Building an Equity Movement

Empowering a healthier, more equitable community through inspiration, skills development and action.

Glenn Singleton, creator of Courageous Conversation about Race: Beyond Diversity.

What are some of the hallmarks of a healthy community? We believe that knowing where things currently stand is a good place to begin. Helping people become smarter about the obstacles we face in attaining optimal health has been an important part of our strategy from the beginning. That’s why we’ve prioritized knowledge and skill-building experiences that strengthen our ability as a community to know how to move from where things stand today to the better community we envision.

The social determinants of health framework teaches us that all the underlying factors in our environment—from the quality of our schools, to the policies that govern where and how we live, to our food supply and communal and spiritual lives—account for a far greater health impact than health care. That means it’s up to all of us to understand where we fall short in providing an environment where people can thrive. That often means changing hearts and minds about inclusion and equal access to the rich resources that surround us.

Since 2016, our ​Speakers Who Inspire​ series has brought national thought leaders and authors to St. Petersburg to advance the local discourse about equity. We give platform to nationally recognized speakers, inviting them to share their insights and ideas to inform, inspire, and motivate action. The events are free and open to the public and include book signings and discussions with the more than 200 guests who attend each. More than 98% of the participants surveyed give the series an excellent or very good rating.

For those who are able to invest more deeply in the equity movement, ​Courageous Conversation About Race: Beyond Diversity h​as been adopted by the Foundation as a powerful protocol for strengthening our understanding about racial inequity through a constructive and healing lens. Developed by Glenn Singleton, founder of the Pacific Educational Group, this method of deep, sustained, dialogue has taught hundreds of thousands of people across the globe how to talk openly, honestly, and humanely about race, centered on their own personal, local and immediate experience with the topic.

Two of the two-day workshops were held in 2018, comprised of groups of up to 100 people, balanced by race, occupation, and sector. To date, we’ve trained more than 300 leaders and employees from our local corporate, educational, faith-based, government, and healthcare communities and have committed to graduating many hundreds more over the next year and a half.

Feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive and at their request, we created an alumni program for Courageous Conversation: Beyond Diversity “alumni.” Working with Pacific Education Group, xx of these alumni received further training to enable them to become affiliate practitioners, prepared to moderate and facilitate alumni conversations and ongoing skill building in the protocol. The alumni program continues to build and deepen relationships, skills, and commitment among participants to this equity movement.

In order to reach broader audiences with an understanding of the many ways in which Pinellas County is out of equity, we launched a 2018 social media campaign about using new data from research reports funded by the Foundation, calling special attention to areas of disparity in education, housing, and income inequity. Compelling data points were translated into engaging social media posts that contributed to a 50% increase in our Facebook followers. This sharable content also helped advance an understanding of health disparities and concepts of equity among our community of 2,800 e-newsletter subscribers. Ongoing survey data has indicated that among the community of people who have contact with the Foundation’s messaging, understanding of health equity has continued to increase and deepen.

Convening People for Solutions

Supporting people and organizations across sectors to change systems and solve problems.

A successful convening of HIV-AIDS prevention organizations in Pinellas County resulted in the formation of he Zero Pinellas community partnership. Here leaders gather to show their commitment to zero new HIV infections in Pinellas County.

The Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg believes the wisdom is in the community. In order to understand and unravel the complex issues facing our community, we must work together, and in order to do that, we must be able to come together. Over the past year, the Foundation has been a powerful facilitator of community conversations, bringing change-makers across sectors to the same table and uniting their efforts to drive towards a common goal. As we look back at what we’ve accomplished together and plan for the years ahead, it’s clear that convening will play an enormous role in our collective story of success.

This year, we applied convening and the equity framework to HIV health in Pinellas County. Focused on an integrated approach to creating healthy communities of opportunity, we brought together majority stakeholders who drive funding, policies, and communications around HIV and AIDS in our community. For eighteen months, we facilitated conversations among seven project partners, fostering cooperation and trust, and showcasing data to drive progress across sectors. The result is Zero Pinellas, a collaboration that brings the best parts of all partners forward to create a specific shared vision for this community initiative: a 90/90/90/50 model that aims to reduce new HIV infections by 50% over the next few years. We continue to offer a safe convening space and flexible funding to ensure this initiative continues to progress, and indeed it has — serving as a model to other communities for what is possible when you support collaboration across sectors with clear intentions and data-driven decisions.

