Since 2015, The BUILD Health Challenge® (BUILD) has partnered with community-centered, cross-sector partnerships to advance health for everyone. After witnessing the power and concentrated potential of our first round of awarded communities, and recognizing the commitment of our partners to the work, The BUILD Funding Collaborative launched a five-year strategic plan in 2017. The plan wrapped up last year, with the end of our third cohort of awarded communities.
In some ways, we recognized that the previous five-year plan had not kept up with where BUILD and BUILD communities were today, in the wake of a global pandemic, the reckoning for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd, and a continuing evolution in our understanding of what drives community health. BUILD has a responsibility to be forward-thinking, intentional, accountable, and responsive to the goals of our communities, as well as our funders and other stakeholders. With that in mind, the process to refresh our plan was inclusive of partners from across BUILD’s network, and built upon the learnings from our Equity Journey, Listening Tour, and Racial Equity Learning Process. Starting in the summer of 2022, we began a series of town halls with BUILD leadership, funders, and awardee partners to refine BUILD’s strategic plan for the coming years.
The result is grounded in racial equity, community power, and our core values and beliefs. We expect this to be a dynamic, living document, one that will continue to evolve as BUILD does and we continue to understand what this complex, critical work looks like. And we want to be accountable – our transparency has proven to be a strength that allows us to build bridges and aim high, and we want to live up to our commitments.
For the first time, we are proud to share with you: BUILD’s strategic plan.
Our Vision
Everyone embraces a shared responsibility for catalyzing healthy and equitable communities.
Our Mission
The BUILD Health Challenge® (BUILD) invests in multi-sector, community-centered partnerships that transform systems and elevate community power to advance health and racial justice.
Through learning, connecting, and amplifying these local initiatives, BUILD champions the national movement for health equity and moves attention, resources, and action upstream to support vital community conditions for health and well-being across the United States.
Our strategies
BUILD employs three primary strategies to achieve change. Based on BUILD’s unique model for community collaborations, each strategy runs concurrent to the others and builds on one another—contributing to the normalization of community-centered approaches to health over time.
BUILD supports and invests in community collaborations.
Why? Each site demonstrates how nontraditional collaborations, centering community voice, and upstream approaches can improve health outcomes and transform the systemic drivers of health equity.
BUILD sites and partners seed the field with research and storytelling in order to share learning widely.
Why? Sharing success increases awareness and demand for the BUILD approach to health, encouraging more partners and more collaborations to adopt the model.
BUILD helps advance a national movement that drives policy, investment, and sustainability.
Why? Leveraging the breadth, scale, and scope of these initiatives increases their collective strength and credibility, encouraging more partners to engage and to invest. Policies, regulations, and practices will change to incentivize and sustain these collaborative approaches to health — ultimately creating healthier populations in a more equitable system.
What does success look like for BUILD?
- Spread of the BUILD model — with best practices in policy, community engagement, health equity, and data — in communities nationwide
- Create institutional change across sectors, advance systemic changes that promote health equity and racial justice, and reduce downstream health care costs
- Engage awardees, past and present, to build a national network and movement around upstream and collaborative health interventions
- Take steps towards influencing policy change at the national level
- Secure funding and new partnerships that support the long-term sustainability of BUILD’s assets and network
What does success look like for BUILD’s awardee communities?
- Apply bold, upstream, integrated, local, and data-driven approaches within communities
- Increase capacity and effectiveness in utilizing these approaches to improve health
- Improve community health because of BUILD-related actions in a measurable way
- Amplify community power to ensure that those most impacted by structural inequity are recognized as trusted partners, play a key role in leading change, and hold decision-makers accountable.
- Effect systems changes to advance racial justice and health equity, including shifts in policy, funding, and practice
- Pursue sustainability, scaling, and the replication or adoption of programs with/by others
What does success look like for BUILD’s funders?
- Use learnings from these efforts to inspire and inform others, ultimately helping to create a new norm for how to support and resource community-led health, equity, and racial justice advancements
- Catalyze multi-sector collaborations among organizations at the local level to help develop and advance best practices for community health
- Provide and receive valuable regional and issue-specific expertise to inform the BUILD initiative and communities
- Move resources, attention, and action upstream to drive sustainable improvements in community health in alignment with their respective organizations’ goals
View BUILD’s full strategic plan here:
The development of BUILD’s strategic plan was supported by RMW Consulting Group LLC. We extend our gratitude to Rachel Mosher-Williams and Sandhya Chari for their partnership with us in this process.
