Posted in Network Commons
We are now witnessing not just a health crisis but a community crisis. What is the role for community development investment and cross-sector partnership with healthcare in strengthening resilience and increasing equity in our post-pandemic world? How are these sectors working together to drive meaningful investments toward our hardest hit communities?
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In 2003 in Coal Run, a small hollow in southeastern Ohio, 89-year-old Helen McCuen still paid a ”water man” to fill a cistern buried in her front yard twice a month. Turning on a tap and getting fresh water wasn’t an option. McCuen lived in a largely African American part of town that lacked running water. The nearby city told residents it was too expensive to extend water lines to them. Meanwhile, a few miles away in a white neighborhood, water flowed freely. “The water stopped where the black folks started,” one local resident told the New York Times. It turned out that federal funds were used to extend water lines up to Coal Run but not to the African American community. A lawsuit would eventually force the city to lay water lines to the black residents.
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Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?:
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Studies that connect green space to mental health and wellbeing abound. And this connection is intuitive—people have long retreated to parks and natural places to recharge from the pressures of daily life. Less known is the fact that greening is gaining recognition as an effective violence prevention strategy.
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Interested in developing a health strategy with partnerships outside of your own sector? On August 8, 2019, speakers from Build Healthy Places Network, The CaseMade, and NeighborWorks America drew on their varied experience bridging the health and community development sectors. We discussed entry points, the motivations and perspectives that community development and health sectors each bring to their work, shared goals across sectors, and successful strategies to make your case for partnership. Hear from:
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This article was first published at Shelterforce, the original voice of community development.
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This article originally appeared on Enterprise’s blog on January 24, 2019. The Build Healthy Places Network is helping Enterprise to build healthcare partnerships with this initiative.
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The link between housing and health is far-reaching and complex. Historically, the housing-health nexus has been primarily associated with physical exposures and dilapidated housing; however, recent studies suggest that adverse health outcomes are also linked to housing rental assistance status, housing insecurity, a lack of affordable housing, and neighborhood quality.
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According to dominant narratives, Cleveland— like many urban centers nationwide—is a tale of two cities. But in today’s Cleveland, disparities are no longer between the city and suburbs; they are between zip codes within our own borders.
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Download the playbook, Partnerships for Health Equity and Opportunity: A Healthcare Playbook for Community Developers.
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[This blog originally appeared on the Purpose Built Communities’ From Our Perspective blog.]
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Ashland, CA, is a community in unincorporated Alameda County struggling from decades of disinvestment, high unemployment, and amongst the worst health indicators in the county. The numbers of reentry residents is amongst the highest in the county, further impacting the area’s stability and needs. Despite all this, the community has strong bones to build on.
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Research is documenting the harmful effects on children when families must keep moving to find a safe, affordable home.
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At a recent community event, someone made a reflection that stuck with me. “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety,” said Jonathan Goyer, an expert advisor to Governor Gina Raimondo’s Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force and a person in long-time recovery. “It’s connectedness.”
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This article appears in the Winter 2018 edition of Shelterforce magazine.
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This article originally appeared on America’s Essential Hospitals’ Essential Insights blog on 12/4/17.
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What would our neighborhoods look like if – by design – they supported safety and helped to prevent violence in relationships? How can
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This article first appeared on The Metropolitan Planning Council blog October 31, 2017.
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New case studies show community developers are partnering to create neighborhoods where everyone can be healthier Innovative community developers are making a real difference in the neighborhoods they are revitalizing, creating places that offer the physical, social and economic resources that all people need in order to live healthy lives. Cross-sector collaboration is a given in these projects, as are new ways of thinking about community revitalization. At the Build Healthy Places Network, we are excited by the potential these projects have to create lasting change for low-income communities.
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Hospital Partners with Housing Authority to Put Health at the Center of a Neighborhood Transformation In the early 2000s, Stamford Hospital began planning a major expansion. Located in Stamford, Connecticut’s West Side neighborhood, the 305-bed regional hospital envisioned a large new state-of-the-art addition to its facility. The hospital owned various pieces of real estate in the nearby neighborhood, but none were contiguous with its existing campus. Meanwhile, Charter Oak Communities (COC), a public-private entity that evolved out of the Stamford Housing Authority, was exploring ways to replace its outdated public housing complexes on the West Side.
