1 · How did you hear about the Discovery process
Professional Association or Network
A cross-sector coalition to redesign how Arizona's community-health organizations share data and coordinate care for the families they serve.
Dear Ana,
Thank you for the care you put into reviewing our early concept and for pointing us toward the heart of systems change. Your questions sharpened our thinking, and this refined proposal is the result. We have narrowed to a single problem, a single defined system, and a concrete collaborative mechanism — the work of a coalition that is ready to move together but has intentionally not pre-decided the answer. This planning year is designed to build the shared foundation that a future Systems Change Grant could carry forward.
We would be honored to explore this with Vitalyst as our partner. The responses below follow the Discovery questions in order.
— Lucy Howell, CEO & Dr. Robert Gillio, CMO · The Force for Health® Network
In a single month, one family may touch a school nurse, a community clinic, a food bank, a broadband navigator, and a community nonprofit. None of them can see each other. The family retells its story five times, is referred in circles, and no organization owns whether they actually got better — while each holds a fragment of that family's story the others will never see.
The problem is not low health literacy, or broadband gaps, or the healthcare workforce shortage. Those are symptoms. The problem is the disconnection itself — the missing connective tissue between the health, education, and social-service organizations that share responsibility for the same families.
Arizona's community-health coordination layer — the information-flow and resource-flow tissue between organizations serving shared families. We are not trying to change healthcare, education, or any single disease pathway. We are changing how the organizations around one family relate, share, and are resourced.
Two communities name this daily: the families — disproportionately rural, low-income, and Black and Brown Arizonans — who fall through the gaps, and the small, community-rooted organizations closest to them, who have the least power to fix the disconnection alone.
Silos are not a software problem. They are held in place by how the system is funded, governed, and understood — the structural, relational, and transformative conditions in the Water of Systems Change.
Grants reward individual organizations for individual outputs; sharing data or credit can cost the next grant, so organizations rationally guard turf.
Everyone measures differently and there is no common data-sharing framework, so even willing partners cannot safely connect.
HIPAA and FERPA ambiguity defaults everyone to "don't share." The barrier is unclear rules, not unwillingness.
Large systems hold the data and the leverage; the organizations closest to families hold the least voice in how coordination is designed.
Coordination depends on individual relationships and goodwill — and collapses when a champion moves on.
A deeply held belief that data is an asset to hoard rather than a shared good — the condition underneath all the others.
To establish a durable, cross-sector coordination structure — the Chamber of Health Connection — that lets Arizona's health, education, and community organizations act as one system for the families they share, with shared governance, shared data agreements, and shared accountability that endure beyond any single grant.
This planning year does not launch that structure at full scale. Its goal is to convene the partners and co-design the foundation: to agree on the problem, map its root causes together, and produce the governance and data-sharing agreements that make coordinated action possible — positioning the coalition to pursue implementation through a future Systems Change Grant and other aligned funders.
The planning year runs through a standing, neutrally facilitated structure: monthly Chamber of Health Directors' Meetings in each of Arizona's three regions, pulling insights, challenges, and solutions from the ground up.
These are not networking meetings. Each table carries a mandate to produce — moving from a shared understanding of the problem, to an agreed map of its root causes, to signed agreements that change how partners share data and direct resources. The organizations closest to families hold real decision-making power at every table, deliberately shifting who shapes the design.
A statewide synthesis rolls the three regions' insights into shared learning each quarter — so a solution discovered in the South can inform the North, and the whole coalition sees the system it is part of.
| Quarter | What each region's monthly meetings are chartered to produce |
|---|---|
| Q1 | Re-state the problem in the community's own words; map who is at the table and who is missing; invite the missing voices. |
| Q2 | Co-author a shared root-cause map; surface the data each partner holds and the real barriers to sharing it. |
| Q3 | Draft a data-sharing governance framework and agree on shared metrics that matter to families. |
| Q4 | Ratify agreements, choose a first region to implement, and produce a coalition-owned readiness-to-act plan. |
The reason partners stay at the table is that, for the first time, they can see the whole picture. Aggregating what each organization already holds into a shared, privacy-protected view lets local leaders measure their collective impact, spot where families are falling through, and prove that coordination is working. This is not a dashboard for its own sake — it is a systems-change lever. Shared visibility redistributes power to the leaders closest to families, redirects resources to where the data shows the gaps, and shifts the mental model from "guard our data" to "share to succeed" by making the payoff of coordination undeniable.
The Directors' Tables are designed to shift several interdependent conditions at once, in service of one strategy: making coordinated action the norm rather than the exception.
These partners have worked alongside one another since 2019. Relationships and some MOUs already exist; shared governance, a data-sharing agreement, and an agreed solution do not — which is precisely the readiness gap a planning grant closes.
The 360° SCD Hub with the Sickle Cell Foundation of Arizona convened 15+ partners across medicine and community — demonstrating that reaching families takes technology plus community plus support, never technology alone.
Arizona Broadband Stakeholders Network (statewide Health & Education Taskforce), AZ Healthcare Workforce Action Network, and Banner Family University Care are already at the table.
TUSD FACE Team, Berry Best Phlebotomy / Goodwill, the AZ School Nurse Association, and community leaders across urban and rural Arizona.
Additional community, education, and health partners will be identified and invited through the Q1 "who is missing" mapping at each regional table.
This planning year builds the coordination structure; the health outcomes it is designed to unlock — and that a future implementation phase would measure — align with Arizona's Health Improvement Plan (AzHIP):
During the planning year itself, success is measured by the agreements, governance, and shared metrics the coalition produces (see below) — the necessary structure before these health outcomes can be pursued at scale.
When the organizations serving a family cannot connect, families lose access to care and trust between families and institutions erodes — weakening social cohesion. Educational Opportunity is the on-ramp where families and coordinators first meet.
The families lost in the gaps are disproportionately rural, low-income, and Black and Brown Arizonans — and the organizations closest to them hold the least power in today's data-and-funding system.
Our regional tables are built to redistribute that power: frontline organizations and families lead in naming the problem and co-designing what comes next. Changing whose voice carries decision-making weight is itself a relational systems-change condition.
We are asking for the time and neutral facilitation for partners already in conversation to answer a question none of us can answer alone:
"What shared governance, data-sharing agreements, and resource-flow changes would let Arizona's community-health organizations act as one system for the families they share?"
The Force for Health serves as the neutral backbone and convener, bringing proven assets — our coalition-building experience, the 360° SCD Hub model, and the Chamber of Health framework — to the table for the coalition to build on. The specific governance model and shared infrastructure are what the coalition co-creates together.
Sustainability: the Directors' Tables and the agreements they produce are owned by the coalition and built to endure beyond the grant — a lasting structure ready to carry into implementation.
This Technical Assistance planning year is the deliberate first step toward a multi-year Systems Change Grant — building the coalition, agreements, and shared plan that a larger investment would put into motion.
To convene and neutrally facilitate three regional Chamber of Health Directors' Tables through a twelve-month planning year that produces a shared, community-owned framework for how Arizona's organizations coordinate care and share data for the families they serve.