This page provides links to a variety of web resources, including maps and data, toolkits, guides, examples of promising practices, and more. Many of these resources are developed and maintained by other organizations, and the Georgia Health Policy Center does not have any control over changes made to the resources or opinions expressed on external websites.
The Georgia Statewide Health Equity Community of Practice has determined that these topics are foundational to successful collaboration to create healthy communities for all. Please use this table of contents to jump to the types of resources you wish to explore:
Identifying Inequities in Your Area
The annual data release provides a revealing snapshot of how health is influenced by where we live, learn, work, and play. The snapshots provide communities a starting point to investigate where to make change. https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/health-data
This web application provides interactive maps for model-based estimates of 36 chronic disease related measures at county, place, census tract, and ZCTA levels. PLACES is an expansion of the 500 Cities project. It is a collaboration between CDC, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the CDC Foundation. https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/22c7182a162d45788dd52a2362f8ed65
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Social Vulnerability Index (hereafter, CDC/ATSDR SVI or SVI) is a place-based index, database, and mapping application designed to identify and quantify communities experiencing social vulnerability. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/placeandhealth/svi/interactive_map.html
Trusted Well-Being Data on Children and Young People in the United States. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT® (LA INFANCIA CUENTA™) is a premier source of data on children, youth and families. Find indicators for the nation, states and more. https://datacenter.aecf.org/
Regional and statewide data for Georgia and the Atlanta region. https://neighborhoodnexus.org/
Bridge the gap between data and action. Their mapping application, analytics platform, and data licensing services are built for non-GIS professionals, data-literate researchers, and everyone in between. https://www.policymap.com/
The National Equity Atlas is America’s most detailed report card on racial and economic equity. We equip movement leaders and policymakers with actionable data and strategies to advance racial equity and shared prosperity. The Atlas is produced by PolicyLink and the USC Equity Research Institute. https://nationalequityatlas.org/
The original Well-Being In the Nation Measures were developed by over 100 organizations and communities working together across sectors to identify and try out measures that mattered to them as part of the 100 Million Healthier Lives initiative. The process of developing and updating these measures is stewarded by Well-being and Equity (WE) in the World and is done in collaboration with Healthy People 2030, the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and others with input from hundreds of communities. https://www.winmeasures.org/
EJScreen EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool. Identify environmental health risk factors. https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/
Identify environmental health risk factors. https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/
Data 101: Finding and Using Information
Mobilize data, research, and evaluation to make the case for, assess, and inform interventions for health equity. https://healthequityguide.org/strategic-practices/mobilize-data-research-evaluation/
Welcome to the Racial Equity Data Lab, a space where you can create data visuals and dashboards to support your campaigns for racial equity and inclusive recovery. https://nationalequityatlas.org/lab
These resources and tools provide helpful guidance around using and interpreting data and maps for community change work. This is a great place to start for community data skill-building—you’ll find descriptions of foundational concepts, tips and tricks, and emerging and innovative tools and resources for using data to drive and inform your work. https://www.communitycommons.org/collections/Maps-and-Data
Getting to Results connects a racial equity lens to the Results-Based Accountability (RBA) methodology to help empower jurisdictions to make good decisions and advance racial equity. The RBA framework shows a relationship between whole population level results and community indicators of those desired results to the actions that groups determine will be most effective at producing change in communities. https://garemembers.racialequityalliance.org/viewdocument/racial-equity-getting-to-results-2
Introduction to Community Resources
Millions of people use the Community Tool Box each year to get help taking action, teaching, and training others in organizing for community development. Dive in to find help assessing community needs and resources, addressing social determinants of health, engaging stakeholders, action planning, building leadership, improving cultural competency, planning an evaluation, and sustaining your efforts over time. https://ctb.ku.edu/en
The Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD) is at the center of a large and growing movement that considers local assets as the primary building blocks of sustainable community development. Building on the skills of local residents, the power of local associations, and the supportive functions of local institutions, asset-based community development draws upon existing community strengths to build stronger, more sustainable communities for the future. https://resources.depaul.edu/abcd-institute/Pages/default.aspx for the institute and https://resources.depaul.edu/abcd-institute/resources/Documents/WhatisAssetBasedCommunityDevelopment.pdf for the toolkit
