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May 2010

Successful Partnerships: Strategies For Multi-Field And Cross-Sector Collaborations

Overview

Health and place are inextricably linked. People are healthy when the places they live in support health. But the systems that shape communities and health are complex, from how food is grown, processed, distributed, and sold to how neighborhoods are built to the transportation systems that serve them. Creating healthy, equitable communities requires the broad expertise and influence of funders, advocates, and practitioners working across multiple fields to change these systems. This webinar explored the importance of engaging partners that extend beyond health. We heard about initiatives that involve collaboration across a broad spectrum of fields, including health, urban planning, transportation, food and sustainable agriculture, and community/economic development.

Featured Speakers:

  • David D. Fukuzawa, Program Director, Kresge Foundation (powerpoint)
  • Chetrice Gillon, Special Project Launch Manager, Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion, Bureau of Substance, Prevention Treatment and Recovery (powerpoint)
  • Jill Fuglister, Co-Director, Coalition for a Livable Future (powerpoint)

June 2010

A Path From Hope To Change: Implementing Equity-Focused Principles And Strategies

Overview

"Equity: Just and fair inclusion. An equitable society is one in which all can participate and prosper. The goals of equity must be to create conditions that allow all to reach their full potential. In short, equity creates a path from hope to change." - Angela Glover Blackwell, PolicyLink. Creating healthy places is critical to improving the overall health of Americans. Our neighborhoods must allow people the opportunity to make healthy decisions. Yet, not all places are created equal. Some neighborhoods have safe places for children to play outside, good schools and proximity to healthy food outlets like grocery stores and farmers markets. Other neighborhoods have only liquor stores, and lack sidewalks and parks to play in. Those neighborhoods lacking in healthy opportunities are where low-income people and communities of color live. They are also where people experience the worst health outcomes. Yet, all people should have the opportunity to live healthy lives. To create healthy people it's critical to focus on low-income people and communities of color whose environments often do not allow for healthy choices. In this session, participants learned how equity-based strategies and principles can form the basis of environmental policy change.

Featured Speakers:

  • Angela Glover Blackwell, Founder and CEO, PolicyLink (no powerpoint)
  • Linda Jo Doctor, Program Officer, The W.K. Kellogg Foundation (powerpoint)
  • Robert Garcia, Founder and Executive Director, City Project (powerpoint)

Talking About Healthy People In Healthy Places: Linking Values To Policy And Environmental Change

Overview

Creating healthy places where people can be healthy requires broad-based policy and environmental change. Developing these changes requires effective communication with others about the importance of healthy, equitable communities. Social science research demonstrates specific techniques for successfully conveying messages. For example, for most people in the U.S., the starting point for change of any kind is at the individual level. But when audiences are reminded early in the communication of the influence environments have on health, they are receptive to messages about policies that can change those environments. This webinar addressed effective communication strategies to advance the reality of healthy people in healthy places. Panelists discussed framing, language and techniques to develop messages that can garner support for policies and environmental change strategies. Panelists specifically addressed the challenges of talking about equity.

Featured Speakers:

September 2010

The Art And Science Of Evaluation: Sound Methods For Assessing Policy And Environmental Change

Overview

The majority of efforts to improve health focus on healthcare and programmatic and educational strategies. Yet, environmental and policy changes can create long-term sustainable opportunities for health. In the past several years, advocates from multiple fields across the country are implementing innovative projects to foster policy and environmental changes that help create healthy places where families and children can lead healthier lives. These strategies are fairly new, so how do we know if they are working? Ongoing tracking, measurement, and assessment can provide short-term feedback to guide and improve existing efforts. Evaluation can also help to identify effective strategies and tools for sustained use over the long term. In this webinar, panelists will discuss techniques for effectively evaluating policy and environmental change efforts to create healthy people in healthy places. It will also touch on strategy evaluation to promote equity and multi-field partnerships. Panelists will draw on specific evaluation examples and discuss challenges and lessons learned.

