Shift Launches Health Sector Participatory Investing Initiative

Shift Health Accelerator is excited to announce the launch of a health sector participatory investing initiative. Over the past few years Shift has worked to support healthcare institutions deliver on their health equity commitments. This new initiative will grow this work to test participatory and trust-building approaches applied to healthcare investment capital, enabling a new model for health and economic justice in the field that actualizes equitable approaches.

We believe that healthcare institutions must grapple with the reality that equity is realized not just through what gets funded, but how. To ensure true power-shifting and address root causes of health inequities, we must invest in truly participatory, community-led processes. In our experience, this is a pathway to creating better health outcomes. Through this initiative, institutional leaders will advance work that stands to benefit both communities facing stark health inequities and the health ecosystem -- whether it is a move toward value-based care, identifying efficiencies in understanding community needs and avoiding costly downstream, preventable illness, and/or accelerating the effectiveness in addressing health inequities and mission alignment.  

This initiative will support health system leaders in operationalizing health equity commitments through a learning cohort and 1:1 consulting in 2024, alongside support for testing participatory investing with health system capital. Shift will bring technical expertise and community advisors to test ways for investments and terms to designed in concert with potential loan recipients and community leaders. 

Who can participate? The net we are currently casting is intentionally wide to build a range of potential ways to seed participatory investing across the health ecosystem. We envision hospital systems, health plans, public health, impact investors, health funders, health technology platforms -- all systems that might have capital to deploy using participatory practices -- to be well-positioned to make meaningful and participatory investments using their capital. For example, we welcome system leaders seeking to invest in housing, entrepreneurship, and health technology to address the social determinants of health, and health leaders with flexible capital that can test community owned priority setting and governance. We are also interested in applying a participatory lens to the investments themselves, such as a community-owned social needs tech platform that accrues value to patients and communities or investments in land trust models and other community governed assets. 

This initiative will build upon tests of change in the field, including participatory budgeting, trust-based philanthropy, and participatory grantmaking, including our experience advancing participatory investing in the philanthropic sector, as well as participatory grantmaking accelerating health equity efforts across California.

Check out our initiative description and get in touch to explore partnership: Shift Healthcare Participatory Investing Initiative