Our History

Care Share Health Alliance originated in a Collaborative Network of partners dedicated to connecting uninsured and underinsured individuals in Buncombe County, North Carolina with donated healthcare services.

In 2008, Care Share Health Alliance was officially established to serve as a statewide resource and technical assistance center to help communities develop their own Collaborative Networks to improve access to care and the health of low-income, uninsured and underserved people.

While working with Collaborative Networks, Care Share began to realize that to truly make an impact on overall health, we could not focus solely on clinical care, but rather broaden our scope to address additional factors preventing individuals from seeking or receiving healthcare services. These are the “Social Drivers of Health” (or Social Determinants of Health), which include all areas affecting an individual’s health, such as housing, transportation, access to health insurance, availability of healthy food, education, and job/income opportunities.

Care Share has since been able to address the social driver of access to health insurance in two major ways: in 2014, through establishing NC Get Covered to help North Carolinians get access to health insurance after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and beginning in 2020, through the NC Collaborative on Medicaid Transformation (NCCOMeT), which helps support the implementation of Medicaid Transformation in North Carolina.

Inevitably, through this and our other work addressing social drivers of health, Care Share became aware of the inequities inherent in healthcare systems that predominately affect historically marginalized populations, especially BIPOC communities. We recognized that disparity is due to White Supremacist Systems – systems that perpetuate structural violence by intentionally leaving out, othering, and harming People of Color, to advance White individuals.

That realization led Care Share to shift our organizational focus to making community-led systems change for better health equity and creating opportunities for BIPOC individuals in healthcare and BIPOC-led organizations addressing Social Drivers of Health through professional development, capacity building, and creating connections.

While our strategic priorities may be different, our current work is still deeply informed by the values we have held since our beginning with Collaborative Networks: that we must be responsive to communities, who all have their own assets and challenges; that our work must be driven and defined by those communities, as they are the experts in their own experiences; and that collaboration is fundamental to making change.