Empowering Communities to Advocate for Planning Policies Supportive of Health and Wellness

Given the growing recognition that physical and social environment factors play a major role in shaping health, Asian Health Services (AHS), a community health center, capitalized on an unprecedented opportunity to engage community members in a city planning process focused on the re-development of a neighborhood located near a public transit station. This neighborhood, located in Oakland, California, is characterized as a crowded, lower income community with many needs that sensitive planning could address. Given the significant number of AHS patients that live, work, and recreate in the neighborhood, AHS has implemented a community-based participatory project, “Leadership Action for Healthy Communities”, which focuses on empowering patients as well as low-income community members in the neighborhood to advocate for local environmental, planning, land-use and overall policies that support community health and wellness. This project has been instrumental in mobilizing community members young and old to gather relevant data in their community for policy advocacy, voice their needs and issues, and advocate for health priorities to be incorporated into a city specific plan for the neighborhood. As a model by which low-income community members have gained the leadership skills necessary to address the root causes of the chronic diseases they face, such as crime, polluted air, traffic, and unsafe public spaces, this project implemented activities that fostered effective local partnerships between city planning agencies, affordable housing advocates, businesses, churches, architects, youth organizations, and health centers. This session will discuss how these efforts created community-level change to building a healthy community.