The Flagship Program
Emerging public-health leaders, placed inside the cities and agencies of the Inland Empire, doing real policy work for communities that could never otherwise afford them.
How it works
The fellowship pairs graduate students in public health, planning, and policy with host agencies across the Inland Empire for a year of embedded work.
Fellows are placed with cities, county departments, hospitals, and community organizations, working on the region's hardest problems: chronic disease prevention, active transportation, food access, housing and health, air quality, and healthy community design.
Host agencies get talent and capacity they could not otherwise fund. Fellows get something rarer: real responsibility inside real institutions, a professional network across the region, and a working understanding of how policy actually moves. Many alumni now hold permanent roles in the agencies where they served.
Past cohorts have drafted healthy-city general-plan elements, launched farmers-market and food-access programs, built active-transportation plans, run community health assessments, and staffed regional collaboratives linking health and the built environment, the intersection where the Lewis family has worked for seventy years.
The fellowship recruits graduate students and recent graduates in public health, urban planning, public policy, and related fields, with a strong preference for candidates rooted in, or committed to, the Inland Empire. Recruitment runs through partner universities each spring.
“Give communities talent they could never otherwise afford, and give that talent a reason to stay.”The fellowship's founding idea
Interested in hosting a fellow, or applying? Start with your university's public-health program, or write to us.
Placements are coordinated with partner universities and host agencies across San Bernardino and Riverside counties.Continue
Impact & Gifts