OPPORTUNITIES

Declaring Racism a Public Health Crisis

 [ Webinar ]

Although the word equity is used more and more often these days, do we always know what it means? How do you know equity when you see it? How well are people impacted by the decision-making included in the process? What does data tell you about how people who have been historically marginalized are doing? Is that data collected and shared with transparency? Answering these questions can help build a common understanding of equity. Watch the third of four virtual events hosted by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focused on adaptive factors of aligning sectors. This event featured Deitre Epps, CEO and founder of RACE for Equity. To watch the recording, click here. To read the related report titled, "Racism: An Underlying Public Health Crisis," click here. 

Community Voices Panel: Shifting Power

 [ Recording ]

Elevating community voices helps ensure that lasting change is driven by and for the community. This is particularly true for improving health locally, as the health care, public health, and social service sectors are aligning to work together in new ways. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation hosted an investigation of how three communities—Lake County, Colorado; Gastonia, North Carolina; and Proviso Township, Illinois— intentionally empower and elevate the voices of members of their communities as they work to align sectors. This engaging panel featured diverse perspectives from organizational leaders and community members who offered practical takeaways and lessons learned along the way. Participants learned how to shift power so that community members are invested in setting priorities and shaping solutions, how elevating the voices of the community is central to addressing racial equity, and much more. To watch the recording, click here.

RESOURCES

The Road to Recovery Lies in Greater Equity

How Data Can Create Racial Equity

Lots of cities take pride in their rankings: the best place to live, the best place to work, the best place for single people, and so on. But what constitutes a “best place” for some may be misery for others. This was the case in Austin, Texas, in 2015 when it was named the best place for families — and the most economically segregated city in the U.S. “When we started to break down data, we learned that Latino and Black kids are five and seven times more likely to live in poverty,” said Brion Oaks, Austin’s chief equity officer. “So you ask yourself, is a community that has that level of disparity and extremes of poverty for certain populations truly family-friendly?” Oaks and other local officials across the U.S. say the problem lies in how cities — and city rankings — look at data in aggregate. They have been encouraging their municipalities to dig deep and break information apart in order to get a more true picture. FUSE Corps, a nonprofit that partners with cities and counties, has identified some examples of the strategy being used to create racial equity within communities. To learn more, click here.

Community Rooted Economic Inclusion: Strategic Action Playbook

The United States is characterized by a persistent geography of racial and economic injustice, in which people of color and low-income people are concentrated in underinvested neighborhoods and systematically isolated from the resources, amenities, and opportunities needed to thrive. COVID-19 has magnified the harms of this enduring intersection between race, poverty, and place—literally killing people in real time for living in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods—but it only shined new light on systems that have long been broken. Facing an inflection point of inequity, there has never been a greater urgency for community, city, and regional leaders to advance bold solutions that foster long-overdue investment and opportunity within disinvested communities—and to do so in a way that benefits existing residents and small businesses within these communities. This playbook provides local leaders with an actionable set of tools to create more just landscapes of neighborhood opportunity through community-rooted economic inclusion—a new, multidisciplinary and systems-level approach to building community wealth within underinvested places, while driving city and regional economic growth and development that centers equity at its core. To learn more, click here.

Reclaiming Shared Space through City-to-Citizen Collaboration

The Urban Institute’s evaluation of Love Your Block describes how the program and Cities of Service, affect neighborhood-level remediation of vacant and abandoned properties, city government collaboration, and resident engagement. Love Your Block connects mayors’ offices with city residents to revitalize their neighborhoods one block at a time. Cities of Service selected 10 cities to be in Love Your Block’s second cohort: Buffalo, New York; Gary, Indiana; Hamilton, Ohio; Hartford, Connecticut; Huntington, West Virginia; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Newark, New Jersey; Richmond, Virginia; and South Bend, Indiana. The cities disbursed mini-grants of $200 to $2,000 to community groups, block clubs, and informal groups of neighbors who organized volunteer-led projects in their neighborhoods. To learn more about the program, click here.

NIMBYism and the Language of Affordable Housing

Across the U.S., the National Low Income Housing Coalition reports a shortage of 6.8 million rental homes for extremely low-income renters alone, not even accounting for those with slightly higher incomes. But the largest hurdle to overcome continues to be the stigma and prejudice surrounding affordable housing and low-income housing tax credit projects. NIMBY-ism, or Not-In-My-Backyard bias, now spans race, wealth status and geography. Simply put, whether you are poor or rich, you don't want "them" in your backyard. A central tenet of the affordable housing debate: Those in other communities support spreading such projects across the city, while existing neighborhood residents said they felt overwhelmed by poorer residents already. Yet whether they be an elected official, longtime resident or social media troll, many people are drawing conclusions based on an incomplete understanding of what it takes to truly address the increasing need for housing affordability. To learn more about this challenge, click here.

Insights for Health and Community Development Partnerships from People Who Have Crossed Sectors

The Build Healthy Places Network found in a 2020 survey of CDCs that lack of staff capacity and in-house health expertise are barriers to engaging with health care organizations, even though the majority of CDCs want to do so. And a 2017 report by NeighborWorks America and Cityblock Health showed that the vast majority of 242 CDCs surveyed conducted “activities at the nexus of health, housing, and community development” and engaged partners to do so, but the report also indicated gaps in their knowledge of health-focused strategies. But hiring is happening. Last year, MACDC’s annual member survey (covering 2019 activity) for the first time included questions on whether CDCs had health experts on their staff or board, finding roughly one-third had at least one staff member with a health background and about one-third reported having a health expert on their board. Cross-sector hiring is occurring in the opposite direction, too, with community development experts increasingly landing within hospitals, public health organizations, and even health insurers. In either direction, for those changing sectors it can be a lonely leap, bringing a learning curve from establishing shared language to navigating different organizational cultures—but also a satisfying experience that opens up fresh opportunities to make change happen. To learn more from experts leading this charge, click here.

10 Priorities for Advancing Racial Equity Through the American Rescue Plan

Developed in partnership with community leaders, chief equity officers, policymakers, economic development practitioners, research and policy organizations, and philanthropic partners, PolicyLink has released, 10 Priorities for Advancing Racial Equity Through the American Rescue Plan: A Guide for City and County Policymakers, which suggests municipal strategies for deploying ARP funds equitably, efficiently, and strategically.  Additionally, the guide lays out a framework for equitable decision-making around ARP spending and investments with prompts that local leaders can use to not only ask hard questions around racial equity, but also seek to address them. To read the report, click here.

CITY TEAM NEWS

Keep Sharing Updates