RECENT POSTS
- This Flu Kills
August 29, 2009 - Serious Doubts on Healthcare
August 27, 2009 - Ted Kennedy Dies
August 26, 2009 - Two and a Half Men: The Return of the Sitcom
August 24, 2009 - MJ's FBI File
August 24, 2009 - How Youth Make a Difference
August 22, 2009 - Hurricane Katrina Four-Year Anniversary: Have We Done Enough?
August 21, 2009 - Bringing Guns to Obama Town Halls
August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
California's Boys and Men of Color Part III: The Lens of the Community
Between 6 and 7 million Californians do not have health insurance.
Why am I telling you this? Because the RAND Corporation report that sparked my recent posts grew out of that reality.
The California Endowment, a private 13-year-old health foundation, commissioned the RAND report on boys and men of color as part of the endowment's new 10-year initiative called Building Healthy Communities—a “strategic direction” that the endowment will take that is designed to “develop neighborhoods where children and youth are healthy, safe and ready to learn.”
When the endowment began to look at making changes in communities across the state, they noticed that a significant portion of the population was faced with some really harsh issues.
The issues “are man-made and they can be unmade,” says Robert Phillips, who leads the endowment's statewide effort to bring access to health coverage to children.
“We're talking about the lives of these communities, and these boys are just kind of a lens, a look into that community,” Phillips says.
“Can you actually improve the health of the communities that we're going into if the core segment is doing worse than everyone else,” Phillips asks.
So, what will the initiative actually do?
In talking to Phillips I discovered that the RAND report is really the opening conversation for the foundation's 10-year commitment.
The endowment will devote most of its resources to 14 communities across the state where it can build upon the type of community-level work that I mentioned on Wednesday. But also, the endowment will work to impact policy at both the institutional and state level.
If that is not specific enough for you, check out the initiative's overview here, a background on the program here, a video about the initiative here, click here for descriptions of the 14 target communities, and keep in mind that the program is still in the ramp-up phase and will actually begin in 2010.
“All of the efforts that we looked at that have been successful on broader community efforts have, at a minimum, taken 7 to 10 years,” Phillips says. “But we just have to be patient.”
RAND report lead author Lois Davis says she's impressed by the range of foundations that have committed to focusing on the population that she studied and is hopeful that another report like the one she worked on won't be needed in 2020.
“The national dialogue as well as the local dialogue has really become stronger and stronger and gotten a voice in this area,” Davis says. “So we're hoping that we can build on that momentum.”
Later this month RAND is holding a policy forum on improving the odds for boys and men of color in California.
Young Voices will keep you posted.