Strategies to Repair Equity and Transform Community Health (STRETCH) Initiative

We all want to live in a community where everyone has the opportunity to reach their best health and wellbeing, no matter their race, ethnicity or class. Communities, including state health agencies and community-based organizations, have been working toward everyone having opportunities to access health care, clean air, parks, childcare, transportation options and the many other aspects of our lives that impact our overall health. The Strategies to Repair Equity and Transform Community Health (STRETCH) Initiative works to strengthen the foundational relationships imperative to ensuring all members of the community can thrive and improve the structures and processes needed to consistently move this work forward.

Join the STRETCH Network 

STRETCH Network of Health Equity Practitioners Online Community

The online community creates connections among those working in cultivating a culture of equity and creating systems-level change. Members can share best practices, tools and methods for operationalizing equity, common pain points while navigating this often-challenging work and foster peer-to-peer connections with health equity practitioners.

Participants who register for a STRETCH National Convening will be automatically added to the community. Anyone interested is free to join at any time! Participants will need to create a my.astho account if they do not already have one.

Join the STRETCH Peer Learning Community

The STRETCH Framework

The STRETCH initiative champions a systems change approach by analyzing the underlying policies, practices, resource allocations, power dynamics, relationships and mental models—our beliefs or assumptions that influence our perceptions—that have created barriers to everyone having the opportunity to live their healthiest life. The initiative synthesized different perspectives into an action-oriented framework that emphasizes addressing root causes to achieve health equity.

The STRETCH Framework is a tool for public health practitioners—including state public health agencies, local health departments and community-based organizations—to understand the shifts needed to achieve true systems change. 

Learn More about the STRETCH Framework

STRETCH Partners

The STRETCH initiative, a partnership between the CDC Foundation, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and Michigan Public Health Institute (MPHI) supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, offers capacity-building activities to build and strengthen trust and accountability among state public health agencies and community organizations, develop approaches to power sharing, identify community priorities and build a shared set of actions to achieve common goals of advancing opportunities for all community members to live their healthiest lives.

STRETCH 2.0

Building upon the experiences in the first round of the STRETCH initiative, STRETCH 2.0 aims to promote necessary skills, core competencies, power sharing and authentic relationships among state team members and community partners to advance and sustain health equity through systems change.

Governmental public health is currently receiving an influx of funding to strengthen the public health workforce and infrastructure. STRETCH is helping to ensure that the community is at the forefront of these decisions and that state public health agencies are investing in their community partnerships.

STRETCH 2.0 will have three levels of engagement:

1. National: The national tier provides technical assistance resources pertinent to challenges and needs across public health and is open for all public health practitioners to participate, regardless of their participation in STRETCH
2. Cohort: A peer learning network for the seven participating teams accepted through the RFA.
3. Collaborative: The individual teams accepted through the RFA.

STRETCH 1.0

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.