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Trauma-Informed Community Building Sets Stage for Neighborhood Revitalization Susan Neufeld, Vice President of Resident Programs and Services for BRIDGE Housing Corporation (BRIDGE), describes the existing 606-unit Potrero Terrace and Annex housing projects as “an island of poverty in a sea of wealth.” Unlike many distressed public housing complexes that are surrounded by other disadvantaged neighborhoods, residents of Potrero Terrace and Annex, with a median annual income of $14,000, are surrounded by Potrero Hill neighbors making ten times that much.
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Tipping Point: Deep, Neighborhood-Scale Transformation Creates Lasting Change Of the East Lake Meadows public housing project before revitalization, says Carol Naughton of Purpose Built Communities, “the only thing that was working was the drug trade.” Frequently called “Little Vietnam” – as in, a war zone — the Atlanta neighborhood grappled with extreme poverty, violent crime, abysmal educational outcomes and high unemployment. The poorly built, 40-year-old public housing was in severe disrepair. For kids, East Lake Meadows functioned mostly as a pipeline into the Georgia penal system.
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Revitalizing People and Place with a Healthy Food Hub After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the founders of what became Broad Community Connections (BCC) started attending community meetings, and exploring with their fellow community members how to rebuild a city in shambles. These conversations highlighted some of the seemingly intractable problems that many central New Orleans residents had faced even before the storm, such as economic disadvantage, community disinvestment, health disparities, and lack of access to many needed goods and services.
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Creating Access to Opportunity by Building a “Village Center” in a Houston Neighborhood In the 1970s during Houston’s oil boom, the city’s Gulfton neighborhood sprouted street after street of luxury apartment complexes catering to the single young professionals pouring in to work in the oil industry. Swimming pools, hot tubs, and even a disco seemed essential in the complexes, while neighborhood developers simply skipped building sidewalks, parks or other public amenities. When the bottom dropped out of oil a decade later and the oil professionals left, rents in these complexes plummeted too.
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Weaving Together Opportunities for Healthier Lives for a Diverse Immigrant Community “Wherever there is conflict in the world, a few years later you start to see that population showing up here,” says Andriana Abariotes, executive director of Twin Cities LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation). Minneapolis-St. Paul has a long history of welcoming immigrants and refugees from around the world and is home to many organizations serving these populations. St. Paul’s East Side, where LISC has worked for years, is home to a rich cultural mix of immigrants including Hmong, Somali, Karin, Bhutanese, Sudanese, Latinos and others, alongside Native and African Americans.
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A Hospital Partners with a City to Develop a Health, Literacy and Recreation Hub In 2012, a neighborhood clinic of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in South Philadelphia had outgrown its space and was looking to expand, but in this working class neighborhood of dense row houses, real estate was hard to come by. Meanwhile, the City of Philadelphia operated a health center, a library and a recreation center, in outdated facilities, on a city block of land in the same neighborhood. CHOP approached the city about its need for land, and a partnership emerged.
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Community Development 2.0—Collective Impact Focuses a Neighborhood Strategy for Health Not all community developers are aware that the work they’re doing has the potential to improve health, but the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC) has built health into its strategic plan, and in the neighborhood revitalization work of the San Pablo Area Revitalization Collaborative (SPARC), convened by EBALDC, health is the first priority. The San Pablo Avenue Corridor neighborhood that stretches between downtown Oakland and nearby Emeryville is one of the poorest and most disadvantaged areas of Oakland, California. Here, life expectancy is up to 20 years lower than just a few miles away in the Oakland Hills.
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Holistic Redevelopment to Bring Lasting Change to a Distressed Neighborhood The St. Bernard Public Housing Development was already in severe disrepair and only 75 percent occupied on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit leaving much of the Bayou District neighborhood submerged in eight feet of water. One of four large public housing complexes in New Orleans, the St. Bernard was notorious for its blighted properties, rampant violence, drug activity, and severe poverty. Schools in the area were among the worst in New Orleans, a state whose schools regularly rank as low as 48th in the nation. Katrina rendered the housing complex uninhabitable, and many of the residents scattered as part of the Katrina diaspora.
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This article first appeared on the Urban Institute’s UrbanWire blog on July 20, 2017.
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Can a community market improve infant health? Can developing a local entrepreneurship culture reduce the number of babies born prematurely?
