Community Catalyst
ONE Federal Street
Boston, MA
United States
Community Catalyst is a national non-profit advocacy organization working to build the consumer and community leadership that is required to transform the American health system to it serves everyone.
Historically, our partnership with Community Catalyst has focused on capacity building and technical assistance (TA) to OPEN through large scale learning opportunities at conferences, smaller learning opportunities through webinars and meetings, and deeper, more intensive TA to support our grassroots grantees to move successfully into the oral health space. Community Catalyst’s capacity building has focused on effective models of advocacy and community engagement and they have consistently supported grantees and partners in operationalizing a health and racial equity lens within their work.
This proposal falls under the Advancing Equity funding initiative, and the Increasing Community Voice and State Advocacy sub-initiative, and seeks to capitalize on several significant milestones that occurred in 2020 and 2021.With previous funding, Community Catalyst led a national field scan of oral health advocacy that focused on three organization types: community-based organizations (CBOs), state policy advocacy organizations, and funders. The soon-to-be published report will be a landmark for advancing oral health equity in the field and can serve as an impetus for deeper resourcing and activation of historically marginalized communities within policy conversations where they have a significant stake. As well, in early 2021, Community Catalyst released a Policy Equity Tool that seeks to do just this, build power in community-based organizations to engage in policy agenda setting and advocacy, while supporting state policy organizations in there capacity to effectively partner with CBOs. In 2021, Community Catalyst will build upon this work and continue to test and refine the tools based on user-feedback and results.
With this funding, they will implement a multi-tiered learning community, in collaboration with CareQuest Institute grantees, that will:
• For state advocacy organizations, increase the skills and capacities in incorporating authentic community engagement practices into their oral health policy agenda-setting and advocacy efforts;
• For community-based organizations, strengthen their policy analysis skills and capacities as they seek to elevate voices of marginalized communities in broader oral health advocacy; and
• Bridge the gap between national level policy discussions and community-identified priorities.
The budget for this proposal is $498,548 and about two-thirds of it goes to staff time and supplies associated with the facilitation of the learning communities. There is also funding for stipends for people and organizations participating in the learning communities and $50,000 set aside for the Community Catalyst lobbyist, which is matched by the Arcora Foundation.