Articles and Publications

Access to abortion care in Ohio. The chance to support city candidates with democracy vouchers in Seattle. Promoting judicial ethics in Colorado. An $11 an hour minimum wage in Arkansas. What do these policy changes have in common? They were all enacted through the ballot initiative process, and they all support healthy, thriving communities, both in process and in outcome. But multiple states are seeing efforts to curtail the ballot measure process, limiting the voices of voters.

In the last few years, there has been an increased number of extreme weather events, including wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves in the United States. In 2023, the United States experienced 28 disasters that cost at least $1 billion, the largest number of billion-dollar disasters in a single year on record (Smith 2024). While some areas of the country are more susceptible to these threats, there are no regions immune to disasters. According to a recent Gallup poll, 37 percent of adults in the United States report they have been personally impacted by at least one extreme weather event in the last two years, which is higher than the 2022/2023 survey result at 33 percent.

After the 2018 Camp Fire – the most destructive and deadly wildfire in California’s history – the California Accountable Communities for Health Initiative (CACHI) understood that the community needed more than programming to recover. In response, the region’s Accountable Community for Health (ACH) was created – a community-rooted, cross-sector collaborative that invests in local leadership to shift systems, influence policy, and address both long-standing inequities and urgent crises.