Public Health System Transformation Update Newsletter
December 2025 | View all system transformation newsletters

Sustained Investment Builds a Strong Foundation 

When we have funding for public health that’s ongoing, equitably distributed, and that we can use flexibly across public health programs and topics, we can build a stronger foundation across Minnesota. 

The framework of foundational public health responsibilities helps define that work consistently. Sustained, ongoing, flexible, and equitably-distributed investments help us be strategic and effective in helping Minnesotans be their healthiest. 

Building capacity in foundational responsibilities like communications, equity, and assessment and surveillance, enhances the work we do everywhere else—that's the cross-cutting nature of foundational work. 

A cracked or unstable foundation leads to cracks elsewhere, no matter the topic or program, or whether the work is foundational or specific to your community.

Population-level prevention 

Our value in public health lies in our ability to help shape for the better the policies, systems, and surroundings that shape someone’s opportunity to be healthy from the moment they’re born. 

Much of the funding that supports public health doesn’t enable broad, population-based preventive changes and cures to the policies, systems, and surroundings that impact health; instead, it supports delivering services to individual people (social needs), minimizing public health’s ability to do what it does best—prevention upstream on a broad scale  (social determinants).

Imagine if public health workers had the resources and support to help prevent illness, by working with our communities to investigate and address the factors that shape their health.

What does sustained investment look like? 

Sustained investment means ongoing, flexible, and equitably distributed investments in the public health system. 

This looks like: 

• Leveraging federal, state, local, Tribal, and other funding sources in a strategic and appropriate way to ensure a strong foundation for public health across the state, while ensuring local and Tribal flexibility to account for differences in capacity, resources, opportunities, and challenges.
• Fostering right-sized solutions and the best value for public dollars.
• Moving from a funding cycle that swings unpredictably between panic (more funding) and neglect (less funding) to a funding cycle that’s stable and predictable.
• Ensuring that funding cares for the entire public health system, and account for the impact each funding source has on another (e.g., how cuts to one sector impact others).

Dig into the roadmap

In 2025, the Joint Leadership Team created a roadmap, in consultation with LPHA, SCHSAC, and MDH, to help lay out different paths (above) toward a seamless, responsive, and publicly-supported public health system.

This roadmap helps everyone working in or alongside public health in Minnesota align their efforts toward a transformed system. It highlights ongoing actions, roles organizations can play, ways to adapt to change, and key milestones and strategies guiding the path forward.

Learn more: Roadmap Toward a Seamless, Responsive, Publicly-Supported Public Health System

Subscribe: Public Health System Transformation Update