Introducing Health Justice Intelligence: Turning Insight Into Action

For more than 25 years, Community Catalyst has worked alongside partners in communities across the country to advance health justice by combining community leadership, organizing, policy expertise, and lessons learned from lived experiences. Together, we've built powerful movements that have expanded access to care, reduced medical debt, strengthened accountability, and improved health outcomes in communities nationwide. 

Now, we're excited to share a new strategic priority designed to help our collective work move even further: Health Justice Intelligence.

Right now, big decisions from health systems that are critical to a community’s wellbeing are made based on data and experience that systems, not communities, say is important.  

At the same time, advocates, organizers, policymakers, and funders face a common challenge that we likely know all too well: there is no shared infrastructure for understanding what is working, where systems are breaking down, and how harm is showing up in real time. 

Health Justice Intelligence is Community Catalyst's response to that challenge. 

This initiative brings together personal stories, health and economic data, organizing power, and implementation insights to create actionable, real-time intelligence that helps identify healthcare access, affordability and accountability problems earlier — and at the community level — and enhances the ability of state and community groups to intervene. This will enable communities to shape their health systems to address the issues and challenges that people in their own words identify — not just problems based on narrow data collected by the government, insurers, or health systems. 

The foundation for this work has been years in the making — and we wouldn’t be here without you.  

Through our partnerships and storytelling efforts, we've received more than 14,000 stories from people across 45 states that detail what healthcare access really looks like in our country. These stories reveal patterns and realities that traditional data alone often misses. Health Justice Intelligence builds on that legacy by treating lived experience not as anecdotal evidence, but as essential information for understanding how policies and systems affect people's lives. 

After all, data without a story is just a number. 

Health Justice Intelligence is intended to serve as the connective tissue across the health justice field — helping our partners better describe and discuss emerging challenges, identify opportunities for intervention, and demonstrate impact at scale. 

We invite you to learn more about this work and how it fits into Community Catalyst's broader vision for advancing access, affordability, and accountability in health care. 

Learn more about Health Justice Intelligence in our new blog.

Thank you for your partnership and for the work you do every day to build a health system that works for everyone.