Sharif Braxton

Sharif Braxton serves as Founding Director of EQUIP NJ, where he leads the direction and implementation of the new policy-advocacy intermediary in the state. Sharif has a decade of experience in public health and health systems work within the academic, government and non-profit space. Prior to EQUIP, Sharif worked at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NJ department as its inaugural Community Officer. His work at RWJF sought to enhance organizational ways of working with local communities and enhance the Foundation’s understanding of and focus on complex regional challenges in its home state. Sharif was previously Program Manger in the Clinical Redesign Initiatives team of the Camden Coalition. In this role, Sharif led several aspects of a local mental health initiative, Pledge to Connect, which set out to improve connections to community-based mental health services for clients visiting Camden City Emergency Departments. Sharif specifically managed one arm of the client engagement workflow, partnership formation efforts with community-based providers, the meaningful incorporation of perspectives from individuals with lived experience and the development/launch of a pilot process and tool for accessing and monitoring outpatient behavioral health availability within a local community resource platform. The success of the Pledge to Connect program in its pilot year led to a $7.5 million state budget appropriation to scale the project to 5 counties in the South Jersey region. In this work, Sharif additionally led stewardship, scoping an implementation efforts with new hospital and community partners, codifying and scaling of lessons learned from the pilot phase, and managed pass-through grants to community-based organizations. Prior to the Camden Coalition, Sharif served as Executive Director of Medina Community Clinic, a small local nonprofit headquartered in Trenton, NJ. Medina Community Clinic provides specialty health care services to uninsured and underinsured members of Mercer County, free of charge. Sharif was responsible for the overall administration, organizational strategic planning, and operations of the Clinic to address unmet medical needs, social determinants of health and inform policy. Under Sharif’s leadership and guidance, Medina Clinic saw growth in referral partners, specialty services provided, number of patients served and overall operating budget, even in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sharif earned his BA in Public Health Studies from Johns Hopkins University. Born in Philadelphia, PA, Sharif now resides in the Princeton area with his wife and Maltese dog, Winnie. In his spare time, he enjoys catching Broadway plays, training in MuayThai and watching anime.

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