About
“"Research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being.” ~ Dr. Dhruv Khullar, The New York Times, December 2016
JUSTICEWISE HISTORY
Justicewise was founded in 2017 to bring change management expertise (the people side of change) to groups working on local community challenges. Justicewise contributed to Collective Impact projects in California and Georgia, which gave us front-row seats to the benefits and pitfalls of this popular framework for system change.
Our early projects were mostly with Public Health departments, where we learned about the mismatch between current funding mechanisms that favor individual contribution over collaborations that improve the performance of whole systems. The matter of who gets credit for systemwide improvement is a tricky question. The difficulty in answering it has a profound impact on funding for Public Health and cross-sector collaboration. In 2019, Justicewise transitioned from an LLC to a nonprofit to better sustain our work.
Now, Justicewise is a fiscally sponsored project of Inquiring Systems, a 501c3 corporation. Thanks to Inquiring Systems and generous financial support from nonprofit healthcare systems, community foundations, and individual donors, we apply what we've learned over the years to help local systems of care collaborate for greater impact.
WHO WE ARE
Justicewise is a community-driven information network whose mission is to advance health equity by increasing access to information. We connect partners at the forefront of social service delivery and people in the community who use those services through customized tools that increase the flow of information within and across the system. We build equity into the foundation of our bilingual information-sharing tools by incorporating feedback from Spanish and English customers from the project's inception.
OUR VISION
Justicewise envisions a future where communities work together to solve their toughest challenges in ways that improve the lives of all residents. Below are the principles that guide our approach:
we believe we are all interconnected
we believe living among neighbors who suffer from poverty and neglect is overwhelming because it seems unsolvable, so many of us harden our hearts to this suffering in order to go about our lives.
we believe the cost of hardening our hearts is that we slowly become disconnected from ourselves and the loved ones who surround us, not to mention the physical cost, evidenced by the fact that heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States.
we believe rekindling caring hearts regenerates the well-being of whole communities. That's why we seek to connect neighbors and build tools that make it easier to support those who have fallen on hard times.
WHAT WE DO
Justicewise hosts community events and builds technology that helps people work together for the good of their community. Our unique model is powered by socially-minded tech volunteers, public health interns, and the hearts, hands, and firsthand knowledge of local providers and advocates.
Text Food/Text Comida is a free cross-sector collaboration tool designed to share timely information about food security in Sonoma County. Information for renters, families with young children, and other groups is coming soon. We have two other collaboration tools in development, designed in partnership with the organizations already doing the work in our community.
The iBelong Project and Annual Festival of Belonging was paused during the pandemic. The project, founded in 2019, began with a question: "How would a healthy community support neighbors who were being evicted with nowhere to go?" The project's goal is to reconnect housed community members afflicted with a type of inner homelessness called "social isolation" with those who are physically homeless or bereft of life's necessities. We believe both conditions share a root cause whose solution lies in the fundamental human need to connect and belong.
Meet Our Founder,
Gillian Haley
Gillian Haley
Ms. Haley is an alumna of Accenture’s Process Excellence and Change Enablement practice, where she led change strategy in Fortune 500 companies implementing digital transformation on a global scale. Even so, she is the first to admit there is no roadmap for navigating the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century. What matters most is how we show up to do the work. Ms. Haley is a specialist in the people side of change who works with communities to build alignment for regenerative social change. She knows that taking time to understand the needs and beliefs of those we seek to change is the only way to create lasting change. Using this approach, Ms. Haley secured an agreement to drop a multiparty lawsuit while repairing relationships. She also saved a project team over a quarter-million dollars in development expenses by helping the team better understand the needs of a critical business unit. Currently, Ms. Haley brings her experience to Justicewise, where she works at the intersection of food security, information access, and belonging.
Read More: Interview With Gillian Haley
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