Riverside Community Health Foundation

Supplementing community needs and the continuum of care

Riverside Community Health Foundation (RCHF) is a nonprofit dedicated to community health, engagement, and education. Its mission is to improve the well-being of its community, and its strategic goals and initiatives address public health needs – in other words, they supplement where the gaps are in healthcare.

Lauren Randall, Health Education and Evaluation Specialist, talks about managing strategy for community health with ClearPoint Strategy in our customer interview. 

Watch the full video here!

About Riverside Community Health Foundation

Riverside Community Health Foundation (RCHF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity based in Riverside, California. It opened in 1997. Its mission is to improve the health and well-being of its community. RCHF runs health education and fitness programs that aim to increase health knowledge and access to fitness. It is also the community engagement partner for the Eastside Climate Collaborative, Riverside's project under the state Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) program, and convenes the project's Community Engagement Workgroup. Learn more at rchf.org.

The Challenge

In Randall’s words, Riverside Community Health Foundation “supplements community needs and the continuum of care.” RCHF manages a diverse portfolio of health-related projects, including grants from the state, community engagement initiatives, and performance tracking for health improvement programs. It needed an efficient way to set goals, develop new programs, and deploy resources effectively while staying transparent.

ClearPoint Strategy Implementation

ClearPoint supports a shared workflow across RCHF’s three main branches:

1. The three clinics, operating under a federally qualified healthcare system, can better manage and report on patient care and health outcomes. 
2. The direct programming branch tracks initiatives and outcomes more closely, so programs meet community health needs. 
3. The grant work division, which writes new grant applications and manages existing grants, uses ClearPoint for detailed reporting and oversight, increasing transparency and accountability. 

ClearPoint also reaches into RCHF’s operations, including human resources, where it helps align the foundation’s human capital strategies with its mission and goals.

Streamlining Grant Management

RCHF uses ClearPoint to manage direct programming, most of which is grant-funded. After receiving the Transformative Climate Communities grant from the state, RCHF adopted ClearPoint to manage its grants.

ClearPoint’s centralized system lets RCHF track all grant-related activities, meet state compliance requirements, and demonstrate the real-world impact of the funded projects.

The TCC’s Annual Indicator Report focuses on eight detailed activities contributing to the region’s sustainable development. In collaboration with eight local partners serving the community, RCHF has taken the lead in Community Engagement and is the central point for tracking the progress of all eight projects. 

Because the program requires collecting data from eight other organizations, RCHF uses workflows to send automated reminders to grant partners to update statuses. ClearPoint’s real-time reporting gives RCHF a solid basis for reporting back to the state and keeps data flowing.

At the end of the year we have this beautiful report where I feel very confident about the data and information reporting back to the state. 

Health Strategies

Randall works for the evaluation team and uses ClearPoint to look at how well the organization executes its plans and at the impact on local communities. Before Randall joined the foundation, strategic management had a notable gap: leadership defined the scope of work each year but seldom revisited the plan until the next, which made project management static and retrospective.

ClearPoint helps RCHF retain lessons learned and share them across the team, building a culture of continuous improvement. According to Randall, ClearPoint brings the various moving parts of operations together and makes evaluating their work honest and objective. 

Especially working as a nonprofit, it’s important to be able to demonstrate the impact you’re making and what you actually were able to do with dollars that you received – which in turn, turns into more money for us.

Direct programming involves tracking 37 programs, their process and outcome measures, and the activities that contribute to them, and people can easily see the “why” behind ClearPoint. 

See RCHF’s program tracking in ClearPoint in our webinar (10:25)

Departmental Scope of Work

RCHF has fully implemented ClearPoint across all departments. These divisional scorecards are less detailed than the overall Health Strategies system, but they give the overview needed to track activities, processes, and impact measures at the right level.

Under Randall’s guidance, the departments planned data visualizations of various indicators that would highlight trends and let the organization compare against past performance.

Randall sees ClearPoint as a key asset for RCHF’s mission. Coming out of the pandemic, the foundation was ready to engage actively with the community again. With ClearPoint, RCHF can provide services, demonstrate their effectiveness, and show the reasons behind its strategies.

Our workload is getting larger. Having something like ClearPoint to keep us organized and focused, making sure that there are no missing pieces to our operations, is a really great thing.

Strategic Advice

RCHF’s experience shows a truth about any tool: “It is what you make of it.” By using the platform fully, the organization gets a complete view of the impact of its efforts. RCHF encourages users to learn the system’s purpose and navigate it with confidence. Once the ClearPoint elements and reporting capabilities are clear, the foundation finds, it can build a solid framework for tracking and showing impact.