1702-12972

Florida: Support to the Tampa Bay Healthcare Collaborative (TBHC) to act as a lead convener in the Tampa Bay region as part of the Grassroots Engagement Strategy. TBHC is a regional network of health and social service organizations, providers, agencies, and community programs addressing the health and healthcare needs in the Tampa Bay. The "Achieving Oral Heath Equity in Tampa Bay" (AOHE) Initiative works to deepen the leadership capacity of grassroots organizations on a community, county, and regional level. Throughout the grant Year 2, TBHC continued to leverage existing relationships and cultivate new relationships to engage community stakeholders; held a second annual “Oral Health Planning Session” to reinforce initiative’s goals, review progress and assessment data, and develop potential solutions; convened oral health stakeholders representing diverse backgrounds to learn more about the Oral Health 2020 network and discuss opportunities for collaboration; shared the oral health assessment results and sought recommendations during a community stakeholder forum; catalyzed the development of the State Alignment Network; and leveraged funding from the DentaQuest Foundation to acquire additional support from a local foundation to develop a pilot project in Wimauma, FL. Oral Health 2020 investment of $100,000 will be used to support the following priority areas: advocacy, community collaboration, and education. Specifically, TBHC will work to build advocacy capacity for identified stakeholders, maintain existing relationships and build relationships with new stakeholders, and curate messages and resources to use in education and advocacy efforts. All actions described in the proposal work plan for the Year 3 work were organized around the systems change framework (policy, financing, care and community). This proposal aligns with the Oral Health 2020 Goal 6 of improving the public perception of the value of oral health to overall health and the target that oral health is increasingly included in health dialogue and public policy.