The Mission: End Childhood Lead Poisoning in Rochester
In the 1990s, Rochester, New York, had an alarmingly large number of children who had elevated lead levels in their blood. Decades later, the rate has decreased by 85 percent. This is how a local coalition made it happen.
Foreclosing on Our Health?
In a dangerous cycle, medical bills are a common cause of foreclosure—and the stress and financial crisis of foreclosure causes an increase in serious health problems.
Housing Advocates Track Indoor Environmental Hazards to Spur Improvements
When the community health promoters of San Diego’s Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) say they’re doing pollution testing, many people probably imagine samples from the...
Putting Health Care Dollars to Work
Several organizations are working to coordinate health care investments in ways that will allow funding to truly boost community health.
Organizing for Hospital Community Benefits
Community development corporations need to become more educated about hospital community benefits. This is what can be done to get the process started.
Building Healthy Housing Through Health Action Plans
A pilot program required CDCs to collaborate with public health professionals in order to discover—and address—a community’s pressing health issues. What the collaboration uncovered were issues that the participating CDCs hadn't even considered.
From Food Pantries to Food Justice
Is it possible for a family to be truly self-sufficient and provide all of its own food?This is a...
Tools of the Trade: Measuring the Health-Related Returns of Community Development
Partnerships are becoming more the norm and less the exception, but how do we know that they are actually having a good effect on health, well-being, and economic opportunity?
Employment as Crime Prevention
With the hottest, often most violent, month of summer still to come, Chicago has logged record numbers of killings of public school students this...
Can Investing in a Community’s Growth Boost Health Outcomes?
ProMedica and LISC team up to fund place-based investments in the hope of improving health outcomes for residents. How do they do it?
Sitting on a Porch Can Be Good for Your Health
To help combat isolation and reweave the connecting fabric that had been lost, a neighborhood arts center launches an initiative that eventually became a movement.
NOLA Brings a Holistic Focus to Resilience
Cities cannot weather the effects of climate change without going beyond infrastructure to address institutional racism, historical inequities, and access to physical and mental health services.
Smaller Cities Are Laboratories for Change
In smaller cities it is typically much easier to engage high levels of leadership, get traction for strategies that are more visible, engage the wider community, build trust, and scale solutions more quickly than in larger areas. Here are a few examples.
Prescription for a Legal Advocate
When we wrote in 2006 about Boston Medical Center's program to link patients to lawyers who could help improve their...
Community Development and New Understandings of Health and Wellness
In June 2012, I attended the Institute for the Future’s Health Horizons conference Innovating Information Ecosystems: The Next Decade and Beyond as an expert...
Unsorting Our Cities
To improve the health of residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods, we have to address inequality, not medical care.
Which Agencies Should Pay to End Family Homelessness?
When families have stable housing, the benefits are widespread. And perhaps that has been the problem.
Housing Policy Must Change in Wake of COVID-19
COVID-19 will hurt the low-income and housing insecure the most. We must act now to protect them—and ensure safe housing for all going forward. Here's how.
How *to* Connect Health and Community Development
A recent Rooflines post explored how not to connect community development and health, urging practitioners to not fall into the trap of “moralizing public...
Hey Housers, Health Folks Want to Talk to You Too!
People in the affordable housing field have grown increasingly interested in talking about healthcare. Concepts like “housing as a platform” for health outcomes have become part of our professional lexicon and panel topics at our conferences. We talk a lot about the barriers to progress in aligning health and housing policy in this country. […]