Posted in News
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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We’re excited to launch our Fast Facts series with Capital Impact Partners and West Health that will highlight how coordinated services – from healthcare to housing – can create livable, age-friendly communities that support the economic, health, and social needs of older adults.
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We’re excited to launch our Fast Facts series with Capital Impact Partners and West Health that will highlight how coordinated services – from healthcare to housing – can create livable, age-friendly communities that support the economic, health, and social needs of older adults.
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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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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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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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Read the full Expert Insight series!
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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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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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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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“We’ve got to be in the ZIP code improvement business.” -Tyler Norris, Kaiser Permanente
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We’re excited to launch our Fast Facts and Jargon Buster Series with the Build Healthy Places Network that will highlight key concepts from our initial research. Explore our postings as we share knowledge and demystify jargon in an effort to strengthen the connection between the worlds of community development and health.
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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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We’ve shared maps that make the case for why ZIP code matters for health. But how have local communities used maps to catalyze neighborhood improvements? The Communities of Opportunity initiative (COO) shows us how.
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Fact: Since 2011, the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) has leveraged over $140 million in grants and an estimated $1 billion in additional financing for grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and other healthy food enterprises in low-income food deserts.
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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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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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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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Poorer communities prove they are hungry for healthy shopping options.
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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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