About the Fellowship

About the Fellowship

There is a critical need for leadership programs designed for leaders from systemically excluded communities — programs that hold intentional spaces for radical self-care, healing, and safety — within frameworks that promote community and vulnerability.

Community Catalyst’s Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship focuses on just that, building the power and capacity of advocacy leaders and their organizations to reshape the US health system to better reflect and respond to their community’s needs. To that end, the Fellowship explicitly addresses the historically discriminatory roots of our health system.

The Fellowship concentrates on advancing leadership development and teamwork, organizational transformation, powerful partnerships that may not have otherwise occurred, and professional and personal growth within a race equity and health justice lens.

Portrait of Rob Restuccia, the former executive director of Community Catalyst, in profile, wearing a gray blazer, wire-rimmed glasses, and a slight smile.
Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship
The Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship honors the late Rob Restuccia, former executive director of Community Catalyst, shown above.
Successes

Building the power of health justice leaders to reshape the US health system

To date, the Fellowship has:

  • Established new partnerships and a shared network among Fellows
  • Expanded board, leadership, and partnerships for Fellow organizations
  • Launched an immigrant health academy
  • Built a culture of accountability, radical candor, and reflection
  • Developed overall capacity for Fellowships organizations, including relationships with the media

This includes open communication about topics like the role of stress in race equity and health justice work, and how unmanaged stress can lead to disengagement and burnout. We also emphasize ways to integrate healing justice, liberation, and healing circles into our Fellows’ important work and causes. The Fellowship offers socially relevant content and guest speakers who share experiences that are rooted in reflection as well as tangible, applicable takeaways — especially regarding race equity.

Guiding Principles

Guiding Principles

The Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship has four guiding principles:

1. Advancing leadership development and teamwork

2. Organizational transformation

3. Powerful and unique partnerships

4. Leadership through a race equity and health justice lens

Programmatic Elements

Programmatic Elements

Core elements of the Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship are:

  • Executive leadership coaching
  • Ongoing workshops with objectives that link back to the four guiding principles of the Fellowship
  • Throughline of race equity and health justice
  • Organizational transformation: Each organizational team decides on an organizational transformation, which is shaped by the other program elements and the four guiding principles

The culture of the Fellowship is built on 3 core values that are intentionally woven throughout the Fellowship experience: 

  1. Authenticity (show up as you are) 
  2. Wellness (self-care, collective care, and healing justice) 
  3. Community connection (peer-to-peer Fellowship community built on trust) 
Meet the Fellows

Meet the Restuccia Health Justice Fellows 

Get to know past and present Fellows, their organizations, and what excites them most about the program below. 

Resources

Get to Know Community Catalyst’s 2024-25 Restuccia Health Justice Fellows

Community Catalyst is thrilled to welcome its 2024-2025 cohort of the Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship: Taller Salud, Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese and Be Inc. Collective. The new cohort represents a diverse group of organizations and individuals working to reshape the health system to be more reflective and responsive to community. Get to know the Fellows, their organizations, and what excites them most about the program below.

Read more here

Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship Offers Refuge and Community to Advocacy Leaders

Investing in leaders who are experiencing systemic harm first-hand while also working to transform the health care system is essential, both for advocates of color and the health justice movement as a whole. As part of Community Catalyst’s efforts to build collective power and impact through leadership development and infrastructure support, the Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship focuses on building the power and capacity of advocacy leaders and their organizations who are actively working to reshape the US health system to better reflect and respond to their community’s needs. Apply to join the 2024-2025 cohort by March 25, 2024.

Read more here

Power Building with Race Equity and Health Justice at the Center

Executive Director Emily Stewart shares how Community Catalyst’s Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship is one way we can prioritize race equity, health justice, long-term vision setting and power building to transform the health system into one that is shaped by and accountable to all people.

Learn more here

Community Catalyst Honors Emerging Health Justice Leaders at NYC Celebration

On Sept. 30, two cohorts of health justice advocates and their respective organizations graduated from Community Catalyst’s Restuccia Health Justice Fellowship program. The graduates come from a national cohort of organizations as well as a regional cohort, The Restuccia Health Justic Fellowship – New York.

Learn more here

Remembering Rob

On the third anniversary of the passing of Community Catalyst’s founding executive director, Rob Restuccia, we remember a visionary advocate for health care for all and a mentor to so many advocates in the health justice movement.

Learn more here