Together with your engagement, the Bay Area Global Health Alliance has had a busy and productive year. Below you will find highlights, which we believe speak to our ability as a community to identify and advance opportunities to promote global health equity and innovation.

The Alliance continues to operate under the belief that more is possible if we work together. Over the last two years in particular, we have seen how our Bay Area, and now global membership, has brought expertise and leadership to address the Covid-19 crisis and other health priorities. We are incredibly proud of our members and the contributions they have made to such a challenging pandemic. The Alliance has been able to build bridges and networks and we are beginning to see the breaking down of silos and a transformation in how our diverse sectors work together to achieve impact.

We are now in a position to deepen our relationship with our members and expand our reach more intentionally to serve the Global South. Your sustained commitment is enabling us to continue the momentum to bring together our community to harness the region’s collective expertise to achieve equity and impact in global health. We stand strong in our collective belief that in bringing diverse sectors together in a trusted community, we can break down silos and solve pressing health challenges that affect us all.

2022 Highlights

Membership and Stewardship

Membership: We are now 72 members strong – which includes representation from tech, private and public sector and nonprofit members based in the Bay Area and around the globe. We are a network with global reach and influence which offers the possibility to accelerate our collective impact in our communities.

Member Listening Tour: Thank you for your participation in our member listening tour, held Q2-Q3, 2022. Through over 60 conversations, survey responses and feedback at events, many of you shared what you value in the Alliance, your priorities and where you’d like to see us focus. What did we learn?

We heard resoundingly that our value proposition is strong. Many of you value:

• Our role as neutral convener with the ability to broker multi-sector collaborations, and engage the tech sector alongside traditional global health stakeholders from academia, NGOs, and the public and private sectors
• The networking opportunities we create and foster
• The bespoke 1:1 connections we facilitate
• Our ability to aggregate and disseminate news on global health trends and issues
• Communication – our amplification of members’ global health work

We validated what we already knew: No single organization can tackle the range of health challenges and opportunities that our current reality presents. We need candid, evidence-based dialogues and trusted conversations that reach across communities, organizations and geographies to catalyze technology, high-quality research, development and delivery of health care for all

Your feedback has helped us align on our strategic priorities for 2023, explore new initiatives, and recommit to the continued delivery of high quality “core” activities for our members – connections, communications, and convenings

Administration and Governance

Board of Directors: Two new directors joined our esteemed Board in 2022: Martin Dale, Director for Digital Health and Monitoring, Population Services International (PSI); and Krista Donaldson, former CEO, Equalize Health. We are grateful to our active and engaged 19-person Board, composed of multi-sector leaders who are all experts in their fields, senior leaders in their organizations, and who together bring decades of experience in global health. Our board officers are:

• Mary Pittman (Public Health Institute), chair
• Neha Agarwal (PATH), co-vice chair
• Hema Budaraju (Google), co-vice chair
• Colin Boyle (formerly UCSF Institute for Global Health Sciences and now UC Berkeley‘s Haas School of Business), secretary
• Jonathan Kfoury (L.E.K. Consulting), treasurer

Signature Partnerships

The Alliance’s network, global reach and influence resulted in two unique partnerships with leading health influencers.

The Alliance was selected by the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Tech Task Force to serve as its secretariat. Our collaboration with the Task Force is enabling regular engagement with the tech sector and allowing for increased opportunities for collaboration across our members.

With members Meta and Merck, the Alliance was awarded a lead communications role for the Alliance for Advancing Health Online to promote the RFP and subsequent results with our membership and global health network. Together with the Sabin Vaccine Institute, a new 2021 member, the Alliance led the AAHO’s dissemination efforts, the Insights Dialogue project, to share evidence from the 33 grantees (including Alliance members Stanford University, UCSF, and Maya Health Alliance) and how-tos with vaccine program implementers, public health communicators, behavior change scientists and other stakeholders.

• Results can be found through this Insights Report and include: 22.1M people reached with messaging; 598K link clicks; 60K microsite visitors; 118 curated resources and 1,311 virtual event attendees

Programming

In partnership with our members, we held 20 multi-sector events and convenings in the last 12 months that leveraged our community’s rich resources and diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem to respond to the interests you indicated were your priorities. The wide range of virtual programming allowed participation from colleagues and Alliance members from around the world and the Global South in particular, with 33% of our members featured as co-hosts, speakers, or panelists over the last year. The Alliance served as a neutral convener and cross-pollinated ideas and knowledge across a diverse range of organizations to accelerate understanding and impact through webinars, conversations and conference events. A few of the Alliance’s program highlights follow.

• Collaborated with Devex’s Prescription for Progress, ETR’s YTH (Youth Tech Live), Global Digital Health Forum, Consortium of Universities in Global Health (CUGH), and UNGA2022 to feature Alliance members, offer their expertise on current health issues, and raise our profile. The Alliance has become a thought partner and panel producer for many of these events, and has been able to secure introductory and closing plenary panels given our extensive network of leading tech and global health influencers

• Co-hosted a private web dialogue, Tech for Health Systems Globally, with member Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and their partner, The Global Fund. More than 55 leaders from across the sectors took part in the robust discussion. The Alliance helped synthesize the insights and lessons learned in this report on tech and health systems with equity, and strengthened its partnership with The Global Fund

• Hosted a WHO delegation in May for an in-person WHO Tech Task Force meeting, as well as a WHO Digital Health briefing at UCSF and related bilaterals

• Partnered with UC Davis and Healthy Davis for a 2-day cross-sector workshop to develop a roadmap for academic integration in pandemic preparedness and response planning that influences the future of public health. It brought together public health officials, academics, nonprofits and private sector partners from California and around the U.S.

• Produced a webinar with Salient Advisory, and member PSI, on commercially-driven innovations in health care supply chains in Africa

• Launched a timely multi-sector webinar on monkeypox with a local public health director, clinicians, researchers and activists, in an effort to provide guidance to members and to share knowledge on the extent and scope of the outbreak and potential prevention strategies and treatment options

• Convened members Americares, Stanford University, Public Health Institute, UCSF, and Google for a virtual conversation exploring the impact of wildfires and air pollution on the health of communities in California and beyond

• Provided additional networking through strategic, bespoke 1:1 matchmaking for potential collaborations between diverse members, and a few outdoor, in-person networking events

• See past events for further details

Communications

In addition to amplifying your news and events, the Alliance continued to produce and publish our monthly Connections newsletter for nearly 9,000 subscribers. Providing a wider perspective on Bay Area global health, Connections features and aggregates the news, events, publications and opportunities of our multi-sector members, with a lens on global health innovation. We saw an increasingly engaged community as demonstrated by more than doubling the open rate in the last year, a rate well above industry standards – and 78% of our members were featured at least once. Subscribe here. Our website is regularly updated with member news and events. We also saw strong increases in social media engagement.

Summary

We would not be where we are as an organization without the active engagement of our members and our Board of Directors. Your thought partnership and leadership has helped us advance the concept of a global health alliance for the region into a practical reality. Thank you for being part of the Bay Area Global Health Alliance. As always, we welcome your feedback and continued involvement as we work to accelerate our collective health impact around the world.