Complex health problems facing communities today require creative solutions that can impact the root causes that deprive many people of the opportunity to reach their best health potential. Addressing these issues requires partnerships that work across different sectors, leverage an array of expertise and resources, and develop synergistic solutions that are more powerful than what is possible by working alone.
The Cross-sector Innovation Initiative (CSII) is a three-year endeavor, led jointly by the Center for Sharing Public Health Services (CSPHS) and the Public Health National Center for Innovations (PHNCI), and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. CSII is designed to support partnerships among public health, healthcare, and social service sectors to improve population health, wellbeing, and equity for all. The CSII will examine the unique role of public health in fostering work across multiple sectors addressing social determinants of health and health equity.
The CSII will release a Call for Proposals (CFP) in late July 2019 for collaborations aimed at aligning public health, healthcare, and social services to improve community-wide population health. Brief applications will be due about six weeks after the CFP is released. Selected applicants will be invited to present a second, more detailed application. Up to 10 grantees will be selected and granted awards of up to $150,000 each for projects that will last between 18 and 24 months, starting in early 2020.
Eligible applicants must be part of established collaborations, although it is anticipated that selected collaborations will have reached different levels of maturity. The collaborations must include, at a minimum, partners from multiple organizations representing public health, healthcare, and social services. Applicants may be governmental or non-profit organizations from the public health, healthcare, or social services sectors and one or more health departments must have a leading or prominent role in the collaboration.
All grantees will participate in a learning community designed to promote peer-to-peer exchange and foster knowledge transfer throughout the project period. While the CFP will not specify topics or categories of work, grantees will be required to work collaboratively to address at least one root cause or social determinant of health, based on an identified community need or priority, that will lead to improvements in population health. In addition, grantees will be required to intentionally move collaborations beyond single-focused, time-limited projects towards working in alignment to institutionalize collaborative efforts as a way of doing business to promote population health and impact health equity.
Interested? Stay tuned to the CSPHS and PHNCI for the release of the CFP later this summer and start the ball rolling by discussing the opportunity with your partners.
