Community Initiatives (CIs) are a fundamental part of how Alliance members foster resilient, healthy communities and improve health and wellbeing at the population level. Through advocacy and community organizing, CIs achieve collective social, environmental, and/or policy change that benefits whole communities. They are often community-led and are always delivered in partnership with community members and organizations.
Although they are essential, CIs are often misunderstood or overlooked by policymakers and funders. The Alliance is committed to helping our members collect and share information about their CIs in order to facilitate spread, scale, continuous improvement, and advocacy. This is why we are launching a new tool that will enable our members to record this information directly in PS Suite. The new process was developed with input from Alliance members and has been designed to capture the most important information in a concise, usable way. We will be pilot-testing it with a small number of member organizations in the summer of 2025 and rolling it out to all CHC members who use PS Suite in mid-September.
To help you prepare for these changes, we'll be releasing two custom forms and an updated user manual in early September and hosting a webinar on September 17. We will continue to facilitate implementation of the new process with a follow-up Q&A session on October 22 as well as ongoing support.