Healthcare Capital Accountability to Anti-Racism and Equity: Setting Standards for Community Ownership and Power-Sharing

Over the past two years, a global pandemic and national reckoning on racial equity have underscored the disproportionate burden of health inequities carried by BIPOC and low-income communities. Against this backdrop, healthcare institutions are stating their intentions to prioritize racial and economic justice in the communities they serve. Actualizing these intentions — and codifying them into tangible commitments and investments — requires addressing a key determinant of health: power. In the context of healthcare, power can be seen as control over the definition, scope, funding, and evaluation of what “counts” as health, and historically, those communities with the greatest inequities are the same communities who have been excluded from this control, particularly when it comes to funding decisions and allocations. To achieve equity and to ensure better health, healthcare funders and impact investors must commit to authentically supporting community power-building processes that center restorative capital principles (for example, Shift recently piloted a California-based participatory grantmaking process for health). Hear from innovators advancing tangible power-sharing and anti-racism commitments with community leaders and healthcare leaders and efforts to lay the groundwork for national standards of healthcare accountability.