In 2012, Palm Health Foundation’s senior leaders shared their aspirations for a deeper connection to the Palm Beach County community and the ability to transform community health.
“Collective Impact,” a place-based grantmaking approach, provided the foundation a framework for shaping our ideas.
The foundation’s leadership team spent the following year canvassing the community, seeking input for our early vision to wrap a collective impact model around the foundation’s priority areas: diabetes, behavioral health and family caregiving.
We began to see that a more holistic approach was needed emphasizing systems, culture change and a new perspective to see ourselves as local stewards of shared resources. As our vision came more into focus, a new theory of action emerged.
By 2014, the foundation decided to move forward with a five-year commitment to invest $1 million in each of six selected communities to make lasting, sustainable impact around some of the most complex health-related issues.
The strategic shift emphasized the partnership between residents and leaders as we began working hand-in-hand to build organizational and individual capacities to support new and existing networks and influence factors that are key in transforming systems.
The overarching goals set at the beginning of the initiative were to:
Palm Beach County is named by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation a Culture of Health Prize-winning community! Check out our community’s video here.
The Healthier Together initiative is featured, starting on page 164, in the newly published book, Aligning Systems for Health: Two Years of Learning, presented by Georgia Health Policy Center at Georgia State University. Click to download the book.
In ReThink Health’s Unsung Stewards podcast, Palm Health Foundation CEO discusses how the foundation uses a hyperlocal approach in addressing the community’s needs during the COVID-19
Healthier Together Mini Grants Showcase, a learning event, celebrates the diverse resident-led efforts taking place around Palm Beach County
Highlighting the Unity Wall in Lake Worth Beach:
WPTV, Unity Wall Dedicated in Lake Worth Beach
WPBF, Wall of Unity in Lake Worth Beach Brings Community Together
Lake Worth Herald, The Wall for Us All
Download our Healthier Together paper, A Shared Purpose, Transforming Communities Through the Social Determinants of Health.
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