For the past decade, The BUILD Health Challenge® has brought together community-based organizations, health care partners, and public health agencies to drive meaningful change in communities across the United States. Guided by its core principles of bold, upstream, integrated, local, and data-driven action, BUILD has developed a collaborative model that offers valuable lessons for funders and leaders seeking to invest in community health and advance health equity. To mark its tenth anniversary, BUILD released a learning brief that reflects on its journey and distills insights from years of collaborative investment and practice.
The brief highlights how a well-designed collaborative structure has been central to BUILD’s impact. By bringing together national and regional funders with diverse priorities and perspectives, the initiative created a shared space for experimentation and innovation while reducing risk for individual funders. This structure enabled collective investment in ambitious, systems-level change rooted in local community needs, while simultaneously supporting a broader national agenda for health equity.
A strong culture of learning has also been a defining feature of the BUILD approach. From the outset, funders and partners emphasized adaptability, reflection, and continuous improvement, allowing the model to evolve in response to community feedback and changing conditions. This learning-driven mindset supported the refinement of trust-based practices and strengthened the initiative’s focus on authentic community engagement, shared decision-making, local leadership, and racial justice.
Equal Measure, BUILD’s long-term learning and evaluation partner, played a key role in embedding learning into the initiative. Through structured feedback loops and data collection from grantees and community members, BUILD was able to assess how its guiding principles interacted at the local level and adjust strategies accordingly. This approach ensured that evaluation supported real-time learning rather than retrospective assessment alone.
The collaborative funding model also generated benefits beyond pooled resources. National funders contributed systems-level expertise and networks, while regional funders brought deep place-based knowledge, enabling more effective and context-sensitive investments. In many cases, BUILD funding helped unlock additional local and regional resources, including matching support from health care partners, increasing both the reach and sustainability of community health initiatives.
Overall, BUILD’s experience demonstrates that investing in collaborative approaches to community health can drive stronger, more equitable outcomes when funders commit to shared learning, flexible structures, and trust-based partnerships. These lessons offer a practical framework for future investments aimed at addressing complex health challenges through community-led, systems-oriented solutions.
