When Charlotte Community Health Clinic (CCHC) reached a critical inflection point in its growth trajectory, the organization turned to Next Stage for strategic planning support to chart its path forward. The engagement evolved into a comprehensive partnership, encompassing innovative brand marketing campaigns and transformative board and staff engagement.
Through rigorous external data analysis, community engagement, and collaborative planning, Next Stage helped CCHC develop a strategic vision that extends beyond clinic walls to address the broader health ecosystem.
Finding Clarity at a Crossroads
Charlotte Community Health Clinic has long been recognized as a collaborative and trusted organization in Charlotte’s health landscape. By early 2025, CCHC recognized that its recent expansion to multiple clinic locations presented both opportunity and complexity. The organization sought strategic clarity to help it explore new funding streams and strengthen its position as both a provider of choice for patients and a partner of choice for other community organizations.
Next Stage recognized that achieving these goals required a deep understanding of CCHC’s competitive environment, community needs, and the evolving healthcare landscape.
Recognizing the Power of Local Context in Strategic Planning
Next Stage’s approach centered on a critical insight: effective strategic planning must integrate external data alongside internal metrics. For health organizations in particular, understanding what’s happening in the local environment — economic trends, policy changes, and community demographics — is essential for developing relevant and responsive strategies.
Rather than applying generic best practices or relying solely on broader healthcare trends, Next Stage helped CCHC develop strategies responsive to Charlotte’s unique landscape, recognizing that the city’s economic development initiatives, transportation challenges, affordable housing supply, and governance decisions all shape the environment in which the organization operates.
However, the firm also recognized that while each community health clinic’s local context is unique, there is inevitably overlap in goals shared across these organizations. And rather than representing competition, this overlap can create significant opportunities for cross-organizational collaboration — a principle that became central to the development of CCHC’s strategic vision.
Building Strategy Through Comprehensive Discovery
Next Stage’s engagement began with research efforts that extended beyond CCHC’s internal data, including community interviews, focus groups, and surveys. This human-centered approach ensured that strategic planning reflected not just data points but lived experiences and community voices. The firm also conducted trend research and comparative analysis to understand the evolving community health landscape in Charlotte.
Critically, Next Stage reframed traditional conversations about social drivers of health. Rather than simply asking how housing, transportation, and economic factors affect health outcomes, the firm explored the inverse: How is health itself a social driver in these areas? This perspective shift — recognizing health as foundational to economic mobility, educational success, and community stability — would serve to position CCHC as a critical partner in Charlotte’s broader community development ecosystem.
Engaging All Stakeholders at a Collaborative Board Retreat
In October 2025, Next Stage facilitated a board retreat for CCHC, bringing together nearly 30 participants, including department heads, manager-level staff, and board members — a rare convergence that created dynamic in-the-room brainstorming and problem-solving.
Staff members appreciated the centering of community voice throughout the process and the quality and depth of external data presented. By engaging the full staff team, Next Stage helped onboard everyone to the vision. This broad engagement ensured that CCHC’s strategic plan would be owned and driven by the entire organization, not just leadership.
Moving from Strategy to Action with Interconnected Campaigns
The initial discovery phase of CCHC’s engagement with Next Stage revealed an additional opportunity: brand marketing and communications support to amplify the organization’s strategic positioning. Next Stage developed two interconnected campaigns to translate strategic vision into actionable initiatives.
Roots of Care: Where Community Connection Builds Healthier Lives
The “Roots of Care” pilot aims to position CCHC, alongside two other community health clinics in North Carolina, as leading community health centers in the state. This collaborative approach addresses three critical focuses: building health literacy in complex times, leveraging trust to mobilize action, and affirming community health clinics’ roles as providers of choice.
The proposed six-month pilot, planned for mid-2026, will activate local ambassadors, deploy health literacy materials, and test referral models to strengthen links between clinics and communities. By focusing on targeted geographies, this strategy reinforces the role of community health clinics as both providers of care and partners in community well-being.
Solidifying CCHC as a Partner of Choice
Given that competition for both patients and funding continues to intensify, Next Stage conceptualized a campaign to help strengthen CCHC’s position through cohesive brand marketing.
The campaign unites CCHC’s holistic care model, collaborative partnerships, and patient-centered voice under a single narrative that inspires engagement and investment. The campaign recognizes community health clinics’ unique “rootedness in community” — their deep understanding of and connection to the patient populations they serve. This rootedness, combined with CCHC’s track record as a collaborative and trusted organization, positions the clinic to lead community health transformation in Charlotte and beyond.
Strategic Planning as Organizational Transformation
For health organizations considering strategic planning, CCHC’s journey demonstrates that effective planning requires looking beyond internal metrics, demands engagement of all stakeholders, and recognizes that collaboration among fellow community organizations often proves more powerful than competition.
Through this comprehensive engagement, Next Stage enabled CCHC to clarify its path forward with confidence. The result is a strategic vision that positions CCHC to lead community health transformation in Charlotte and serve as a model for collaborative, community-centered care throughout North Carolina.
To learn more about CCHC’s work, visit www.charlottecommunityhealth.org.
If you are interested in learning more about our approach to strategic planning, reach out to us to start the conversation.
