Local initiatives to address COVID-19 health disparities among populations at high-risk and underserved, including racial and ethnic minority populations. - During the COVID-19 response, one of our biggest learnings has been the importance of our public health infrastructure to enable us to do public health 3.0 and health equity work. We were able to leverage our Center for Health Equity, founded in 2006, to help shape the response. Having the right people with the right training in the right positions meant that the way our response prioritized strategies and created programs looked very different than it otherwise might have. During this response, we have made sure to invest in staffing either through long-term hires or contracts, however most of the expansion has gone into ensuring our immediate operational needs can be met. The Center for Health Equity staff who contributed to this response were invaluable; our epidemiologists created public dashboards that were used internally and externally, our planners designed interventions focused on immediate needs and root causes which may never otherwise have existed in the emergency infrastructure. Even so, most staff worked above and beyond normal hours and acknowledged there could always be additional data analysis, more program design to support residents, more comprehensive policy research and implementation if we had more time in the day, or more staff in our Center for Health Equity. Our goal with this grant is to make sure that we can build our capacity to more fully address root causes and systems of power; those systems which have an outsized influence on how different populations experience health and wealth inequitably in our community. This proposal aims to more than double the staffing in the Center for Health Equity so that we can more effectively address root causes that impact COVID-19 and health inequities. It also builds additional capacity to make sure our work is community-centered and that residents can help lead this work through ongoing support of community advisory boards and community health worker networks. Much of this grant will go towards staffing which goes against traditional grantmaking orthodoxies. However, this pandemic has taught us that having a robust staffing infrastructure gives us more flexibility to meet community needs than funding specific projects and programs. Having the space to build an adequate infrastructure will give us the space to strategize and go after projects, policies and grant funding that we may never before have been able to pursue, and to do so in partnership with our residents who have been most impacted. We are requesting total federal funds in the amount of: $ $4,296,855.
