Inequities exist throughout all of America's systems - education, economic, justice, social, political, and health. While strides have been made in addressing inequity in public and community spheres through developing coalitions and community organizations, these approaches haven’t involved the backend capacity issues faced by these same coalitions and organizations. Inevitably in these partnerships, due to capacity-limiting factors like administrative requirements, political power, or lack of infrastructure, larger organizations tend to take on the bulk of the work and therefore the bulk of the money. This leaves the engaged communities and community-based organizations to cobble together several funding sources to do the work they want to do, often leaving them without the ability to increase capacity, so over worked, under compensated, and all too often under appreciated or under recognized, even when the work they are able to do is equal, or even more impactful, culturally or geographically relevant, and connected to the populations the work is being done with - not for.
Moving communities and CBOs to a space where they can not only be a prime recipient of large funding, but also administer the funds successfully gives them the right to drive budgets and determining who receives what compensation, gives them the right to drive the legal relationship and who has ownership over the work that is completed and gives them more of the ability to hire and pay people from within their communities. Having these organizations as recipients of the funding drives the decisions and control from them rather than decision and control being driven from the other, larger organizations.
Through this vision and, associated current practices, our partnership is developing an approach to Administrative Equity. Administrative Equity, similar to health equity, is ensuring everyone has a fair and just opportunity to secure, manage and administer funds from any funder. We firmly believe that by addressing administrative equity we will bring our communities closer to the broader vision of health equity.