PRINCETON—The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) today announced nine communities chosen to receive the 2024 RWJF Culture of Health Prize. The Prize celebrates communities that have made incredible strides toward building safe and supportive places where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. Prize winners are reshaping food systems, emboldening youth leaders, honoring elders, protecting the environment, and changing the narrative about their communities.
Prize winners take unique approaches to health—but they share common strengths. From building local power, forging cross-sector partnerships, building economic sovereignty, advancing policy reform, and reclaiming cultural practices, Prize winners are advancing lasting solutions to ensure health is no longer a privilege for some, but a right for all.
The 2024 Prize-winning communities illustrate the range and magnitude of those solutions and their real-world implications. Prize winners include rural areas, towns, cities, tribes, reservations, and counties. The Prize communities are the City of Jurupa Valley, California; City of Trenton, New Jersey; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Juneau, Alaska; Lower Eastern Shore, Maryland, and Sussex County, Delaware; Milwaukee County, Wisconsin; Molokaʻi, Hawaii; Sacramento, California; and Tribes in the Great Lakes Region.
These communities demonstrate an unwavering commitment to creating a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right. At a time when our shared values are under assault, their leadership and innovation in the face of adversity are models for partners everywhere for creating a better world, one where everyone’s children and grandchildren can thrive.
—Richard E. Besser, MD, RWJF President and CEO
Since 2013, 68 communities across the United States have been awarded the RWJF Culture of Health Prize. Their work highlights community-led solutions and the possibility of a more equitable world.
About the Winners
City of Jurupa Valley, California
Seated at the crossroads of major trade and transport arteries in Southern California, Jurupa Valley is also a nexus of local organizing and leadership development. It is a multicultural beating heart for what it means to collectively build both community health and community power. Following years of local advocacy and organizing, Jurupa Valley communities were officially incorporated into one city in 2011. With that designation came the resident-led representative power to roll back decades of unregulated industrial pollution and environmental destruction. This new future—one where residents have a say in public policy and everyone has what they need to provide for their family and stay healthy—is being cultivated across Jurupa Valley every day. Once listed as the most contaminated site in California, Jurupa Valley is now a leader in revitalizing healthy food systems, developing new community leadership, promoting cross-sector partnership, and facilitating dozens of bilingual community engagement sessions to align city resources with the community’s evolving health needs. Jurupa Valley may be one of California’s newest cities, but its dedication to building a healthy, safe, and thriving community is generations in the making.
The site of a decisive American victory during the War of Independence, Trenton, New Jersey’s Revolutionary roots run deep and remain strong. Its residents are reimagining what communities can be when no one is hungry, neighbors have a say in the laws that affect their lives, and moms have safe, respectful healthcare during and after pregnancy. In the multiracial and multi-ethnic city, Black and Latino Trentonians are leading the charge to fulfill their vision for a healthy and prosperous region where they keep each other safe. Trenton, the state capital, repeatedly models how community engagement can lead to policy change that centers public health, safety, and wellbeing. Through the tireless work of a multisector partnership of healthcare organizations, city agencies, and health service providers, Trenton has overhauled numerous public services and policies to more effectively prevent violence, promote maternal and infant health, advance food security, and invest in communities. It has successfully redesigned response systems so that health workers trained in de-escalation are the first line of contact in nonviolent emergencies. The city has also established mobile food banks to come to doctors’ offices to provide people better access to vital services. Trenton knows that when people work together to build power and public health, they can win revolutionary policies that work for everyone.
A new generation of leaders in Green Bay, Wisconsin, is uniting across cultures to build people power. Rooted in the cultures and voices of all the communities that call Green Bay home, local leaders in government, business, sports, and community-based organizations are collaborating on interconnected initiatives. These issues include everything from housing, to food security, from health services, to making the city a welcoming and supportive place for everyone. Learning about the changing dynamics of the city’s population was critical. Leaders implemented a new framework for measuring wellbeing, providing insight into residents’ physical health, mental health, social connections, and community conditions—such as income, housing, and safety. By centering the lived experiences of its residents, Green Bay, Wisconsin’s oldest city, is actively recalibrating systems to better prioritize community needs, build trusting relationships, and foster hope for a future of health, equity, and liberation.
In Áak’w Ḵwaan—the Lingít name for the area that surrounds Juneau, Alaska—healing begins with a reclamation of self-identity. Following the cumulative momentum of generations, residents in Juneau are reimagining their future. Eighty years after segregation was banned in the state, Alaska’s capital city is reaching more and more toward expression and acceptance. From preschools to health clinics to the local radio station, partners are unraveling deep trauma across generations and embracing Lingít practices, language, and culture. Juneau serves as a place for learning, not only for the victims of colonial harm, but also for the descendants of those who enacted that harm. Partnerships across Áak'w Ḵwaan support queer youth, celebrate interconnection, and build spaces for ancestral learning. Through shared leadership, cultural return, and deep commitment to truth, this community shows that healing is not only possible—it’s already underway.
