Research is documenting the harmful effects on children when families must keep moving to find a safe, affordable home.
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.”
Community developers and health professionals often work in the same neighborhoods with the same residents, but they rarely work together in an integrated way to improve people’s health and economic outcomes. That is starting to change.
Data-driven decision-making is nothing new to those in health care. Life and death decisions are made every day based on patient data. However, as health care moves beyond the hospital walls and into the community, understanding the dynamic environment in which their patients reside is critical to reducing costs and improved patient outcomes.
Within the last five years, partnerships between community development and health organizations have grown from one-off local experiments to a full-blown national movement.
It’s clear why collaborating with other sectors can be beneficial: Collaboration can help expand available resources, strategies, and capabilities to achieve outcomes that would be difficult to accomplish alone.
Kansas is the nation’s leader in wheat production and is third in beef production, yet according to the Kansas Health Foundation, more than 800,000 Kansans lack easy access to fresh, affordable food.
Across the country, nonprofit hospitals are under intense scrutiny due to the discrepancy between the substantial revenues they generate compared to the level of support they provide to neighborhoods that surround them.
The Culture of Health Leaders Program is now accepting applications for the 2018 cohort. The Build Healthy Places Network is a partner agency in this program and we’re confident the program is a fantastic opportunity for community development professionals at CDC’s, CDFI’s, and related organizations who are already integrating health into their work.