This workbook is for community-based organizations seeking to affect the social determinants of health through community-based participatory approaches and nontraditional partnerships. Along with an introduction to the concepts of health equity, the workbook presents case studies of communities working at both small and large scales. The authors then provide guidelines for developing your own initiative, from creating partnerships to identifying your approach to assessing and maintaining your progress.

What is this thing we call 'race'? Where did the idea come from? What are the patterns of human variation? And if race isn't biological, what is it? How do our social institutions 'make' race? Used widely in classrooms and community spaces, This acclaimed three-part series compels viewers to scrutinize some of their most fundamental beliefs.

Also see the extensive companion Web site, with games, interactivities, and additional information.

This film is part of the Structural Racism sub-category of California Newsreel's African American Perspectives Collection.

The authors review evidence that suggests that segregation is a primary cause of racial differences in socioeconomic status (SES) by determining access to education and employment opportunities. SES in turn remains a fundamental cause of racial differences in health. Segregation also creates conditions inimical to health in the social and physical environment. The authors conclude that effective efforts to eliminate racial disparities in health must seriously confront segregation and its pervasive consequences

The Strategic Alliance for Healthy Food and Activity Environments has developed recommendations for taking advantage of opportunities from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to improve the health and safety of all Californians.

This report examines the many pathways by which foreclosures are taking a toll on individual and community health.  The consequences of the foreclosure crisis spreading most rapidly in low-income communities of color extend well beyond individual families being forced to leave their homes.  Neighborhoods pockmarked by vacant housing are struggling with increased crime and violence.  Social bonds are broken as families leave the neighborhood, leaving the entire community less prepared to deal with problems.  School stability is threatened as families are forced to move out.  The report highlights the health impacts of foreclosure and offers strategies to reduce or eliminate foreclosure's negative health outcomes.

This memo offers recommendations for targeting Prevention and Wellness recovery funds to maximize the health and equity benefits in the Recovery Act of spring 2009. It makes the case that prioritizing disease prevention – particularly among the most impacted communities – is imperative to strengthening the nation. It makes specific recommendations for using funds to
- Build upon and leverage existing prevention initiatives;
- Promote equity by targeting America’s low-income communities and communities of color;
- Target multi-disciplinary strategies focused on environmental change;
- Develop the health workforce to effectively shape and implement prevention efforts; and
- Advance a vision of healthy people, healthy places.

Advancing health equity to ensure all Americans have the opportunity to lead healthy lives should be a priority. We have an opportunity to do so in a way that alleviates pressure on the health system and saves money. This memo was developed in January '09 to provide background and recommendations for developing a comprehensive, prevention-oriented strategy for acheiving health equity.

Opinion piece commemorating anniversary of Bravo detonation, 60 years after the commencement of U.S. nuclear testing in the South Pacific, urging us to remember the health effects of nuclear testing on the residents of the Marshall Islands.

Health inequalities between rich and poor people are much lower in areas that have lots of green space, such as parks, forests and playing fields, a large British study finds.

Community activist Torm Nompraseurt leads a "toxic tour" of Richmond, California where high levels of industrial pollution are wreaking havoc on the health and wellbeing of residents.

Includes tools for community health worker programs, resources, and references to academic studies on the project.

This handout describes several key resources that may be useful for audiences interested in learning more about the connections between population health and the built / physical, social, economic, and service environment.

Journalist Jill Eisen explores the importance of the social determinants of health from a Canadian perspective. The program devotes considers the importance of looking at "upstream" causes of health and presents possible policies for intervention on different levels.
Part One: S. Leonard Syme, Richard Glazier, Carol Shively, and Michael Marmot explain the concepts behind social determinants of health, present evidence for how stress contribute to "modern" diseases, and elaborate the moral and practical obligations we have to demand action. Part Two: Dennis Raphael, Richard Glazier, and Clyde Hertzman discuss the obesity and diabetes epidemics and early childhood development. Raphael makes an interesting commentary as to why governments continuously fail to address social threats to health.

In 1996, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency joined with several non-profit and government organizations to form the Smart Growth Network (SGN). The Network was formed in response to increasing community concerns about the need for new ways to grow that boost the economy, protect the environment, and enhance community vitality.  The Network's partners include environmental groups, historic preservation organizations, professional organizations, developers, real estate interests; local and state government entities.

This thorough text examines the history of public health in Sweden, with particular attention to the emergence of the welfare state in the past century. Say the authors, "Historical lessons cannot be transferred uncritically from one country to another. However, differences and similarities in appropriate contexts can increase our understanding of relations between health and society. We hope that this book will be useful for policy comparisons and in the training of public health policy-makers, researchers, administrators and practitioners."

Full pdf available online, 5 MB.

To assess the extent to which inequities in the healthcare and physical resource environments determine and shape the health of the South LA community, Community Health Councils collaborated with the Coalition for Health and Justice in a year-long study examining the healthcare and physical environment resources in the area. The resulting Scorecard takes into account multiple public and private policies that influence the resident health through investment—or lack of investment—in economic, education, housing, and healthcare systems. The Scorecard also identifies incremental steps by which South LA can be helped to achieve health equity.

From West Oakland's diesel-choked neighborhoods to San Francisco's traffic-snarled Mission District to the fenceline communities abutting Richmond's refineries, poor and minority residents of the San Francisco Bay Area get more than their share of exposure to air pollution and environmental hazards, this report finds.

SAJE is an economic justice, community development, and popular education center that has been building economic power for working class people in Los Angeles since 1996. Over the past eleven years, SAJE's winning combination of community organizing, coalition-building, and grassroots policy has gained significant benefits for the community. Accomplishments include creating the nation's first welfare-to-work bank account and, through the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice, negotiating the nation's most comprehensive community benefits agreement.

The Strategic Alliance is a coalition of nutrition and physical activity advocates in California, working to shift the debate on nutrition and physical activity away from a primary focus on personal responsibility and individual choice to one that examines corporate and government practices and the role of the environment in shaping eating and activity behaviors. The Alliance's goal is to benefit the health and wellness of all California residents by promoting environmental solutions and institutional and government policies and practices that support healthy eating and activity.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot has been asked by the British government to Chair an independent Review to propose the most effective strategies for reducing health inequalities in England from 2010. This review is a response to the recommendation of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health that national governments develop and implement strategies and policies suited to their particular national context aimed at improving health equity.

Sarnia, a Great Lakes oil town that is the nerve center of Canada's petrochemical industry, once enjoyed the highest standard of living in the country, but now the bill has come due, in compromised environmental and community health.
This film is part of California Newsreel's Health and Social Justice Collection.

Scientists such as Edith Chen, Ph.D, have found evidence that the very experience of poverty and the stress it induces might itself be an asthma “trigger.” Dr. Chen co-founded the Psychobiological Determinants of Health Lab at the University of British Columbia to better understand the pathways by which class gets under the skin and influences our heath.  Rather than focus on how material pollutants, like soot, disrupt our physiology Chen and her colleagues are investigating how ‘social pollutants’ – that is, toxic social environments can become embedded in our bodies and increase susceptibility to disease. 

How does socioeconomic status get under the skin? This book summarizes the decade of research by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health “exploring the pathways and mechanisms that contribute to the gradient relationship between socioeconomic status and health.”

PDFs of each article are available online.  You may also purchase a complete copy of the journal.

This first-ever policy statement on health and place from the AAP argues that pediatricians working with community partners should participate in establishing communities designed for activity and health.