Lower Eastern Shore, Maryland, and Sussex County, Delaware
Through civic engagement, deep trust, and resilience, community partners across Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore and Delaware’s Sussex County are chipping away at the systems that benefit industry and profit over people and the planet. Black, Latino, White, and Haitian neighbors across the rural area have formed an unbreakable partnership to end the chokehold that factory poultry farming has had on the region. Rural Maryland and Delaware share shorelines of unincorporated areas where industrial growth has poisoned the land and the people who live there. Large-scale slaughterhouses and concentrated animal feeding operations have long exploited workers and contaminated the water. With a focus on making the invisible visible, community groups have united to address and undo decades, if not centuries, of systemic injustice, structural racism, and inequity by honoring the region's culture, heritage, and shared experiences. Through their fight for equity and access to wellbeing, this cross-state community has demonstrated the power of solidarity by stopping slaughterhouse expansions, winning class action suits against major polluters, defending immigrant workers, and passing the Delaware Clean Water Act.
Leaders in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, knew that in order to address deep health disparities, they would need to involve their whole community. Today, local leaders, residents, public safety partners, and nonprofit organizations are working together to make Milwaukee County neighborhoods safe and healthy for everyone. They are working to increase access to safe, stable, affordable housing; job opportunities; efficient and reliable public transit; and high-quality, culturally relevant healthcare. Partners in Milwaukee County are transforming their community’s landscape by designing parks and green spaces for and by the people who use them. Milwaukee County’s unwavering commitment to racial equity informs every decision, inspires innovation, and provides hope for a world in which everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
The Hawaiian Island of Molokaʻi has always been a place where land and people existed in a regenerative and symbiotic relationship. Unlike other Hawaiian Islands shaped by tourism and outside interests, Molokaʻi has long prioritized its ʻāina, its community, its health, and its self-sufficiency. But this commitment has come at a cost, including limited access to services like healthcare, high poverty rates, and ongoing threats to land and resources. Today, the Molokaʻi community aims to address these issues by preserving and promoting the island’s unique culture, traditions, and customs, including an effort to buy back a large portion of its land to help protect the lifeways that sustain its people and its land.
The voice of Sacramento’s youth is the voice of its future. Inspired by the belief that liberation takes every generation, residents of California’s capital city are proud to advance youth-centered and youth-led programs and policies. Youth Forward, a local nonprofit coalition of 36 youth-serving organizations and thousands of individuals, is elevating the voices of young adults that represent every Sacramento community in the city. Together, they are addressing systemic issues such as poverty, public safety, and the criminal legal system. Legacies of colonialism, overcriminalization, carceral injustice, redlining, neighborhood disinvestment, and racial discrimination affect Sacramento’s substantial Native American, Asian refugee, diverse Latino immigrant, and Black communities. Youth leaders and the organizations that support them are building power through activism and organizing. To seed change locally and across the state, they recognize that those having experienced systems—such as the foster care or juvenile justice systems—know best how to improve them. The results are undeniable, with large investments from city leaders that prove that youth-led movements make communities stronger, safer, and help shape a better future for everyone.
Tribes in the Great Lakes Region
Tribal nations across the Great Lakes Region are reclaiming food sovereignty and restoring physical, cultural, and economic health to their communities. The Great Lakes Intertribal Food Coalition, comprised of diverse groups, are reestablishing traditional trade routes, creating a viable small business ecosystem of producers, and generating economic pathways for tribal members to produce traditional foods and products. In doing so, they are replacing certain extractive, colonial, and government-funded food systems designed to exclude and harm their communities. These groups include tribal elders across Wisconsin, tribal food producers, state food distributors, and local educators. Building on pandemic-era rapid-response efforts, the coalition has created and sustained critical food justice infrastructure and networks that feed their elders, reshape and build local food systems, and reflect Indigenous approaches to community care. The results are remarkable: they have expanded economic opportunities, improved health outcomes, and reignited meaningful cultural and intergenerational connections. This powerful cross-community work is a promising model for how regional communities can work together to revitalize, restore, and celebrate cross-generational learning, culture, and community.
RWJF is a leading national philanthropy dedicated to taking bold leaps to transform health in our lifetime. Through funding, convening, advocacy, and evidence-building, we work side-by-side with communities, practitioners, and institutions to get to health equity faster and pave the way together to a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.
Grantee Story
The RWJF Culture of Health Prize honors communities at the forefront of addressing structural racism and other structural injustices to advance health, opportunity, and equity for all.