Public Health and Community Development: Using an Evaluation of Three Health Impact Assessments to Create a Toolkit for Fostering Future Collaboration between Sectors

Community development includes a wide range of activities that influence multiple determinants of health and quality of life. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) can play a key role in improving health in these communities by providing a context for cross-sector collaboration between two fields that are often working on similar issues, but from separate perspectives. In 2013, the Health Impact Project funded three community development-focused HIAs and an overarching evaluation of lessons learned from those three projects. This session focuses on those lessons learned and the resulting Community Development and HIA toolkit (to be released in summer 2015). The three HIAs analyzed different aspects of community development: neighborhood-level sustainability planning in Hartford, Connecticut; state-level affordable housing policy in Georgia; and a state-level funding program for community development corporations in Massachusetts. The evaluation, led by the Georgia Health Policy Center, determined what aspects of the HIA process and findings were useful, what was redundant or peripheral to the developers’ needs, and how the process could be streamlined to make it easier and more efficient for community developers to integrate health considerations into their work. Topic areas covered in the evaluation and toolkit include poverty mitigation, community services, economic development, affordable housing, place-based revitalization or stabilization, and community organizing. Using a Health in All Policies approach that engaged community development stakeholders in the development of the toolkit and valued their perspectives avoided “health imperialism” and resulted in a tool valued by end users in both the community development and public health sectors.