The purpose of Lead Local: Community-Driven Change and the Power of Collective Action, a project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), was to understand how community power catalyzes, creates, and sustains conditions for healthy communities.
To explore this question, RWJF brought together a set of partners: Caring Across Generations, Change Elemental, Human Impact Partners and Right to the City Alliance, Johns Hopkins University SNF Agora Institute, USC Equity Research Institute (formerly USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity), and Vanderbilt University. Turning to those closest to the work, Lead Local partners expanded the project to incorporate the knowledge and expertise of 40 local organizations working in 16 places across the United States.
The report is about the story of community power in 16 places. It is the culmination of a 24-month process to understand how community power catalyzes, creates, and sustains conditions for healthy communities through the lens of local organizations who are building community power to dismantle systems that perpetuate health inequity and to create alternative policy and institutional vehicles that can promote healthy communities.