How much of good health results from our lifestyle? From our
healthcare? From the environment in which we live? It might surprise you to
learn the extent to which our health– good or bad –depends on our environment.
In fact, experts assert that at least half of our health depends on our social,
economic, and physical environment: the education we received; our income; our
neighborhood; the quality of our housing; and other elements of our background
and current circumstances.
In Minneapolis and St. Paul, people living in one
neighborhood can expect to live as much as 13 years longer than people living
just a few miles down the road. If you want to see how your zip code stacks up
against others, take a look at the study which we at Wilder Research completed with the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota
Foundation. Where you live, how much education you received, your income –all
are factors that can shorten or lengthen your life; they influence your blood
pressure, your susceptibility to chronic diseases, and other physical
conditions.
Traditionally, public health practitioners and community
development finance professionals have focused on these social determinants of
health using different lenses. Public health has focused primarily on increasing
awareness of healthy behaviors (eating nutritious food, exercising, not smoking,
etc.), on policies which protect the public from harm (food handling laws,
fluoridated water, smoking bans, etc.), and on increasing access to health
services. Community development finance professionals have focused on designing
living environments best suited to good health and on financing major projects
which can offer access to health care, child care, housing, and better food,
for example. Despite similar missions, these two sectors have largely worked
independently.
Clearly, a convergence (as Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey of the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation calls it) between these two disciplines makes a
lot of sense. Individuals may seek to do all the right things – exercise,
provide enriched child development experiences for their children, secure a
good job with an income sufficient to provide stable housing to themselves and
their families, and much more. However, the environment can inhibit them from
accomplishing their goals. No matter what your skill level, for example, if no
jobs exist, you won’t find a good job, you won’t have a good income, you won’t
secure quality housing for yourself and your family.
Wilder Research collaborated with the Federal Reserve Bank
of Minneapolis, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of
Minnesota Foundation, to foster just such a convergence here in Minnesota. We
brought together public health and human service people and community
development finance people – in the hope that they might join forces. Our daylong
conference showed representatives from the two sectors the benefits of
collaborating with each other and gave each the “basic 101 level” understanding
of the other sector – so they can talk with each other, understand
opportunities and constraints for action, and ultimately engage in more joint projects.
Fortunately, we have already made some good strides in
Minnesota. Andriana Abariotes of LISC, one of our advisers and seminar
presenters, identified in her article,
Community Development, Health’s New Partner, some outstanding existing local efforts. For
example, she notes an initiative which both promotes better health care and
addresses longer-term social determinants of health: Northpoint Health and
Wellness, “where the continued expansion of its clinic and campus can not only
provide quality health services but also serve as an anchor in the
redevelopment of Penn and Plymouth Avenues in North Minneapolis, improving
community safety and providing access to jobs.”
Abariotes also points to the Backyard Initiative (an effort
in which Wilder Research had the good fortune to play a role during the design
phase): “a community partnership led by Allina Health and the Cultural Wellness
Center to engage residents in a completely different conversation and approach
to their health. It is innovation playing out in real time, where deep
listening and learning are core to changing the nature of the relationship
between a major health provider and its patients and neighbors. Also changing
are residents’ sense of ownership and efficacy and their own relationship to
each other and to institutions in the neighborhood.”
Through our work at Wilder Research, we have the capacity to
build understanding, kindle imagination, promote collaboration, change systems,
and improve the lives of individuals, families, and communities by working
“upstream.” Our society cannot sustainably deal with problems one by one after
they occur. “Healthy Communities” – our partnership with the Federal Reserve
Bank of Minneapolis, the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation, and
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – offers the opportunity to build strengths
(not just remedy weaknesses), lengthen and improve everyone’s quality of life,
and prevent problems before they occur in this generation and in the future.
(A video of the keynote and resources from the Minnesota Healthy
Communities conference are available here on our website.)
