I was so privileged to moderate a discussion on behalf of @islandpress with the editors of the 2nd edition of Making Healthy Places (Nisha D. Botchwey, Andrew Dannenberg, and Howard Frumkin) and Katherine Catalano of the American Public Health Association.
The first edition of Making Healthy Places edited by Andy Dannenberg, Howie Frumkin, and Richard Jackson was groundbreaking in pushing forward the idea that place was central in population and community health. The new and second edition progresses the work of the first edition by bringing in the global scale, encouraging and teaching us how to be more relevant and collaborative partners with communities, government, and the nonprofit/NGO sector, and to provide tools in pursuit of equitable health programs and policies.
This conversation covered a lot of ground and many topics. My takeaways from this conversation:
Making places healthier requires a long term commitment to places and people.
The long term commitment means that the people and the places where they live, work, and play are central in designing the policies and programs that affect them. In other words, authentic partnership with communities and places is vital.
Enabling this long term commitment requires investment in the operations of organizations and agencies that have worked on these issues -- programmatic funding, while important, is insufficient for longer term impacts.
There are tools that can help us understand and to explain the issues faced by communities and places.
Here is the link to the conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuTfPtI3BvU&t=2s
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