Braiding multiple health funding sources to advance injury and violence prevention: a Colorado example case

Injury and violence prevention is underfunded relative to the burden of injury globally. In the USA, many health departments are organised around separate health outcomes, creating silos between injury prevention, chronic disease, maternal and child health and infectious disease. Yet these programmes often address the same social determinants of health to positively impact the health outcomes of interest. This article describes a Colorado case in which injury prevention staff collaborated with chronic disease and maternal and child health programmes to braid multiple funding sources to both fund community grantees to implement built environment strategies, with investment in state staff to provide subject matter expertise and technical assistance to grantees to enhance their implementation efforts to address a shared determinant of health across multiple outcomes. This example case illustrates how leveraging a variety of topical health outcome investments can further injury and violence prevention outcomes, beyond what might have been achieved with injury prevention investments alone.