At Conversations for Change events, which began in September 2014, the Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin endowment invites a content expert and representatives from funded projects to facilitate discussion about issues influencing health in Wisconsin.

The next Conversation in the series will be held in Milwaukee on December 17, 2014. The topic for the discussion is community-based mental and behavioral health.

On December 18, 2014, a rescheduled Conversations for Change session will be held in Wausau. The event had been planned for November 2014 but was postponed due to severe winter weather. The topic for the discussion is the utilization of community collaboration to promote health in Wisconsin's rural communities.

The funding will support Wisconsin-based, multi-sector, community-MCW academic coalitions or networks to work together to translate public health data and evidence into actions to pursue grassroots policy, environmental or systems change (changing the regulations, rules, priorities, protocols or practices within and across organizations and communities and/or changing the physical or material components of the community environment) that address the key determinants that most strongly influence health.