Collaborative Learning and Networking Across New Jersey

Collaborative Learning and Networking Across New Jersey 

2020–2022

New Jersey State

Overview

New Jersey Health Initiatives (NJHI) is the statewide grantmaking program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. NJHI supports innovations and drives conversations to build healthier communities through grantmaking across the State of New Jersey. The NJHI program encourages collaboration across sectors in the state’s communities to foster deep relationships committed to long-term change in order to meet the health needs of the state’s diverse populations and afford everyone the opportunity to live the healthiest life possible.

Our Support

Healthy Places by Design began its partnership with New Jersey Health Initiatives (NJHI) in 2018 by providing collaborative learning and networking services for the Upstream Action Acceleration initiative to reach NJHI’s goal of creating “a smart network of different coalitions across the state” for cross-site and cross-sector learning, and to achieve broad impact. Success in building a learning collaborative among the Upstream Action Acceleration grantees created opportunities to expand it to all of NJHI’s grantees and coalitions partners.

The design of the learning collaborative plan provides a mix of activities to support grantees and community partners in learning new information and skills, sharing experiences and successes, and networking to build peer-to-peer relationships. The activities are based on emergent interests and needs, and regular input from grantees and community partners in order to ensure that they are relevant, useful, and engaging. Services that Healthy Places by Design provides includes:

• Managing a learning collaborative that engages community leaders and partners across New Jersey coalitions and communities,
• Leading the development and implementation of virtual and in-person collaborative learning and networking activities,
• Contributing content for the NJHI webpage which serves as a resource hub,
• Serving as a strategic partner and supporting field building and dissemination efforts.

Healthy Places by Design also manages NJHI’s Community Collaborative Learning Funds which supports collaboration across communities to engage in mutually beneficial learning, accelerate action or statewide impact, address health equity, and generate learnings that can help other communities to become healthier and more equitable.