What’s an ACH?
An Accountable Community for Health (ACH) is a community-driven collaborative dedicated to making lasting and transformational change in the health of a community and forwarding the goal of health equity. ACHs provide residents and key partners from diverse sectors an infrastructure for working together to change systems, advance equity and build stronger, more cohesive communities prepared to address both existing and emerging health challenges over the long term. The ACH’s key roles—elevating community voices, facilitating multi-sector dialogues and aligning organizations and systems—fuels powerful and sustainable changes that reflect the needs of the community.
The Fundamentals
Video: Voices of ACH leaders across the state
The Value of the ACH Model
Accountable Communities for Health (ACHs) make transformational change possible, helping communities accomplish more than what can be done in health care, government or community settings alone.
“What worked really well…was when we had committed public health leadership coupled with strong, visionary, charismatic CBO leadership and a strong resident leader. When we had that trifecta, things were moving and shaking in all the right places.”
— East San Jose PEACE Partnership
Critical to every ACH is the presence of a skilled and experienced Backbone entity to coordinate the ACH, working across organizations to develop a shared, collaborative mindset that can shepard systemic change.
While partners and residents assume a range of leadership roles within the ACH, the Backbone is the glue that keeps the ACH together—nurturing relationships while managing priorities, timelines, and communications to sustain the momentum of the ACH’s strategies to advance health equity and community health.
A Strong, Resourced “Backbone” Supports ACH Infrastructure
The ACH’s Key Functions
Each ACH serves five key functions that permit long-term collective action and systems change, all while strategically advancing equity.
For decades, long-standing inequities have exacerbated health issues in low-income communities and communities of color, resulting in persistent health disparities. ACHs provide a powerful framework for tackling those inequities by breaking down barriers and promoting a new way of working together.
The Bottom Line
ACHs rely on three core principles to marshal the collective action and transformational systems change that lead to healthier, stronger, more equitable communities:
The ACH Framework
Community residents are too often excluded from critical decisions that impact their health. ACHs reengineer this reality by placing residents at the heart of all community health-related discussions. ACHs level the playing field by ensuring that residents have a prominent and active role in their ACH, helping to ensure that equity—and the realities that shape their health—is paramount.
Center Community Voice
ACHs include not only traditional healthcare and public health systems, but also partnerships that embrace the social drivers of health because improving health outcomes for all requires that health and other sectors, which reflect the various contributing factors needed for healthy communities, work in concert.
Multi-Sector Engagement
ACHs help partners shift from transactional, program-specific approaches to a new norm where participants align local community interests, incubate fresh ideas and expand collective capacity. Built on a foundation of transparency and data sharing, this alignment results in greater impact than any one entity could achieve alone. By ensuring both transparency and accountability, trust is built among ACH members and the community.