In this new brief, Countering the Production of Health Inequities: Ensuring the Opportunity for Health for All, Prevention Institute analyzes how various sectors such as housing, education, and economic development have contributed to inequities in health but also have important roles to play in achieving health equity. There is a role for every institution, sector, and system working together to achieve an equitable culture of health across the United States.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law. Despite some progress, segregation from opportunity and unequal access to quality, affordable housing persist today, and we need to do much more to ensure that every community is afforded equitable access to opportunity and a healthy way of life. That’s what’s happening in Buffalo, New York, where PUSH Buffalo has led efforts to increase community ownership of land, build affordable housing, and create green jobs. Watch this video to see how PUSH is improving health by taking on housing.

In this op-ed for The Hill, Dana Fields-Johnson of PI and Jessica Aiwuyor of the National Fair Housing Alliance call for reinforcing and reinvigorating efforts to reduce housing discrimination and residential segregation in America.

On March 24th, students and families will rally in Washington, D.C. and across the country and globe to protest Congress’ inaction on gun violence.

Today, Prevention Institute releases a new list of recommendations for preventing gun violence.

In a new report, PI addresses early questions that have emerged in practice and implementation of the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience (ACE|R) Framework. Community efforts to operationalize the ACE|R Framework revealed opportunities to refine and clarify elements of the Framework and to expand its applicability across a diversity of communities and community concerns. PI has also just published six new profiles of communities implementing the Framework.

PI's Ruben Cantu's blog, featured in AlterNet, explores how climate change is even more destructive to communities that already face adverse experiences:

"While we all share the same warming planet, the effects of climate change aren’t experienced evenly across societies. Climate change poses a disproportionate threat to communities that already face multiple challenges, including economic disinvestment, higher rates of violence, and exposure to other environmental hazards."

Cradle to Community was a national partnership project of Prevention Institute and the Center for the Study of Social Policy, supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. With the UNITY City Network and Early Childhood LINC, the project identified strategic policy, practice, systems, and norms change levers to make communities safer so that all children have the opportunity to develop optimally. The project also identified policies and practices to strengthen early childhood development as a strategy to foster safer communities in the long-term.

PI's Lisa Fujie Parks joined Sonali Kolhatkar, host of Rising Up with Sonali to discuss moving beyond #MeToo to prevent sexual harassment and violence in the first place.

In this blog for Health Affairs, PI's Larissa Estes and Well Being Trust's Benjamin Miller call for thinking and acting "upstream" to address the underlying causes and community conditions that are fueling opioid addiction and diseases of despair.

Mental wellbeing has a tremendous impact on the lives of individuals, families, and communities.  Now is an opportune time for our nation to implement a comprehensive approach to mental health and wellbeing that incorporates community prevention as a complement to clinical care and long term recovery supports. Communities can forge a path forward by focusing on specific community conditions like housing, social networks, and trust, while intentionally embedding healing values like safety and trust.  

Our report explores what people working on “healthy community” issues—like active transportation, parks, healthy food, planning, public health, healthcare, and more—can do in their own work to improve community conditions without contributing to gentrification and displacement.

In California and across the country, there is greater recognition that where we live, work, and play not only shapes personal behavior, such as eating and physical activity, but also drives health outcomes such as diabetes and heart disease. Now, a new Prevention Institute (PI) report also draws the connection between community environments and health and safety in our intimate relationships. 

Our report digs into the ways community trauma undermines health, and talks about how to build community and individual resilience.

For medical high utilizers, healthcare use and costs are significantly greater than for others in the population. Our report discusses ways that prevention can reduce the need for services currently faced by high utilizers.

We draw upon and incorporate these deeply-held values and strategies in our work: community wisdom; norms that support equity, health, and safety; comprehensive action reflecting the Spectrum of Prevention; taking Two Steps to Prevention to the community determinants of health; multi-sector collaboration; shifting the narrative; local, state, and national policy change; organizational practice change.