Kaiser Permanente's participation in the California Convergence

Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) has been a cornerstone of Kaiser Permanente's (KP) community investments in Northern California for over 6 years now. KP's involvement was born from our pediatricians' concerns about the increasing numbers of overweight children and families they were seeing in clinic, and recognition that we could not prescribe “eat better and move more” and then send patients back into communities where they lacked access to healthy foods or safe places to walk or play. We knew it was critical to invest in sustainable environmental changes as well. Our response was to launch three place- based initiatives called Healthy Eating Active Living-Community Health Initiatives (HEAL-CHI), as well as support local partnership grants and regional and statewide advocacy organizations.

As we built our HEAL portfolio, we aimed to leverage funding, share lessons and challenges learned, and contribute to the evidence base for policy and environmental change strategies with others in the field. The California Convergence provided the framework to more systematically communicate among funders, grantees, evaluators and technical assistance providers. It also developed into a vehicle for a shared voice across policy areas related to healthy eating and physical activity in the state. When the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Communities Putting Prevention to Work funding opportunity was announced, The California Convergence was poised and ready to shine the light on the great “shovel-ready” work already underway in California. Together with our partners including the California Department of Public Health, The California Endowment and The Partnership for the Public's Health, we informed our community partners/grantees, quickly made resources available, co-signed letters of support and worked with counties to include the California Convergence's policy goals in their applications.

Within KP, this involvement provided invaluable for keeping our facility leadership updated, and allowed us to better align with the CA Convergence policy and environmental change messages and focus. Many of our physician and operations leaders had been asked to sit on county planning committees, and many of our Community Benefit Managers had received requests to provide letters of support. All of these types of engagement were informed and influenced by the California Convergence policy agenda and priority areas.