About Us

When asked about our "why," our answer is simple: because it’s needed.

Our current U.S. systems are fragmented, rooted in racism, and continue to perpetuate the oppression of disenfranchised communities, and marked by disparate outcomes for Black, Brown, and Indigenous (BBI)
communities. The current reality has resulted in distrust from impacted communities. To address health inequities and improve outcomes for the most impacted communities, public health, medical, and social services systems must align service delivery and finance mechanisms for a more coordinated, holistic, and person-centered care, while shifting the model of development through culturally resonant solutions developed and co-implemented by BBI communities.

Additionally, BBI communities are often neglected from opportunities to generate knowledge that decolonizes and expands the evidence base on what is truly effective. Our communities are often the subjects of research, but not often enough, the authors of our wisdom, stories, interventions, and practices in academic journals.

Systems Alignment Innovation Hub (SAIH) aims to remediate this problem by continuing its work and adding new activities driven by community feedback to better support community-based organizations (CBOs) situated within and led by racially marginalized and historically disenfranchised communities by:

● investing in research that addresses barriers identified by racially marginalized
and underserved communities while amplifying solutions co-designed by those
communities in partnership with public health, medical, and social service sectors

● investing in research approaches and “ways of knowing” that shift from a deficit
based and pathologizing needs analysis approach in an attempt to "fix”
disenfranchised communities to an asset oriented and community-led systems
alignment approach that addresses structural racism unapologetically

● investing in research that seeks to heal the long history of health inequity and in
approaches that shift resources and power back to Black, Brown, and Indigenous
communities that center their cultural assets, community knowledge, and
indigenous practices that are often devalued, and not part of the
evidence-base

SAIH deeply believes that the long-term impact of our work will  advance the decolonization of existing research evidence and praxis by expanding the knowledge of what works, grounded in the Indigenous wisdom, cultural assets, and practices of racially marginalized and historically disenfranchised communities who are often devalued and underfunded. Our work contributes to the acceleration of undoing structural racism at the national, state, and local levels by uplifting community-led and co-designed strategies.