About

The Center for Cross-Cultural Health (CCCH) has been in operation since 1997 as a 501(c)3 organization. The early mission of CCCH was To integrate culture into health. CCCH developed cultural competency programs, organization assessment tools, and education and training resources.
In 2008, CCCH and the International Health Education Alliance (IHEA) merged. The role of IHEA was to work with underserved populations, especially immigrants and refugees, to identify and define their community’s health needs and to establish new education programs to address these needs.  IHEA’s relationships and knowledge of community augmented the expertise and knowledge CCCH had with health care systems. 
Continued demographic changes, the documented growth in health disparities, and the understanding that no one group can solve health dispariteis alone have been the impetus for CCCH to broaden its work to look beyond individual behavior and genetics to the underlying casues of health disparities.  By early 2009, a new mission, vision, goals and values laid the foundation for a broader and deeper approach.  The mission “To advance health equity by addressing the root causes of poor health and supporting equal opportunities for good health” puts forth a clear mandate for future work.

The strength of CCCH is its ability to work in the space between healthcare organizations/ institutions and the communities who experience health disparities. Because CCCH understands the unique qualities of the medical culture, and how changes are made there, we continue to assist health and human service organizations implement practices to enhance the provision of culturally appropriate services. CCCH also understands how change occurs within community.  Our relationships with multiple communities, including ethnic, immigrant, and refugee communities, helps us to understand what barriers they encounter to health and healthcare. These two areas of expertise prepare us for the role we play we play as a bridge between communities experiencing the greatest disparities and healthcare organizations and systems. 
Our goals are to:

• Collaborate with ethnic and cultural communities to identify, understand and act on disparities in health and in health care.
• Co-create solutions with those communities that build on the knowledge, skills, tradition, culture and resources of the community.
• Develop leaders with skills to understand and act on the root causes of health disparities.
• Expand the understanding and capacity of health care organizations to provide culturally appropriate services.
• Provide ethnic based community organizations, medical organizations, and other key stakeholders with tools and resources to effectively develop, implement and evaluate initiatives to eliminate disparities.
• Create spaces where these diverse stakeholders come together to learn about each other, build relationships and discover their unique capacities to address disparities and increase health equity.