And so begins 2026 – already living up to the old axiom that the only constant is change. Much as we did throughout 2025, we have already seen significant turmoil, at home and abroad, paired with a great swell of humanity responding to demand more – and better – for themselves and their neighbors.
For BUILD, we are seeing the impacts daily. BUILD collaborative partners – residents, community-based organizations, local health departments, and healthcare institutions – have been ground zero for many of the aggressive shifts in federal policy and funding over the last year. Social and political tensions have led to deep reflection and strategic thinking about what we can each tolerate, where we can meet in the middle, and when we must let go of relationships and structures that no longer serve us and create something different.
We are often asked about how BUILD communities are responding to the current moment, but there is no singular BUILD story – every person, organization, and community must navigate not only a rapidly changing federal context, but their local dynamics and personal experience as well. Those complex stories continue to unfold in a new way each day.
Over the last year, we had a unique opportunity to reflect on the pace of change as we crossed the milestone of a decade of BUILD. Reflecting on all that occurred during those ten years – what we learned and what changed as a result – was both a rare marker of stability, and reflective of what we can achieve when we choose to move forward together.
Coming Together
In May, we marked BUILD’s tenth year with a convening that brought together over 150 awardees and partners from across the last decade in San Diego. We celebrated progress, deepened our connections, and built momentum for the next chapter of our collective work. We were reminded, again and again, that not only are we more alike than we are different, but that our diversity of experiences make us stronger together. It was a bright spot of joy and hope in a turbulent year.
Strengthening the BUILD Model
In the fall, we looked back at the BUILD model and what it means to be Bold, Upstream, Integrated, Local, and Data-Driven. In a new report, we highlighted lessons from the experience of 68 awarded communities about how those principles work in practice locally and how they’ve evolved over time more broadly. Ten years in, the model continues to be an effective tool for creating sustainable, effective, and equitable change in communities – flexible enough to adapt, powerful enough to drive impact.
Centering Communities
Central to BUILD’s function is the relationship between BUILD’s funding collaborative and the awardee communities. A second report explored how that relationship and investment evolved over time, including embracing a culture of learning, implementing trust-based practices, and centering community leadership to make upstream health change more sustainable.
Diving deeper, a new article in The Foundation Review examined the ways that BUILD built on that learning culture to develop a listening practice over time and ultimately put into action. The article shares BUILD’s story of how we changed our ways of working to intentionally embed community voice into our strategy, operations, and culture.
Lifting Our Voice
Finally, we continued to spend listening to and learning from each other. BUILD partners have immense experience in organizing, collaborating, and build power in their communities. They are deeply skilled in navigating change, pivoting, and advocating for systems change. While BUILD alumni, like those in Greenville, SC and Washington, DC, continue their efforts to improve health, current awardees are also putting their learnings and relationships to work. From community leaders in Cleveland, OH who utilized their experience collaboratively addressing lead poisoning to respond to the loss of a local grocery store; to partners in Muskegon Heights, MI who recognized an opportunity to support local entrepreneurship that would drive healthy outcomes in their neighborhood; BUILD collaboratives continue to be powerful examples of what’s possible when we center the experience of community members and build responsive ecosystems that support them.
At BUILD, we are moving into our eleventh year holding steady. We are not standing down in the face of challenge. Healthier communities don’t happen in a vacuum – policy decisions, systems and practices, funding, and cultural context all can play an enabling role, or an impeding one. We will continue to advocate for supportive systems changes, and for health equity, for working together, for recognizing that our diversity make us stronger, and for communities that know best what they need to thrive.
As we look forward at 2026 and likely continued unpredictability, we know one thing clearly: the work isn’t done. We’re creating more opportunities to build bridges, to connect within communities and across them, and to uplift more stories of what’s possible. Our view is a long one. We won’t have a perfect solution to our challenges in 2026, anymore than our nation is a perfect union on the anniversary of the United States’ semiquincentennial, but as we have always done, we will continue to make progress that moves us towards a better future.
We look forward to partnering with you on that journey.
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Cover photo by Jingda Chen on Unsplash
