Oral

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program combines data and action to create solutions that make it easier for people to be healthy in their own communities. The County Health Rankings documents the factors that affect a community’s health and calls attention to documented relationships between social and economic factors, such as educational attainment, and improved health. Within the County Health Roadmaps, which promotes action to address those factors, a set of grantees within the Roadmaps to Health Community Grants program are working to reform education policy as a means to improve their community’s health. Those grantees have organized a variety of stakeholders from their community into diverse, multi-sector partnerships and are using their collective impact to pursue education reforms at the policy or system level. This session will provide an overview of multi-sector partnerships for advocacy and will continue with the stories of three communities that are using diverse partnerships to address education policy as a health improvement strategy. Featured speakers will include representatives from three sites: an academic-community partnership in Detroit that is engaging parents and students in policy change aimed at increasing high school graduation rates, an advocacy coalition in Rhode Island that has engaged elected officials and other leaders to make improvements across the state’s entire educational spectrum, and a coalition in Pennsylvania led by a local United Way and prominent business leaders seeking to establish a statewide kindergarten readiness assessment.

Session Objectives: 1. Describe eight capacities for effective coalition-based advocacy at the policy or system change level. 2. Describe specific strategies that engaged decision-makers, parents, educators, business leaders, and other key stakeholders in education reform efforts as a means to improve health. 3. Identify strategies that attendees can use in their community to align education advocates with public health improvement efforts.