Toward a System of Prevention: Enabling and Sustaining Healthy & Equitable Communities

At Friday's Population Health breakfast meeting, Prevention Institute’s Larry Cohen and Manal Aboelata will co-present at Grantmakers in Health with The California Endowment’s Senior Program Officer Dr. George Flores to share early findings on our System of Prevention work.  A System of Prevention builds upon lessons learned from prevention successes (and failures) and identifies the policies, practices and capacities needed to more consistently and effectively scale up and sustain efforts and initiatives. The purpose of a System of Prevention is to save lives and achieve equitable health and safety outcomes.

In moving toward a scaled-up System of Prevention, people, places, policies, practices, and resources align to support health and equity. That means working across issues and sectors to address the roots of health, safety, and equity through evidence-informed interventions, pooling resources and building a movement for healthy communities. We’ve seen prevention efforts succeed time and again; a System of Prevention will magnify those successes by strategically and consciously embedding prevention into planning.  Our presentation will focus on seven key building blocks for creating a System of Prevention—shared vision and leadership, strong coalitions and cross-sector collaboration, a comprehensive strategy, community focus, legal and regulatory supports, sustainable financing, and a prevention workforce—and how grantmakers can leverage these building blocks to maximize the impact of systems-changes efforts. 

If you will be attending the Grantmakers in Health conference and would like to connect with Larry or Manal, please contact Nikta Akhavan. If you’re interested in learning more about our System of Prevention work or would like to see the System of Prevention PowerPoint, please let us know. We look forward to sharing this important work with our networks in coming months.