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Posted in Publications
**Revised as of July 19, 2017**
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“What ideas do people have for the BART plaza?” asked Scott Falcone, posing the question to a group of community members. Falcone, an independent development consultant to nonprofit affordable housing developer Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC), is referring to the community gathering space outside of the Balboa Park BART station, which will be redesigned in parallel with the Balboa Upper Yards affordable housing development. Community members responded and suggested “more trees and green space”, “space for cultural performances”, and “farmer’s markets!” All of these ideas contribute to the design of a healthier and more equitable neighborhood in the Outer Mission of San Francisco.
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Posted in Network Commons
This year, many organizations working to advance health equity find themselves in a new policy environment than in years before. Advocates may be unsure of how to navigate shifting national priorities, budget changes, and policy challenges. Fortunately, we can look to leaders forging ahead on health equity efforts for guidance—particularly those from the community development, public health, and healthcare sectors—amid this new policy landscape. Our guest panelists, all with significant federal-level experience, shared their insights, practical tips, and key resources during our June 19 Network Commons event.
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For more than 20 years, the Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) has lived its mission of integrating research, policy, and programs to advance health and well-being. Through the clients it serves at the local, state, and national levels, GHPC has been embedded in the problem-solving cycle of real people and real challenges. To identify community-wide areas of concern and support the development of strategic actions to improve health, GHPC assists public health departments, health systems, government agencies, and community development coalitions/stakeholders with a variety of assessments, including health impact assessments and community health needs assessments. While these assessments share the objective of improving community health, they differ in regards to their scope, intended use, and stakeholders involved.
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Communities are looking for ways to build more livable cities, promote healthy lifestyles, and create an environment where residents can achieve their potential. It’s a broad vision that most whole-heartedly endorse—but achieving it isn’t easy. To start, the social challenges facing communities of all sizes have no simple solutions. For issues as complex as chronic homelessness, or the many challenges that face youth aging out of foster care, or the need to update an outdated workforce training system to meet the demands of a rapidly changing economy, one policy initiative simply cannot address the many facets of the problem. Even when we do know clear steps or initiatives that could help improve outcomes, the systems through which we fund social services—both publicly and privately—typically aren’t set up to support agile decision-making, nor necessarily to encourage strong performance and accountability among existing funding streams.
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The Mariposa project is on the front lines of a rapidly growing movement seeking to reconnect low-income residents to the critical networks — transit, affordable housing, jobs — that are the cornerstones of opportunity. By centering development efforts around a transit stop, planners are hoping to reinvigorate a neighborhood by connecting its residents to integral supports and services, from hospitals to schools to grocery stores , all while paying heed to the risks of gentrification and displacement.
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As America ages, housing and community development allies work together to develop new choices for seniors. With creative models of long-term care and assisted living continuing to crop up, innovative aging-in-place programs offer an important alternative for many. The variety of options ensures that seniors with different levels of capability and dependence can live safely where they wish.
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We talked with Jeanne Milliken Bonds, Regional Community Development Team Leader, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
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In December 2016, Dr. Doug Jutte represented the Network at the first national convening among hospital and health system leaders on the “Anchor Mission of Healthcare,” sponsored by the Democracy Collaborative. The meeting brought together 43 health systems from across the country, with representatives from urban, rural, community-based, public, academic, children’s hospitals, Catholic and other religiously affiliated hospitals.
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The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) has spent the last 15 years working with thousands of local businesses, investors, and civic leaders who are actively engaged in improving local economies and communities across the U.S. and Canada. These leaders work to support entrepreneurs, drive investment in local businesses, and build equity in their communities.
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All too often, cross-sector collaborations fail to include residents of the communities they purport to serve. Inclusion is usually advocated for on the basis that those experiencing difficult social circumstances have important contributions to make, both in terms of understanding the challenges being experienced and suggesting culturally-appropriate solutions. What’s less appreciated, however, is that inclusion per se is an important part of people’s health.
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Looking at a map of the places they call home, most people can easily point to notably affluent areas versus the ones that have dilapidated homes, under-resourced schools and unsafe sidewalks—places more likely to be cut through by a six-lane highway, or to host a polluting factory rather than a supermarket stacked with fresh food or a tree-shaded playground.
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Children’s hospitals in Ohio are making key investments to address a major cause of poor health — substandard housing.
