Place-Based Initiatives
The Place-Based Initiatives (PBI) program builds deep, trusting, and equitable partnerships between community stakeholders and health systems to enhance community climate resilience. We're launching this work in four locations – Boston, Bay Area, Detroit, and Miami – where health care and community partners have committed to equitable planning, decision-making, and collaborative solutions-building. Together, these partners will co-design and implement community climate resilience projects.
Through our work in these sites, we aim to capture key learnings, outcomes, successes, and challenges to guide the broader health care sector in adopting similar approaches to increase equitable community engagement. The PBI program expands the traditional definition of health care and redefines the essential role health care organizations need to hold to address the climate crisis of our time.
Health systems must be reimagined as decarbonized anchor institutions in deep, equitable relationships with healthier, more resilient communities that can survive and thrive in the face of a changing climate.
Prescription for resilient communities
Health care is on the front lines of climate disruption. Our goal to increase the health sector’s engagement with community stakeholders will support effective and lasting community resilience. This partnership can address the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis on community members who face the most risk.
Our vision
We envision health care organizations as anchor institutions, actively engaging with their communities to build climate resilience. By working together with local stakeholders, hospitals and health systems can create and implement strategies that protect communities from climate, health, and economic challenges, ensuring they can thrive in the face of ongoing disruptions.
How will we do it?
We believe that community members know what is best for their community, and that power-sharing and equitable involvement of local stakeholders and partners from the start is critical to lasting, effective, community-led climate resilience solutions.
Hospitals must break down internal silos while building and repairing trust with communities by acting with greater humility, inclusion, and true partner engagement – part of the leadership principles that guide how we engage health care leaders.
Our work with community-based partners will align with the approach outlined in Anchored by health care: Strategies for health systems. We will also amplify and support the place-based and community-level work done outside of the United States through our strategic partners.
Our PBI locations:
- Bay Area, CA
- Boston, MA
- Detroit, MI
- Miami, FL
Resources
Safe haven in the storm: Protecting lives and margins with climate-smart health care
In the wake of hurricanes and wildfires in 2017, health care leaders can safeguard lives and their organization's financial viability by investing in climate resilience.