Most do not see these two goals being related, but they are. To accomplish both we need for two schools of thought to come together. The first school of thought is the idea of better neighborhoods lead to better lives for the people who live there. The second is declining neighborhoods lead to poor health for their residents. Community development is focused on improving neighborhoods for the benefit of residents. Healthcare is concerned that the very neighborhood people live in could be negatively affecting their health. Join us as we share how to bring these two professions together to revitalize neighborhoods and improve health outcomes.
Watch the following video to understand how to weave these two activities to get healthy cities.
There are many avenues of community development, but Neighborhood Planning is the one we need to focus on. Neighborhood planning is typically used to create a roadmap for a neighborhood to improve. It involves understanding a neighborhood, developing solutions to its problems, building off its strengths, and laying out the steps the participants should take to reach a unifying vision of the neighborhood. Neighborhood planning is part science and part art. We will share our insights, our approach, and instructions on how to properly engage in neighborhood planning so it makes a difference.
In recent years, the healthcare industry has identified a list of social determinants that drive poor health scores. The interesting thing is that most of these determinants line up with the goals of community development. Healthcare organizations should be working side by side with neighborhood and community planners to solve the social challenges of a community. The difficulty is this approach is brand new to most health care professionals. They have made some efforts to focus on elements such as safe affordable housing, but have not found a way to address others such as education, crime, or employment within the same effort. To accomplish this, they will need to work with community development professionals at a neighborhood level to see results.