NC Investment Map

The Investment Map enables strategic alignment of public, philanthropic, and corporate dollars around a community health infrastructure – by catalyzing and guiding conversations among funders – while “buying more health” through creating wealth in North Carolina communities. The Map also fosters the deployment of public and private resources to support North Carolina through a racial equity, economic justice, and health lens.

In conversations with individuals, across the state over the past several years, the questions and responses are often the same when it comes to ensuring communities have the resources, they need to be healthy:

What works? Not just the usual stuff, but opportunities to cut to the root of the issue.

How would we know?

What assets can we leverage or gaps must we tackle?

And how much money – or other resources and commitments – would it take to implement what works?

The answers exist – in communities, organizations that have tackled these challenges on the ground, research centers, state agencies, and beyond. The Investment Map is simply a tool to pull this information together, so it may be put to use now at this most important time for North Carolina, when the suffering, opportunity for change, and the dollars in play to “buy health” are great.

The investment map is not a report. It is intended to be a living tool in a dynamic, visual format consisting of the following components:

• Statewide Criteria for determining Promising Strategies
• Statewide Investment Principles
• Statewide Measures
• Regional Investment Map for two regions
  • Gaps & Assets
  • Investment Required (delineated across public, philanthropic, private; new exiting resources; sequencing of types of capital)

The tool is also available in tabular format (please see the footplate on the NC Investment Map landing page for a link to the tabular format).

• Ensure strategic alignment of resources to best support North Carolinians goal of achieving optimal health
• Be accountable to addressing racial and economic disparities
• Leverage existing knowledge, expertise, and data
• Recognize this is an experiment and commit to learning and improving as we move forward

The Primary Stakeholders and Advisors are the individuals and organizations engaged to complete the regional analysis (relative to the Promising Strategies identified) and estimate the regional investment required.  Additionally, they provide local, on-the-ground perspectives and expertise to inform the work in creating the Investment Map. The Primary Stakeholders completed portions of the Investment Map coincided with their expertise in food, housing, economic development, and capacity-building. Collaboration was necessary to accomplish this goal.

Community voices were crucial to the development of the Investment Map that meets the guiding principles above, including being accountable for addressing racial and economic disparities. These voices informed the  project in two ways:

• The creation of Investment Map:
  • The Primary Stakeholders, who have long track records of working deeply in communities, were responsible for engaging secondary stakeholders to reflect and elevate community voices
  • Only the “promising strategies” which have been shaped and informed by communities were eligible for inclusion in the Investment Map
• The use of Investment Map
  • The goal of the Investment Map is that communities will have a tool to more effectively engage public and private institutions and, likewise, such institutions can use the tool to enable thoughtful and responsible communities

Specific Promising Strategies were not prioritized as part of the initial Investment Map development. Our primary focus was identifying the Promising Strategies for food and housing using criteria established by the Advisory Group and Primary Stakeholders. Specific prioritization of these strategies must be done at the local level or with local/community guidance. Additional, prioritization activities, based on differing criteria, are outlined in the pathways for immediate uses.

One of the design principles is to leverage existing knowledge, expertise, and data – the intent is to not duplicate efforts. The Primary Stakeholders involved in compiling the Investment Map utilized existing statistics and reports as much as possible. In particular, this held true when creating the promising strategies, measures, and regional gaps, assets, and resources.

The regions selected were chosen by the Primary Stakeholders and other key advisors using the criteria below:

• Areas hardest hit by COVID-19 clinical and health crisis
• Areas with racial and health disparities
• Areas with historically marginalized populations
• Areas with opportunity for institutional investment (ex. philanthropy, insurers, health systems, academic institutions)

The Map specifies the dollars required to implement a Promising Strategy in a region – not the dollars already deployed towards that strategy. This requires pulling together the relevant actors to understand (1) current investment and (2) how to effectively align dollars going forward to enact this Promising Strategy.

A monitoring and measurement effort will be needed to track investments made against and tied to each Promising Strategy to understand the change.

Through numerous conversations with stakeholders across NC, and in our national work, we are confident an investment map in NC does not already exist. We have not encountered a direct analog to what we are aiming to build which is the main reason we need to approach this work with a collaborative and experimental mindset.

Reports get “put on a shelf” because there is a gap in translating reports into investment.  Stakeholders across NC have pointed to multiple reports which identify Promising Strategies, but were not aware of any plan which ties those best practices to capital requirements for implementation. The purpose of the Investment Map is to bridge this gap by quantifying the amount, type, and sequencing of investments required to implement Promising Strategies within a region and across the state. The tool is intended to be actively used by multiple stakeholders to inform public and private investments.