G-2101-16668

AltaMed Health Services (AltaMed) is an FQHC based in Southeast Los Angeles that, in addition to providing comprehensive care, champions nonpartisan, evidence-based domestic policy solutions that improve the economic, political, and social landscape for Latinos and other communities of color in states and localities across the U.S.

Our partnership with AltaMed began last year, and is still very new, given the tumultuousness of COVID-19. Despite disruptions, their work focused on connecting patients with opportunities to understand and activate around policy and systems-change solutions impacting them. AltaMed does this through an organizing framework that trains community leaders, engages them in understanding and prioritizing health disparities, and leading advocacy efforts to influence related policy and structural change.
This proposal falls under the Advancing Equity funding initiative, and the Strengthen Community Voice and State Advocacy sub-initiative and seeks to build an innovative new model of community-based research and policy advocacy with a focus on the social determinants of oral health. AltaMed patients and community partners have identified 2 of the larger food banks in Southeast Los Angeles and will seek to advocate for adoption of new healthy policies that inform the food procurement process so as to ensure access to food with high nutritional value for low-income community members. AltaMed will design a multi-functional framework for community organizing that includes, first, a community-based participatory research approach to understanding the social and environmental context related to these policies in their region. Second, through training, technical support, and advocacy, AltaMed will partner with members of the community, and patients, to change these targeted policies and support meaningful implementation moving forward. This work will be implemented through two pipelines of work 1) a Community Organizing Institute that will be primarily for community-based adults and 2) a Youth Organizing Institute, both of which build off of existing infrastructure launched in 2020.

The budget for this proposal is $150,000. Roughly 2/3rd of the budget is for staff time and supplies associated with the deliverables. The budget also includes $15,000 for community stipends and $10,000 for an evaluation contract.

The organizational budget for AltaMed Health Services is roughly $895,000,000, though almost the entirety of that budget is related to care delivery. The budget for the Civic Engagement department, in which we primarily collaborate, is $1,000,000. Based on this, this project would be 15% of the Civic Engagement department budget and “less than 1%” of the total organizational budget.