Featured Speakers:

May 2015

All-In Cities: Building an Equitable Economy from the Ground Up

Overview

As cities come back, leaders must bake equity and inclusion into their growth strategies. This framing paper for the All-In Cities initiative, released at the 2015 Equity Summit in Los Angeles, shares cross-cutting practices and an eight-point policy framework to build equitable, thriving cities. See the report here.

April 2015

Convergence Partnership Statement about Passage of the Farm Bill and Programs to Improve Access to Healthy Food

Overview

The Convergence Partnership responds to the passage of the farm bill and programs to improve access to healthy food. The farm bill includes the authorization of $125 million for the national Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) that helps revitalize communities by bringing in new, vibrant healthy food retail and by creating and preserving quality jobs for local residents. 

WEBINAR-Equity in Healthy Food Access: Engaging Women and Entrepreneurs of Color

Overview

This webinar highlighted strategies and valuable resources for engaging female entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color in financing healthy food access projects. 
 
The webinar presented the economic potential of entrepreneurs of color and female entrepreneurs, common barriers and challenges to accessing capital, promising approaches for connecting smaller businesses with resources, as well as case studies and best practices from the field. 

April 2015

An Equity Profile of the San Francisco Bay Area Region (2015)

Overview

The Bay Area is booming, but a rising tide economy is not lifting up its low-income communities and communities of color. As communities of color continue to drive growth and change in the region, addressing wide racial inequities and ensuring people of color can fully participate as workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators is an urgent priority. Our analysis finds that the regional economy could have been $117 billion stronger in 2012 absent its racial gaps in income and employment. This profile, produced for The San Francisco Foundation, describes the region’s demographic transformation and performance on a series of equity indicators. Read the summary (web version/download PDF) and the full profile (web version/download PDF). NOTE: This profile was updated in 2017. See the updated profile.

Media: Study Finds S.F.’s Ethnic Diversity Dwindling (SF Chronicle); A Startling Map of How Much Whiter San Francisco Will Be in 2040 (CityLab); S.F. Could Be Much Whiter in 25 Years, While the Rest of Region Gets More Diverse (KQED News); Study Shows San Francisco Getting Less Diverse (KGO 810 News); San Francisco Poised to be "Whitest County" in Bay Area (NBC Bay Area); SF Is on Track to Be the Whitest County in the Region (SF Curbed)

Food for Every Child: The Need for Healthy Food Financing in Michigan

Overview

Michigan must address the significant need for fresh food resources in many of its communities. A myriad of factors have created a shortage of healthy food resources in lower-income areas across the state, creating a public health
crisis.
 
Despite having the nation’s second most diverse agriculture industry, 17.9% of Michigan’s residents are food insecure, meaning they lack reliable access to healthy food. In Kent County, home to Grand Rapids, the largest city in West Michigan, 80,000 people are food insecure.
 
More than 1.8 million Michigan residents, including an estimated 300,000 children, live in lower-income communities with limited
supermarket access. Underserved communities can be found in rural areas such as Hillsdale, Tuscola, Sanilac, Cold Water and Allegan, as well as in urban centers including Flint and Detroit.

How the Proposed Fair Housing Rule Will Boost the Economy

Strong and effective fair housing laws are essential for building prosperity — for people struggling to get by, for local and regional economies that benefit from thriving communities, and for the nation as a whole. That’s why a proposed rule by the Department of Housing and Urban Development is so important. As inequality soars and neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are on the rise in most American cities, the rule would push municipalities to deliver on the promise of fair housing. By helping to connect low-income families to neighborhoods of greater opportunity, the rule has the potential to spur economic growth not only within these households, but within cities and regions.

The rule, due out this summer, is called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). It would sharpen the tools that equity advocates and public sector leaders can use to increase investment in high-poverty neighborhoods, fight racial discrimination in the housing market, and add more affordable housing choices in neighborhoods with jobs, good schools, and other essentials. It would do this in three important ways:

(1)  It would make municipalities more accountable to community member needs by requiring resident engagement on fair housing and community development issues.
     