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A Neighborhood Ripe for Revitalization
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This blog reports back from the Housing + Health summit, mentioned in a recent Healthy Community Initiatives blog featuring the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
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For a long time, parks and other urban green spaces were thought of as nice amenities—but not much more. They were beautiful and relaxing, but far from necessary for neighborhood health and well-being.
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A hundred years ago at the height of the tuberculosis epidemic, New York City’s planners and public health establishment mobilized to develop what the New York Times called “…the largest and finest hospital ever built” for tuberculosis. Operating in the absence of any known cure for the disease, the Sea View Tuberculosis Hospital’s medical facilities were, in a real sense, speculative and aspirational. Tuberculosis (TB) had topped the list of causes of death in New York City for decades, and the call to action was urgent.
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Daniel Lau, Manager of Strategic Engagement
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Read the full Dispatches series!
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Daniel Lau, Manager of Strategic Engagement
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Across the country, new opportunities like the BUILD Health Challenge are pushing community organizations to form cross-sector partnerships in order to improve
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This Fast Fact is part of a series in partnership with the Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC), the national coordinating center for Bridging for Health: Improving Community Health Through Innovations in Financing, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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The Build Healthy Places Network staff presented a webinar for Prevention Institute and The Center for the Study of Social Policy on August 26th. The webinar provided an overview of the
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As our nation struggles with what is fair and just, and for whom, the urgent call for equity rings loudly. In philanthropy, equity is high on the agenda among major players, for example, the Ford Foundation, Kresge, Kellogg, the California Endowment, and many others. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s new push for a Culture of Health places
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A version of this article appeared in the GIH Bulletin on 5/17/2016.
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As a
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“We’ve got to be in the ZIP code improvement business.” -Tyler Norris, Kaiser Permanente
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The Mountain View neighborhood of Anchorage, Alaska, has undergone various reincarnations, but a common concern in recent decades was neglect. Then, at the beginning of the new millennium, community leaders and investors launched a revitalization project. Inspired by Mountain View’s cultural diversity and natural beauty, the practitioners aimed to create a place where families and businesses could grow roots.
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For decades, the
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We know that Child Opportunity affects health and varies by zip code. So too a family’s opportunity, especially opportunity to access healthy affordable housing, with low risk of displacement due to gentrification, as explained in this Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) brief.
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This blog series features “quick evidence bites” that highlight the connections between neighborhoods and health and the need for cross-sector solutions for sustained impacts. Tweet these facts and share your own @BHPNetwork #ZIPmatters.
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We’re pleased to be kicking off a series of stories illustrating the deep connections between neighborhood and health. Over the next year, we’ll be visiting communities across the country who are doing innovative work at the intersection of health and community development and showcasing this workin Crosswalk, the network’s new publication on Medium.
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Welcome to The Pulse, the monthly newsletter of the Build Healthy Places Network. Each month we compile a short and sweet round-up of what smart people are talking about, researching, and doing to make neighborhoods and lives healthier. Click here to receive The Pulse in your inbox.
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It’s a vital force that lifts people out of poverty. [figure] [/figure]
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An “Apgar Score” for Community Developers from the Urban Land Institute (ULI); and new reporting on what shapes health and health policy from NPR, Harvard, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Brookings’ new Health360 blog.
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The Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) has long recognized that housing is a powerful social determinant of health. Considerations of health and housing begin at the annual planning level, when research-based housing priorities are set, public-private partnerships are considered, and input from stakeholders forms the plan’s final draft.
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Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies Blog (2/25/15) Not All Hard-Hit Neighborhoods Recover Equally Foreclosures disproportionately hit minority neighborhoods across the U.S. during the housing crisis. In Boston, over 80 percent of foreclosures took place in just five of its 15 planning districts—Dorchester, East Boston, Hyde Park, Mattapan, and Roxbury; nearly 75 percent of the residents in these five districts are non-white, while the remainder of Boston is 70 percent white.
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Does the Earned Income Tax Credit Improve Health?
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Colby Dailey, Managing Director of the Build Healthy Places Network, wrote a piece on the ShelterForce blog titled “Financial Incentives Encourage New Partnerships in Housing and Health”:
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Princeton, N.J.—The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) today announced the 15 communities that have been chosen as finalists for the third annual RWJF Culture of Health Prize, which honors inspiring communities that place a high priority on health and bring diverse partners together to achieve local change. Our Managing Director, Colby Dailey, serves on the Review Committee.
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