History
Building Healthy Communities (BHC) was a 10 – year initiative of The California Endowment that cultivated assets in communities to improve health status and equity for all residents. East Salinas was one of the fourteen place-based sites within BHC that began looking at values and practice changes across systems (schools, healthcare, land use, justice system) and supporting community leadership to redefine health and identify solutions that are relevant to East Salinas. BHC supports the design of communities that are safe, healthy, while promoting community wellness and healthy economic opportunities. Since 2013 BHC has been incubated by Action Council whose mission is to empower people to transform their communities and they do this by incubating leaders, innovative ideas, emerging organizations, and collaborative community action. In 2017 the work expanded across Monterey County which sparked the name change to Building Healthy Communities Monterey County (BHCMC).
BHCMC has supported local efforts to engage and develop the leadership capacity of community residents and systems to achieve equitable outcomes in health, education and economic opportunity for all people. BHCMC is working toward a policy and systems change goal grounded in a healing-informed racial justice framework.
BHCMC has a distinguished track record of facilitating community engagement opportunities and incorporating community voice into policies and decisions that impact their lives. The principal driver of this work is centering residents as assets and key stakeholders not just as recipients of services. BHCMC has been developing effective community engagement and power building strategies that are healing-informed and culturally rooted. BHCMC’s mission is to activate resident voice and power to build an inclusive, anti-racist democracy and safe thriving communities. In 2018 BHCMC launched Toward a Racially Equitable Monterey County (TREMC), an ecosystem of institutions including community-based organizations, government, and philanthropy. The goal of this ecosystem is to build capacity across the institutions to collectively examine systemic root causes of inequities to craft solutions to achieving healing-informed racial equity. BHCMC works in service of and led by Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth and resident leaders looking to transform key institutions to be anti-racist and community-centered.