Introduction to Barriers to Health
The Roots of Health Inequity. Explore the underlying causes of social injustice and health inequity to unearth public health’s role in building healthier communities. https://www.rootsofhealthinequity.org/
Introduction to Vital Conditions
The Seven Vital Conditions for Well-Being is a useful framework for conceptualizing holistic well-being and the Conditions that give rise to it, as well as identifying levers for community change and improvement. https://www.communitycommons.org/collections/Seven-Vital-Conditions-for-Health-and-Well-Being
Tool for Health & Resilience In Vulnerable Environments. THRIVE enables communities to determine how to improve health and safety, and promote health equity. It is a framework for understanding how structural drivers, such as racism, play out at the community level in terms of the social-cultural, physical/built, and economic/ educational environments. As a framework, THRIVE is widely applicable to local, state, and national initiatives to inform policy and program direction. As a tool, THRIVE can be used in a variety of planning and implementation processes, from neighborhood-level planning to community health needs assessments (CHNA) and community health improvement planning (CHIP) processes. https://www.preventioninstitute.org/tools/thrive-tool-health-resilience-vulnerable-environments
Targeted universalism means setting universal goals pursued by targeted processes to achieve those goals. Within a targeted universalism framework, universal goals are established for all groups concerned. The strategies developed to achieve those goals are targeted, based upon how different groups are situated within structures, culture, and across geographies to obtain the universal goal. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/targeted-universalism and https://www.communitycommons.org/collections/Achieving-Equitable-Outcomes-for-All
Vital Conditions and Social Determinants of Health
To better support partners and decision-makers in these efforts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed the Health Impact in Five Years (HI-5) Initiative. The HI-5 Initiative shifts the focus beyond traditional clinical approaches to health and explores social and environmental approaches that improve population health and health equity. https://www.cdcfoundation.org/hi-5-initiative
The Urban Institute is exploring promising solutions to advance equity and upward mobility in the decades ahead. We are also identifying what today’s transformational leaders need to know to drive forward groundbreaking ideas. In 2019, we will start sharing what we learn about the country’s big challenges, answering what would it take. https://next50.urban.org/
The Change Library is a practical, searchable, peer-reviewed implementation library that helps change makers by sharing both the things that work and the things that don’t work to improve health, wellbeing, and equity with people and communities. https://www.communitycommons.org/collections/100-Million-Healthier-Lives-Change-Library-on-Community-Commons
This guide is intended to help the Delaware Division of Public Health and its partners with addressing underlying causes of health inequities by supporting the implementation of their health equity strategy. https://www.dhss.delaware.gov/dhss/dph/mh/files/healthequityguideforpublichealthpractitionersandpartners.pdf
Vital Conditions in Action
- On the Path to Health Equity: Building Capacity to Measure Health Outcomes in Community Development This new report by Enterprise Community Partners and NeighborWorks America shows how an innovative pilot program – the Health Outcomes Demonstration Project – equipped 20 affordable housing and community development organizations to evaluate health outcomes across a range of programs. http://www.buildhealthyplaces.org/content/uploads/2019/07/On-the-Path-toward-Health-Equity-Building-Capacity-to-Measure-Health-Outcomes.pdf
- Advancing Racial Equity in Housing, Land, and Development. The toolbox includes materials for local government staff and their community partners to embed racial equity in housing and planning agencies’ structures, policies, and practices. Materials include conceptual frameworks and the tools and best practices to apply these frameworks in a local government setting. https://www.racialequityalliance.org/viewdocument/advancing-racial-equity-in-housing-1
The CDC Foundation published its Public Transportation Action Guide for public health care professionals. This guide includes information about why public health should join forces with public transportation and how public health practitioners can bolster public transportation systems.
Healthy Environments for All: Good for Families, Communities, and the Economy. This issue brief describes the economic benefits of creating healthy environments for all—both through targeted strategies that improve the quality of neighborhood environments where low-income people of color live and work, and through larger-scale shifts toward a clean energy economy that does not rely on fossil fuels. https://allincities.org/find-resources/library/casey-equal-voice-series-healthy-environment
The CDC Foundation published its Earned Income Tax Credit Action Guide for public health care professionals. This guide includes information on EITCs, how EITCs keep more families and children above the poverty line and their link with positive health outcomes, especially among mothers and children.
