NC Investment Map
In recent years, stakeholders across North Carolina have mobilized behind an effort to buy and deliver health, not only healthcare. There is clear evidence that having an unmet resource need - such as food insecurity, housing instability, unmet transportation needs, or interpersonal violence - can negatively affect health while also increasing health care use and costs. While many stakeholders across public agencies, philanthropies, and private organizations have made and continue to invest in these social drivers of health, most of these investments have been largely uncoordinated across funders.
In an effort to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of investments in social drivers of health, a group of over 45 stakeholders came together to create the North Carolina Investment Map. The Investment Map is a strategic and structured framework for mobilizing, aligning, and braiding resources from public and private stakeholders in a coordinated way, to both improve health outcomes and strengthen the underlying economic context that enables health. The Investment Map initially focuses on ensuring sufficient healthy food and safe, affordable housing, through an economic development lens.
Starting with access to healthy food and safe housing, the “promising strategies” identified in the Investment Map identify the greatest opportunities for investment and highlight the critical role local businesses and community-based organizations can and should play as part of the solution. It also lays out how different funding strategies can be braided in these investments.