Our Mission
We spark, seed, and spread innovations that strengthen the health and well-being of historically underinvested communities.
Our Story
CCI started in 1999 as the Community Clinics Initiative, a collaboration between Tides Center and The California Endowment focused on strengthening community health centers in California through grants, programming, and training.
In 2012, the initiative became the Center for Care Innovations and the work expanded. We evolved from a grantmaking program into a catalyst for the broader health care safety net, helping a growing network of organizations explore new approaches, adopt what works, and share what they learn across the field.
Since then, CCI has worked alongside safety-net organizations as they navigated some of the most significant shifts in American health care — the rise of electronic health records, the Affordable Care Act, the COVID-19 pandemic, Medicaid transformation, and the arrival of artificial intelligence. Through all of it, our role has stayed consistent: strengthen the organizations and individuals doing the work, help good ideas travel, and hold the connective tissue of a field that too often has to figure things out alone.
In April 2025, CCI became an independent nonprofit — a milestone that sharpened our ability to move with the field, build in ways that weren’t possible before, and deepen the partnerships that make this work possible.
Today we work across California and nationally, partnering with community health centers, public hospitals, tribal and rural providers, community-based organizations, managed care plans, public agencies, and philanthropy. The safety net gets stronger with each connection made and each innovation shared. That belief has guided this organization from the beginning and it shapes everything we’re building next.
