Meet the Oregon Public Health Institute!
The Oregon Public Health Institute Team
Oregon Public Health Institute’s mission is to improve health and advance equity, but OPHI knows we’ll never achieve those goals by working only within the health sector. That’s why we are excited to be part of the NWEJC, where we serve as the lead outreach partner for Washington State and as a technical assistance provider.
We borrow Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s definition of health equity, which is “everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible” – and getting to health equity means addressing environmental justice issues that impact our communities in the Pacific Northwest: clean water, air, and soil; extreme heat and climate change; impacts of wildfires; Tribal sovereignty and Indigenous environmental stewardship; access to safe and healthy greenspace; and more. It also means ensuring decision-making rests with impacted communities, and that those communities have the resources they need to lead solutions.
OPHI’s team is a multilingual and multiracial group of community health pros, nonprofit wizards, and policy nerds who bring diverse professional and lived experience to our work. Since our founding in 1999 we have partnered with communities, government, businesses, and others to create and implement community-led solutions to health equity challenges. We’re excited to bring this experience to the NWEJC. Through the Center, we offer technical assistance in a number of areas, including:
Cross-sector communication: Telling your environmental justice story to public health and healthcare audiences (including funders)
Organization, project, and collaborative startup: planning support (strategic planning, action planning, community visioning, prioritization, etc); fund and business development planning
Administrative and finance coaching for CBOs and emerging efforts: grant management and tracking systems; project management approaches; bookkeeping setup and financial workflows; organizational administrative and operating system analysis and recommendations; getting your board on board.
Leadership development and mentoring
Fund development and proposal development to help you resource your work
Grantmaking processes and community outreach for government and other funders investing in environmental justice
Research to support issue identification, strategy, fund development, and policy; and process and impact evaluation for CBOs.
And more!
If you want to learn more about the (free!) technical assistance that OPHI and other NWEJC partners can offer through the NWEJC, start by filling out this quick intake form and the Center will reach out to you. If you’re in Washington State and want to learn more about what the NWEJC has to offer, or to suggest a conference or other event we should attend, drop us a line – we would love to meet you.