Community Centered Health Network: Building capacity and promoting sustainability among Chicago community-based organizations and partnerships

PHIMC has expertise in working with and convening community-based coalitions who often serve as safety net public health providers for many low-income racial and ethnic minority communities throughout Chicago. These coalitions have faced common economic challenges that threatened their sustainability. As a result, the life cycle of many coalitions we've worked with is disappointingly short or preoccupied with a search for financial support, with few coalitions surviving beyond initial formation. To address these issues among our community health partners, PHIMC developed the Community Centered Health Network (The Network). The purpose of the Network is to assist health-related partnerships and coalitions to achieve sustainability. Challenges, barriers and potential solutions to coalition sustainability are being explored with stakeholders and community leaders through a series of interactive forums, workshops, interviews, surveys and targeted capacity-building projects. Based on an extensive assessment of capacity-building needs, the Network has developed tools, data resources and technical assistance opportunities to address issues associated with the sustainability of local health collaborations. Most notably, our capacity building projects included funding opportunities for community coalitions to engage in the development of strategic plans and business planning to specifically identify resource targets to support their efforts. A few of these coalitions have already obtained additional funding for their work as a result of this project and we expect others to do the same. The Network is a successful strategy for improving health coalition sustainability in a harsh economic climate, and can be modeled for success among other community coalitions throughout the country.