Organizational Alignment for Health Equity through a Cancer Lens
“CG has become a trusted member of our Health Equity team. Their services have fostered inclusive, safe spaces for working through challenging issues. They have helped us synthesize and articulate complex, multi-dimensional factors into accessible models and frameworks to engage hundreds of stakeholders to co-create an enterprise road map and strengthen organizational capacity for health equity as a foundation of our work for years to come.”
—Managing Director, Healthy Communities, American Cancer Society
In 2018, the American Cancer Society (ACS) partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to initiate a 3-year organizational transformation initiative to intensify health equity principles and practices in its work, which engages thousands of associates, a myriad of partnerships and over a million volunteers spanning awareness, education, programs, research and advocacy.
As ACS’s organizational development consultant since this project’s launch, CG provides an array of services to build organizational leadership and change management capacities for health equity. This includes engaging internal leaders at all levels as well as partners across the country in tailored planning and capacity-building workshops, as well as developing training and tools, to foster health equity across national and regional ACS policies, programs and practices.
Impact
As an integrated component of ACS’s health equity work, CG’s services have contributed to the adoption of health equity messaging, language and metrics into the organization’s planning and communications; enhanced ACS leadership and management workshops to elevate health equity as an organizational priority; an enterprise-wide health equity on-line training and communications series; a new health equity champion regional training model and stronger integration of health equity into organizational practices and programs leading to enhanced action.