Amplifying Health Advocacy Grant from The Colorado Health Foundation

Park Hill Collective Impact has been awarded an Amplifying Health Advocacy Grant for 2020!

Amount: $200,000

Funding Period: February 1, 2020 - January 31, 2023

Purpose:

This opportunity, provided by The Colorado Health Foundation, will allow us to continue the momentum and efforts of PHCI as the backbone, facilitator, and connector of a network of cross-sector partners and community working diligently to meet the needs of families in Park Hill. Through various forms of engagement (grass-tops to grass-roots) PHCI has begun a movement interweaving resident, stakeholder, youth, and community voice in driving impact through equity to ensure that every child, birth to career, is thriving collectively.

Proposed Activities:

Recent research has demonstrated that the condition of the neighborhood has a direct impact on the positive outcomes for education attainment, economic trajectories, and lifelong success.  Poor environmental conditions, such as communities of violence, low access to nutrition, low access to economic opportunities, etc., create negative outcomes, leaving children directly impacted in all aspects of their ability to thrive. The direct results of these systemic challenges are reflected through data that demonstrates Northeast Park Hill has substantially higher rates of economic instability; children living in single parent/earner homes; children living in poverty; rates of teen births; births to women who receive late or no prenatal care; children/residents with low access to healthy foods; and low educational attainment. Additionally, Park Hill has historically experienced high rates of “come-and-go” programming that is often siloed in nature. The causes and results of siloed work have a cascading impact on a child’s ability to thrive, which as demonstrated, can lead to lifelong health consequences. Individual organizations lack the capacity to focus efforts on these large complex interconnected systemic issues on their own, creating a cycle of instability impacting families two-fold (individually and systemically).  

Through the Collective Impact model, a researched and demonstrated impactful approach to systemic change, we focus on recognizing the intersectionality between issues that are affecting a child's ability to thrive and organizing partners for engaging in continuous improvement in each area. For example, it is important to understand the how unstable housing and economics have an effect on a child's nutrition and confidence to succeed in school; or how community violence has an impact on a child's feeling of safety and health, which also has a direct impact on a child’s ability to focus in academic settings.

Recognizing that tackling large, complex, and intersectional societal issues can feel overbearing and burdensome, Park Hill Collective Impact (PHCI) engages a wide range of partners and community members around five Action Committees that include: Academics; Community Health; Economics & Housing; Juvenile Justice; Emerging Adults & Youth Leadership. Each Action Committee is led by recognized community experts who facilitate a focused conversation with stakeholders, residents, and youth from the community to identify and prioritize work within each of their workgroups while being mindful and communicative with the other facilitators to support each others overlapping work to avoid duplication.

Additionally, PHCI is also taking an innovative approach to engaging the community through partnering with the community to correlate traditional collective impact approaches with best practices of community organizing and the Collective Impact Framework. Collectively, we provide three levels of engagement for involving organizational partners and community members. These meetings are interwoven and tailored to provide options around meeting size, frequency, and style with the intent of providing inclusive engagement to tackle the social challenges in Park Hill that directly impact a child’s academic career.

The three levels of engagement include: Leadership Summit: Engages organizational leaders in a large format annual meeting that is meant for leaders to assist in leveraging and guiding PHCI’s strategic vision. Action Committees are partner and data driven action oriented bi-monthly meetings that focus on the details of creating systemic change in the neighborhood within their perspective workgroup.  #ParkHillTalks are monthly meetings held in a smaller format and are intentionally designed to provide a more comfortable setting for community members to share their input and participate in the work.

Engagement and active enrollment of the community at-large is critical for systemic change in any community. This not only creates a community movement but also fosters residents to embrace active leadership roles for communal impact in the environment where they work, play, and/or live. Approaches that combine both outreach and in-reach create bridges to members whom many times isolate themselves from the community at-large, but also experience the direct consequences of the environment around them. Through enhancing and supporting leadership, community residents create a cohesive and common strategic plan to address challenges they face and begin to steer public policy.

Through approaching these challenges in such a unique way, PHCI has the opportunity to address multiple societal issues in a “divide and conquer together” approach. The result of the work is action-oriented, calling on organizational partners and community members alike to participate in driving systemic change, while creating recommendations for issues outside of the control of PHCI's partners. The recommendations of each Action Committee will be shared with policy makers and community stakeholders on an annual basis to assist in steering policy changes directly from community.