health: Improving Community Health Through Innovations in Financing (B4H). The funds will enable them to put in action their proposed financing innovations to support identified strategies for improving community health. The Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) is the national coordinating center for B4H and has provided training on stewardship, strategy, financing, multisector collaboration, and equity to the site coalitions and has helped them develop mind-sets to advance a Culture of Health. After two years of working with the coalitions, in the summer of 2017, GHPC identified a need to provide the sites with a more structured process to test, learn from, and move their ideas forward into action, as well as to develop an innovation mind-set for the long term. The funding under this grant will be available to the sites during the stress-testing phase of the innovation cycle. The specific uses of the funds will vary by site based on needs, such as supporting setup of a stewardship organization for sites working on community wellness funds or providing seed money that would influence other investors or funding mechanisms to support wider implementation. GHPC will also evaluate the success of this approach.