As we wrote in 2021, members of the community-based workforce and health equity champions envisioned that we could look back in 2026 to see an America that met the challenge of COVID-19 - with unprecedented collaboration between healthcare and public health institutions, a deep reliance on the indelible value of community-based organizations and their leaders, and a renewed focus on racial health equity as the guiding principle for the distribution of health care services, a fundamental advancement in healthcare accessibility, and hundreds of millions of people vaccinated. The challenges felt insurmountable - vaccine development had historically taken years and sometimes decades, community-based organizations were not routinely utilized as a pillar of our national healthcare delivery infrastructure, equity did not drive major healthcare decisions, and structural barriers were deeply entrenched.
Nearly four years after our first community gathering, we’ve had some incredible wins. Federal, state, and philanthropic actors released billions in recognition of community health workers, CBOs, religious leaders, and educators who were and are working to keep people safe and healthy. Community-based workforces and health equity champions answered the call to protect community health and advocate for equitable resources at a scale that hadn’t been seen in decades, if ever - from ensuring people had food and shelter, helping people stay enrolled in Medicaid, connecting communities to vaccines, ensuring kids could be educated safely, delivering on health and mental health supports. Our own Vaccine Equity Cooperative was one of a number of central organizing platforms for disseminating community expertise for COVID-19 communications and interventions, working alongside many local, state and national organizations and community experts. VEC grew to 8,000 partners, with community members across all 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Canada. At the same time, a sister effort – the national Community-Based Workforce Alliance (CBWA) – engaged thousands of CBOs, advocates and policymakers to elevate and center community-based workers, including CHWs, in pandemic response and recovery efforts. We are so thankful to all who built this tent with us.
As a result of these and many other herculean efforts, today 70% of the U.S. population has received at least one COVID vaccination.
Despite these victories, the essential need for collaborative health equity efforts continues. But now, fewer resources, amid cumulative societal exhaustion and the scope of need threaten our progress. The economy and consumer sentiment reflect the fallout of the pandemic as many are at risk from shrinking public health protections. Despite the challenges, philanthropic giving is at an all-time low.
The formal unwinding, and now outright denial, of the continued public health emergency has had and continues with devastating impact. Community health workers and other local leaders are losing jobs, income, and confidence, threatening the sustainability of their communities to withstand persistent systemic inequities. The historic expansion of Medicaid services has been undermined by waves of systematic disenrollment. The mental health crises are growing and our nation’s children are deeply affected.
These are not easy times to work in community health, health care, mental health, or public health. Yet, the message from communities is clear: we must expand the tent. It is time to create new spaces of care that are centered on the relational currencies rooted in belonging and collectivism rather than the transactional currencies rooted in ownership and plunder.
We launched the Vaccine Equity Cooperative as just the beginning of a larger collaborative movement. Our belief was and is that we need each other - no one person, organization, philanthropist, institution or community can do this work of eradicating health inequities alone. We heard from many of you that collaborative health equity work should not end with vaccines. So we listened more to understand how to co-create this next phase. We are thankful for the feedback that came in many forms and for your investment of time and care to get us here: meetings with the core partners, advisory council, and small groups that helped inform what a post-vaccine collaborative could look like, our mental health survey, working group meetings, webinars and polls, and hundreds of conversations, virtual and in-person meetings, a naming survey that resulted in “Health Equity Community Collaborative.”
We, the core partners, remain committed to building the biggest tent so that we all can learn, serve, heal, and benefit in a loving community. We are launching this next phase, the Health Equity Community Collaborative, with a shared commitment to cultivating belonging, fostering healing, and building shared power within the communities we share across the nation. We don’t have magic solutions, but we do have an appetite to co-design and, as we did with VEC, to continue to listen, learn, support, and grow in our community. We hope to enable easier ways to share resources, best practices, and expertise across issue areas, sectors, and geographies. We hope to collectively reimagine and drive policy and drive more resources to be invested in community health. We are committed to fighting for racial health equity. We are committed to bringing joy, laughter, and love into this work. That is the intent of the HECC- to co-create a space for us.
We want to start with a survey on belonging and a virtual community gathering to hear from you all, share back what it means to be included, supported and connected. We envision a future in which life-affirming opportunities and life-extending resources are abundant, equitably distributed, and accessible so we collectively experience and participate in our healing, longevity, shared power, and well-being. We hope you will join us in this vision and help us get there.
