The Collective Impact Health Specialist Program supports community-directed, collaborative projects to improve community health in the Oregon and Washington communities of the Columbia River Gorge. Since 2014, the CIHS Program has secured more than $35 million in grant funding for more than 120 collaborative projects with 85 community partners. 

In 2024, we conducted a ripple effects mapping project to explore a decade of impacts of this collaborative, collective impact grantwriting effort. Our design team included the CIHS team and Chelsea Ruder (OHSU), who supported the project as an additional evaluator. This evaluation was process-focused, qualitative, and place-based; it centered community voice, incorporating storytelling and community building through a series of participant workshops and sensemaking sessions. It was about exploring community change and public health at the systems level, without ever losing what makes this place, and this work, so special: the people who live and work in the Gorge.

For more about this evaluation, check out this blog post we co-authored for the American Evaluation Association.

In late 2024, the CIHS model expanded to a second community on Oregon’s North Coast. We have been invited to continue in co-creation of learning and evaluative processes with the CIHS team, helping them apply what we’ve learned together and infuse evaluative and reflective practices into this new implementation and adaptation of the model. We’re meeting regularly to reflect, identify patterns and opportunities, map new resources and relationships and document as we go.