Report

“The Good Collaboration Toolkit is a set of materials aimed to help individuals collaborate well and build successful collaborations. Through a series of activities, participants will be asked to consider questions, dilemmas, and cases involved with all aspects of the collaboration, most especially the process of collaboration. …this Toolkit provides participants with an opportunity to work through exercises, as persons and in groups, which can be useful to the collaborative process.”

“The Health & Housing Starter Kit is designed to help local institutions take their first steps toward creating bold and innovative health and housing initiatives. The Building Blocks cover a range of issues that local institutions will likely wade through as they start their efforts, and are drawn from themes we pulled from nearly 2 years of field research and interviews with staff at each of our case study sites. These include leadership, financing, how to develop an orientation toward health equity, forming partnerships with communities and other institutions, scaling your work to address population outcomes, developing indicators to understand and evaluate your efforts, and crafting messages to build support.”

“Local and state health departments need to adapt and evolve if governmental public health is to address emerging health demands, minimize current as well as looming pitfalls, and take advantage of new and promising opportunities. [This paper] zeroes in on what a high achieving public health department of the future will be doing differently. It does so not with a comprehensive inventory of tasks but rather with a distillation of the most important new skills and activities essential to be high achieving and serve in the role of the community chief health strategist.”

“Chronic absenteeism is a critical national problem that puts more than 6.5 million schoolchildren at risk for falling behind academically, dropping out of school and serious long-term health, employment and financial consequences. There is a growing movement among schools, states and the federal government to address the underlying causes of chronic absenteeism. This policy brief takes a close look at the reasons behind chronic absenteeism, its adverse impact on health and life outcomes, and potential solutions.”

“AcademyHealth’s Community Health Peer Learning Program explored 17 national and regional programs supporting local and cross-sector collaborations focused on population health improvement at the community level. This environmental scan establishes a baseline understanding for this emerging field of practice, and sheds light on possible opportunities at the funder, program and local project levels to hasten progress toward greater connectivity and collective action.”

“The Action Guide is a framework to help multi-sector groups work together to improve population health by addressing 10 interrelated elements for success and using the related resources as needed. Like a “how-to” manual, the Action Guide is organized by these 10 elements and contains definitions, recommendations, practical examples, and a range of resources to help communities achieve their shared goals and make lasting improvements in population health.”

“This guide is intended to highlight the ways that school needs assessments required by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) can be a valuable tool in identifying, understanding and addressing health conditions that contribute to poor academic performance. It provides child advocates, community leaders, school personnel and other key stakeholder groups with the information that they need to convince their state and local education leaders to make health and wellness a significant component of the needs assessment and school improvement process.”

“Child Trends partnered with the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and EMT Associates, Inc. to review relevant state statutes and regulations enacted as of September 2017 and analyze their alignment with the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model of healthy schools. Findings from this work are compiled in three products to help policymakers and advocates better understand the current landscape and consider the creation of policies that promote healthy schools.”

“Housing and health systems need to work together. Public housing authorities (PHAs) are significant providers of housing to those in need, offering the health sector scale and expertise. Little was known about how PHAs worked with the health sector writ large. With a national survey, we found that PHAs across the country are engaged in a wide range of partnerships with different health organizations that address various target populations and health priorities. Barriers to housing-health collaboration, such as funding and staffing capacity, can be overcome with cross-system partnerships that seek to address these needs.”

“Public health and housing professionals know that the health impacts of housing decisions can last decades, affecting residents over their lifetimes and across generations. Health impact assessments (HIAs) provide an opportunity for these sectors to build strong partnerships dedicated to the shared goal of ensuring that housing projects, policies, and programs promote the best possible health and quality of life for residents. This brief provides public health professionals with information about major housing programs and policies, identifies key decision-makers, and discusses how public health professionals can effectively integrate health into housing decisions.”