Prevention Institute

Community-centered Practice: Our vision is that all people experience their full potential for health, safety, and wellbeing across the life course through thriving, equitable communities. Communities have deep knowledge, assets, intuition, culture, and skills and those closest to the problem have the solutions. That's why we partner with communities in support of community-driven change. We work with individual communities as well as local, regional, statewide, and national learning communities. We hold up the community-driven solutions, and they inform actions across all our work. Accomplishments include facilitating a national learning community of partners advancing park equity; supporting community-led collaboratives promoting mental health and wellbeing; centering community power and healing to prevent domestic violence and advance health equity in communities; and launching an initiative focused on sustaining BIPOC leaders at the intersection of social justice and systems change.

Knowledge and Skill Development: We strengthen practitioner capacity to achieve equitable health, safety, and wellbeing. Our approach emphasizes knowledge and skills in advancing equity and racial justice, community-level transformation, and upstream prevention. We provide training and technical assistance; develop tools, frameworks, and guidance documents; and produce and disseminate case studies and other information that emerges in our projects. We focus on practitioners across multiple sectors including state and local health departments, public health professionals, community-based organizations, and practitioners in land use and the built environment, mental and behavioral health, violence prevention, and other governmental sectors. Accomplishments include accelerating implementation of equity approaches in a public health ecosystem; partnering with CDC on a resource to advance the implementation of equitable transportation and land use policies; developing online community safety modules for CDC grantees and partners to integrate health equity and racial justice into practices and programming; strengthening capacity to advance upstream approaches to the opioid epidemic and rehabilitation; elevating upstream strategies to advance safety through trainings and webinars; and publishing a book chapter on inclusive community engagement.

Momentum Building: We focus on strengthening a prevention and health equity ecosystem while shifting fields, norms, and narratives in support of enduring change. To achieve this, we engage in field building; advocacy and policy change; narrative change work; bridge building across sectors, issues, and movements; and partnership, ecosystem, and network development. Across these activities, our approach emphasizes equity and racial justice, community-level transformation, and upstream prevention. Accomplishments include: exploring and strengthening the connections between public health practice and social justice movements through a timeline of resistance; working with philanthropy to spur transformation and accelerate health equity; co-hosting Young Minds Matter, a conference focused on Transforming Our Communities Collectively; advancing field building and narrative change to elevate park and land use equity; building momentum for upstream prevention in health systems and the frontline workforce; and elevating community voice in framing for public health approaches to community safety.

Systems & Policy Transformation: Our mission is to build prevention and health equity into key federal, state, local, and organizational policies, practices and actions to ensure that the places where all people live, work, play and learn foster health, safety, and wellbeing. An essential element of achieving this is our focus on changing systems and policies to produce equitable health, safety, and wellbeing. Across our systems and policy change work, we emphasize advancing equity and racial justice, community-level transformation, and upstream prevention. Accomplishments include advocating for policies and supporting activities that advance health equity and racial justice in California; partnering with CDC to develop a toolkit of Health Equity Indicators; launching a statewide partnership to explore long-term, durable funding for prevention and health equity; nurturing policy partnerships to emphasize the intersections between public health and racial justice; strengthening state and federal policies for equitable and upstream approaches to mental health; and providing strategic planning to local governmental agencies leading systems change efforts.