Systems for Action
Cross-Sector Research to Align the Medical, Public Health, and Social Service Systems
New Grantees Announced!
The Systems for Action national program office is pleased to announce we awarded $2 million of new research funding to support five individual research projects under the recent 2025 Call for Proposals: Community-Led Systems Research to Address Systemic Racism!
Five one-year developmental grants (pilot studies) will test innovative, community-led approaches to helping medical, social, and public health systems work together to dismantle systemic racism and address the health and social needs of people experiencing health inequities:
Please stay tuned for these teams to introduce their projects at upcoming Research-in-Progress webinars!
Featured Research Products
Systems for Action Research Program
Systems for Action (S4A) is a national Signature Research Program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) that aims to discover and apply new evidence about ways of aligning the delivery and financing systems across the public health, medical and social services sectors. Through periodic funding opportunities, S4A funded research on cross-system initiatives. The final funding opportunity from S4A closed in June 2025. Internally, S4A conducts research on multi-sector population health activities using our National Longitudinal Survey of Public Health Systems (NALSYS) dataset. In partnership with the Technical Assistance Collaborative, the Systems Alignment Innovation Hub was developed in 2022 to assist practice-based organizations in systems alignment work.
Through these efforts, the S4A program seeks to identify system innovations, particularly system-level drivers of cross-sector collaboration and integration across health services and systems.
Glen Mays | Director of Systems for Action
Glen Mays is professor and chair of the Department of Health Systems, Management and Policy in the Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus. His research seeks to understand and solve coordination problems within and across public health, healthcare, and social service systems, with a focus on the health and economic implications of coordination. A graduate of Brown University, Dr. Mays earned Ph.D. and M.P.H. degrees in health policy and administration from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in health economics at Harvard Medical School. Prior to joining Colorado, he served on the faculty at the University of Kentucky, University of Arkansas, and Mathematica Policy Research.