(2)  It would require a data-driven analysis (an "assessment of fair housing") of community conditions and impediments to fair housing, including factors that contribute to areas of racially concentrated poverty and high unemployment (e.g., school performance, transportation access, and toxic exposures).
     
(3)  It would require jurisdictions to tie federal funding — such as Community Development Block Grants and HOME funds — to addressing the fair housing challenges that are identified.

Taken as a whole, the proposed rule would mean that cities, counties, and states must be proactive to ensure all people can live in neighborhoods where they have access to the opportunities and resources we all need to succeed.

This rule is long overdue. It will help turn around the lasting negative impacts of historically discriminatory practices that contributed to the creation of poor neighborhoods of color, and it will reduce barriers that cut millions of Americans off from economic opportunity. This rule can be a powerful tool to advance equitable economic growth for the nation, and here are five reasons how:

(1)  Reducing growth-limiting racial and economic exclusion: Research shows that families living in disinvested and low-income communities have limited economic mobility and reduced future earnings. This effect creates generational cycles of poverty and limited opportunity: For example, two-thirds of Black children raised in the poorest quarter of U.S. neighborhoods a generation ago are now raising their children in similarly poor neighborhoods. This proposed rule has been proven to help direct more investment to neighborhoods that need them and help low-income families move to neighborhoods with more resources. Both the Puget Sound and the Twin Cities regions built off of their fair housing assessments – part of a pilot for the proposed AFFH rule – to focus new infrastructure investment in Native American, African American, African immigrant, Latino and Southeast Asian communities in need of investment. When St. Louis conducted a fair housing assessment, the city found that Housing Choice Vouchers were being used primarily in low-income neighborhoods where there were few jobs and community amenities. This assessment helped the city revamp its program to help residents find diverse housing choices that better met their needs.
     
(2)   Connecting people to job opportunities: By encouraging more job investments in high-unemployment communities and promoting transit investments that connect these communities to jobs elsewhere, this rule would help people previously isolated from employment opportunities better engage in the regional workforce and contribute to local economies. For example, Puget Sound used its fair housing assessment to strategically plan for a new food distribution hub and job incubators within historically disinvested neighborhoods where job growth was needed. And a New Orleans assessment that found transit was not serving late-shift schedules for hospitality and healthcare workers led to realignment of services to better meet low-wage, transit-dependent workers’ needs.
     
(3)  Creating jobs: Places that support the development of quality affordable housing and new infrastructure in disinvested neighborhoods also create new jobs both in the short- and the long-term for communities. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that building 100 affordable homes can lead to the creation of more than 120 jobs during the construction phase and roughly 30 jobs in a wide array of service industries once homes are occupied. When coupled with job training, inclusive hiring and contracting practices, and provisions for good wages and benefits, these jobs can help put low-income and unemployed residents on a pathway to good careers and financial stability.
     
(4)  Attracting new employers: Lack of quality affordable housing that connects to transit makes it more difficult for employers to recruit and retain employees, putting the local economy at a competitive disadvantage. In a national survey of more than 300 companies, 55 percent of large companies reported an insufficient level of affordable housing in their area, and two-thirds of these respondents cited this shortage as negatively affecting their ability to hold onto qualified employees. Other survey data suggests that affordable housing availability plays an important role in where new businesses decide to build or expand their operations. In Boston and Chicago, fair housing assessments helped these cities support new affordable homes around growing job centers in order to attract more employers to the area.
     
(5)  Providing low-income families with more disposable income to invest and save: The disproportionate housing burden on low-income communities and communities of color makes it hard for them to save for emergencies, make long-term investments, or spend money within the local economy on necessary goods and services. Affordable rent and mortgage payments, and access to affordable transportation, can substantially decrease household costs, in some cases by as much as five hundred dollars a month. When families can save on housing and transportation costs, it bolsters their resiliency and financial stability and allows greater spending on health care and education. These investments contribute to greater stability not only for these households, but for the broader economy: a recent study found that every extra dollar going into the pockets of low-wage workers actually adds about $1.21 to the national economy.

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule is powerful only if we understand it and put it to use. Learn more about the rule in our upcoming webinar.

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