We also began to convene around the issue of equitable housing in Pinellas County, releasing a report that addressed the connections between housing and healthcare and between housing and equity. The report was framed around four aspects of the housing system that emerged during the research: adequacy, accessibility, affordability, and availability. We launched the report and then convened a group to walk through the data, created a record of the conversations that came out of that data reflection, and surveyed their impressions after the convening. Moving forward, we are focused on convening people around projects, policies, and financial models that will improve the housing system in Pinellas County, with an equitable county-wide housing plan as our ultimate goal.

We are committed to convening as a tool to address social problems, and it is a key part of the work that will be conducted at the new Center for Health Equity. Convening seeks transformative change through an informed process that provides people the opportunity to innovate. The wisdom truly is in the community, and it is our role to harness that wisdom to develop solutions by providing the space, resources, research, and expertise that will allow groups to connect and meet more intentionally. Convening gives us the opportunity to inspire thinking, use our social capital to connect and incubate ideas in the community, and accelerate the important work that needs to be done to create a more equitable future for our region.

Research and Data for Health Equity

Understanding community health and health disparities.

Guests at the Housing research report release event leave ideas and suggestions about improving the state of housing in Pinellas County.

Research and Data for Health Equity​ was an important theme in 2018 as we launched wide-ranging effort to bring evidence-based approaches to advance equitable health outcomes in Pinellas County. We supported research conducted by nonprofit and governmental partners with expertise in key social determinants of health including education, housing, economic justice, and food and nutrition. These reports are just the beginning, but we see the value of consistently applying an equity lens to research. It reveals a picture that often goes unnoticed for lack of attention to equity in framing data collection. The reports created so far deepen our understanding of the challenges and needs facing our county and inform how and where we invest. The funding and commissioning of these reports has also helped to support and develop research capabilities in organizations, academic institutions and governmental entities in Pinellas County.

The Foundation is increasing our commitment to research in 2019 and will add resources to translating research findings into actionable interventions, including policy advocacy.

Grantmaking and Capacity Building

Investing in programs and projects to improve community health and equity.

Grants to the Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County made possible better countywide data collection and funded the adoption of a Health in All Policies approach to policymaking in the county and in the municipalities of St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park.

As our community works together toward achieving health equity, we are dedicated to providing funding resources to further our collective mission. Over the past three years, the Foundation has committed over $18 million dollars in community investments. As we have evolved, so too has our grantmaking, taking multiple forms to support the versatile goals that all move us forward.

The Foundation’s vision of health equity can only be realized with the help of a strong nonprofit sector. Our ​Capacity Building Grants​ are designed to support nonprofits of all sizes to invest in short-term activities and projects that strengthen the organization and improve their impact, efficiency and/or effectiveness in the community. The grants are smaller, usually under $20k and the duration of funded projects is typically less than a year. To date, we’ve supported twenty-one organizations to strengthen their technology, marketing, communications, training, planning or other infrastructure needs.

Through a partnership with Nonprofit Leadership Center (NLC), we’re helping more Pinellas County nonprofits access training and organizational development tools and courses for their leadership and staff. Based on the findings of the 240 nonprofit leaders surveyed in the ​Pinellas County Nonprofit Assessment​, the two most critical needs were fundraising training for staff and board development.

Empowerment Grants​ helped organizations in the social and public sectors to enhance impact in one or more areas of the social determinants of health. These one-year grants of between $40 and $100k supported organizations with operating budgets of less than $2m a year.

Our multi-year ​Transformative Grants​ seek to support changing the systems that create barriers to positive health outcomes across populations. These funded projects reflect those working across the nonprofit, government, for-profit, and/or faith-based sectors for interventions that will positively impact population health using the broad social determinants of health framework. We’ve committed to nine transformative projects and we’re working closely with the partner organizations—offering facilitators, researchers, and an adaptive wellspring of learning partners and other supportive resources to them. While the financial investment in these Transformative grants has been substantial, their greater value lies in the cross-sector collaboration and ambitious vision setting that they foster.

As we head to the Center for Health Equity, Foundation funding will shift in large measure to invest in community-led social change initiatives that are facilitated within the Center. However, as always, every idea that has the potential for impact on our mission of health equity will be welcomed and considered for support.