Transformational vs. Transactional
To advance health equity, local health departments must systematically address power imbalances, racism, and other forms of oppression. To do so, they must transform how they work internally, with communities, and alongside other government agencies. https://healthequityguide.org/strategic-practices/
For those who are just embarking on this challenging and rewarding work, the practices and principles of BUILD can serve as a model for change, and the experience of BUILD communities as a resource for best practices. https://buildhealthchallenge.org/resources/workbook/
In recent years we have seen a surge in initiatives designed to improve health and safety through changes to community environments, with new investments in bike lanes, parks, urban trails, public transit, grocery stores, and more. Over time such investments, combined with shifting job and housing markets, can attract more development interest and increase the likelihood that low and middle income people and people of color get squeezed out of neighborhood housing and business markets rather than benefiting from new development and investments. http://www.buildhealthyplaces.org/content/uploads/2018/04/Healthy-Development-without-Displacement-realizing-the-vision-of-healthy-communities-for-all.pdf
Emerging and longstanding solutions focused on what each neighborhood needs, crafted in collaboration with the communities that would benefit from those solutions, bring hope and new possibilities for addressing the intergenerational poverty caused by this history of structural and systemic racism. https://www.frameworksinstitute.org/publication/communicating-about-intergenerational-urban-poverty-and-race-in-america-challenges-opportunities-and-emerging-recommendations/
Racial Equity Toolkit: An Opportunity to Operationalize Equity https://www.racialequityalliance.org/viewdocument/racial-equity-toolkit-an-opportuni-2
Leveraging Healthy People 2030 to Build Non-Traditional Multisector Partnerships. The goal of this toolkit is to help state and territorial health agencies (S/THAs) build non-traditional, non-public health sector partnerships to improve health outcomes and advance health equity. The Healthy People 2030 objectives, aligned closely with the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) framework and Health in All Policies (HiAP) lens, can serve as the cornerstone of these collaborations. This toolkit is implementation-focused, providing partnership-building and -sustaining skills that are rooted in Healthy People 2030 tools and success stories and can be operationalized for community needs. https://www.astho.org/topic/toolkit/building-non-traditional-public-health-multisector-partnerships/
Scarcity Mindset
How to Move from Deficit-Based to Strength-Based Language. A key issue that is holding us back from really tackling and ending hunger is the focus on not having enough. Within charitable food work, and in other nonprofit sectors too, we describe this concept as the scarcity mentality. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/moving-beyond-the-scarcity-mindset/
‘The Sum of Us’ Tallies the Cost of Racism for Everyone https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/books/review-sum-of-us-heather-mcghee.html
Community Health Workers in Upstream Health Equity Work
Engaging Community Health Workers to Achieve Health Equity in North Carolina was a capacity-building training hosted by NC CEAL and CCPH. The training provided an up to date overview of community health workers (CHWs) in North Carolina. By participating in the training, participants were able to gain better insights about CHWs’ lived experiences to inform their health equity work, creating new connections between community members and CHWs and identifying best practices on how to engage CHWs in their communities. https://ccphealth.org/nc-ceal-engaging-community-health-workers-to-achieve-health-equity-in-north-carolina/
Rural vs. Urban Health Disparities in Georgia
This report synthesizes recent studies on the complexities of how blight affects the health of individuals and neighborhoods while offering a blend of policy and program recommendations to help guide communities in taking a more holistic and coordinated approach, such as expanding the use of health impact assessments, tracking health outcomes, and infusing public health into housing policies, codes and practices. http://www.urban.org/research/publication/urban-blight-and-public-health
Rural communities may be able to secure continued funding for health equity efforts if they can demonstrate the economic impact of reducing inequities. https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/toolkits/health-equity/6/making-the-case
This toolkit by the Rural Health Information Hub organizes evidence-based models and resources to support the implementation of programs that address the social determinants of health (SDOH) in rural communities across the United States. https://www.buildhealthyplaces.org/tools-resources/community-resource-library/resource/social-determinants-of-health-in-rural-communities-toolkit/