Cambia Health Foundation (CHF) envisions a world where everyone has the equal opportunity to live their healthiest lives. This concept is known as whole-person health and rests at the heart of CHF’s 10-year strategy, Advancing Equity, which caters to the highest need populations including children and families, older adults and healthcare workers.
Advancing Equity is an adaptable multi-step process focusing on various aspects of whole-person health over a 10-year span. The idea is to start with whole-person care which addresses every aspect of a person’s well-being (physical, emotional, mental, social and other factors), then progress into whole-person health and, through these practices, foster a system that achieves health equity.
Steven Lesky, senior program officer at CHF, says the first five years of the plan will focus on behavioral health. “This plan really started in 2020 but due to the pandemic, our funding and attention shifted. During these first five years, which officially launched in 2022, we’re leaning into behavioral healthcare. After that, as we look at the future, we’re going to revisit our vision often to make sure we maintain that vision and perspective,” Steven says. “It’s all about learning and getting better. Even now, we’re taking the lessons we learned from the pandemic and putting them to use.”
The new strategy addresses multiple inequalities but centers racial equity because of its impact on health and healthcare in the U.S. “We realized that while our healthcare system does some things really well, it doesn’t do a great job at understanding inequalities and historical underpinnings,” Steven notes. “We decided our strategies needed to address these gaps, especially in terms of race because when you desegregate data, across almost every domain race is the highest contributing factor when it comes to inequities. With race being such a prevalent indicator of health disparities, we knew it was important for us to center it in our strategy.”
Embodying the sentiment that real work starts on the inside, CHF partnered with the diversity, equity and inclusion consulting firm Equity in the Center with three primary goals: 1. for the organization to better understand all factors contributing to health inequities, 2. for staff to gain the ability to take difficult conversations to a personal level and 3. to create a safe space for those conversations to inform strategic plans for the foundation’s 10-year vision of achieving health equity through whole-person care. Steven believes this partnership with Equity in the Center represented a shift at CHF.
“You can’t make progress without getting a little uncomfortable. That was one among several other takeaways that my coworkers and I gained from working with Equity in the Center. Honestly, working with them was the start of our journey to truly consider how to show up in a space and comprehend the power you hold in that space,” says Steven. “That training was very individual, very personal, like holding a mirror up to yourself where you had to self-reflect. In the end, we knew we had to include what we learned in our larger 10-year vision.”
CHF is the corporate foundation of Cambia Health Solutions and a the majority of the community impact comes in the form of traditional grantmaking, corporate social responsibility and hosting convenings with other organizations to address shared challenges. However, CHF believes they have a responsibility to help create lasting change in their communities through thought leadership – and their Advancing Equity strategy is the embodiment of that belief. “For us, this is about going beyond the checkbook,” Steven says. “When we examine what’s happening in our healthcare system, we can’t ignore it and we want to be part of this larger movement to create a healthcare system that reflects the people it serves. We hope we’ll meet some fellow learning partners along the way."
To learn more about Cambia Health Foundation or their Advancing Equity strategy, please visit their website.
