ABOUT US

The Colorado Multi-Ethnic Cultural Consortium (CMECC) is a statewide coalition of health advocacy organizations advancing change in the health, mental health and behavioral health systems for communities of color. Our mission is to build multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual capacity for comprehensive health and mental health policy, programs, and practice within a social framework.

What We Do
CMECC looks at health care through a multi-ethnic lens and advocates for increased access and system improvement for the underserved. We boil down Colorado legislation to identify the core issues and help our members take action on policy measures that can have real impact in their communities. We work to:

• Eliminate disparities in the Colorado health care delivery systems.
• Transform the system of care and develop a model of care that works.
• Facilitate fundamental changes in the social and economic context that prohibits communities of color from living balanced, healthy lives.

How We Do It
We advance change in the health, mental health and behavioral health systems for communities of color by approaching the issues in three key ways.

• Advocate - We help our members effectively support bills that further our mission, and to defeat the bills that are detrimental. We are advocating for equity and culturally congruent health, mental health and behavioral health services to decrease health disparities.
• Collaborate - We collaborate with policy makers, community based organizations, state health agencies, health care service providers and non-profit advocacy groups throughout Colorado, to advance change. One critical goal is to improve collaboration between communities of color and the health care system decision makers.
• Educate - We educate policy makers about the cultural components of promoting wellness, including the impacts and policy implications that health care legislation has on communities of color. We also provide community programs to support the health, mental health and behavioral health of Colorado communities of color.

Why We Do It
Colorado’s ethnic communities need a voice in the health care debate, and there are many organizations in Colorado doing important work to support the interests of their specific ethnic communities. 

As the only organized coalition of these efforts across our state, CMECC provides a unified voice working to advocate for change in the health, mental health and behavioral health systems for all Colorado communities of color.

With the many demands on our legislators’ time and attention, it is critical to provide this strong, credible, consistent policy voice demanding focus on multi-ethnic health care disparities issues.