In June 2020, the RERR Team’s Provider Working Group—a group of more than 40 healthcare providers, including Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), academic medical centers, safety net hospitals, community members, and the Chicago Department of Public Health—released a powerful joint statement declaring racism a public health crisis and making seven commitments to improve health equity at their individual institutions and as a collective. Civic Consulting Alliance facilitated development of this statement.

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In August 2020, the Provider Working Group sought to translate its unprecedented collaborative statement into concrete action by creating the Racial Equity in Healthcare Progress Report—a tool to track progress and hold themselves accountable to improving health equity. Civic Consulting Alliance collaborated with a pro bono team from Oliver Wyman to develop metrics across four topics—People, Patients, Organization, and Community; worked with a pro bono fellow from KPMG to craft a stakeholder engagement plan and interview healthcare providers, community leaders, and health experts; created a long-term plan and vision for the Progress Report to drive systemic change; and launched a pilot with nine healthcare providers. The resulting Progress Report is the first assessment of its kind to measure racial equity across hospitals and FQHCs in one ecosystem. In February 2021, we launched the Progress Report across all 40 Provider Working Group members, and in spring 2021 transitioned ownership to the Illinois Hospital Association (IHA) to ensure it is sustainably adopted statewide.

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During our work with the RERR Team, Civic Consulting Alliance built and convened the community groups that later supported Protect Chicago Plus—the City’s hyperlocal vaccination effort in 15 predominantly Black and Latinx community areas that it prioritized according to the City’s Community COVID Vulnerability Index, in order to promote equitable vaccine access and to increase vaccine uptake. Leveraging the structure, framework, and relationships we developed with the RERR Team, we supported neighborhood pilots of Protect Chicago Plus in Belmont Cragin, Little Village, Gage Park, and Austin in late 2020 and early 2021, working with community-based organizations to identify trusted messengers, to convene weekly, and to review outreach activities, communications, resource needs, and COVID-19 rates at the Census tract level. This contributed to higher first-dose vaccination rates in those neighborhoods in February and March 2021 compared to Chicago overall.

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Given the success of the RERR Team’s collaborative model, the Team sought to hone its focus on the root challenges that led to the COVID-19 crisis’ disproportionate impact on communities of color. In summer 2021, Civic Consulting Alliance created a framework to guide the City’s growing health equity ecosystem, which positions the RERR Team to support the City’s Healthy Chicago 2025 initiative. Healthy Chicago 2025 aims to leverage community-driven approaches to promote equitable health outcomes, advocate for policy and system changes to address the social determinants of health (e.g. education, housing, violence prevention), and support the development of long-term community health improvement plans.

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