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Resource Library

The Partners for Advancing Health Equity (P4HE) Resource Library is a virtual portal containing action-oriented health equity research, practice, and policies. The library aims to increase equity in health by offering free access to field-tested, evidence-informed and evidence-based programs strategies and high-quality research.


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  • Climate change has altered global to local weather patterns and increased sea levels, and it will continue to do so. Average temperatures, precipitation amounts, and other variables such as humidity levels are all rising. In addition, weather variability is increasing, causing, for example, a greater number of heat waves, many of which are more intense and last longer, and more floods and…
    December 2020
    Illness/Disease/Injury/Wellbeing, Social/Structural Determinants, Environment/Context, Disasters
  • Since its inception in 1996, The California Endowment (TCE) has sought ever greater impact in improving the health and lives of all Californians, with an intense focus on the state’s populations and communities of color experiencing low income. The foundation’s approach has evolved from supporting programmatic efforts to a focus on communities, policy change, and systems reform, to now an…
    December 2020
    Policy & Law, Systemic Determinants
  • While the terms equity and equality may sound similar, the implementation of one versus the other can lead to dramatically different outcomes for marginalized people. Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an…
    November 2020
    Systemic Determinants
  • In June 2020, The California Endowment (TCE) issued a Statement on Race and Racism and identified key action steps to advance racial justice in our role as an active partner and investor in Black communities and communities of color. This brief reports on our specific commitment to improved tracking, reporting, and transparency of TCE funding to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)-led…
    October 2020
    Physical Environment, Social Environment
  • This blog post covers a Dutch participatory research project called The Workspace, a study which brought policymakers together with unemployed people to share perspectives on municipal initiatives to encourage unemployed people's participation in society. The article outlines how The Workspace encouraged dialogue and furthered the goals of action participatory research.
    October 2020
    Structural Violence, Systemic Determinants
  • Policies that increase access to SNAP are related to reduced risk of food insecurity, particularly among economically vulnerable households.More widely available school breakfast may help offset food insecurity. Policies outside of food assistance—including length of unemployment insurance availability, generosity of EITC and potentially higher minimum wages —are linked to food security. A…
    October 2020
    Services & Programs, Systemic Determinants
  • This guide offers a set of guideposts to support city staff in designing and implementing inclusive processes for shared analysis based on the equity data provided in the Greenlink Equity Map (GEM) (and potentially additional data as well) through collaboration with community partners. Engaging with impacted communities is key to 1) understanding the stories behind the data patterns the maps…
    September 2020
    Climate Change
  • Social factors are becoming more widely recognized as having an impact on health. There is growing evidence that social, economic, and environmental factors contribute significantly to disparities in health outcomes (Braveman et al 2011). As a result, those looking to close health disparities are increasingly looking at interventions that address structural issues that create an unfair and…
    September 2020
    Community-rooted/Participatory Research, Systemic Determinants
  • We know that pandemics, natural disasters, wars, and other crises magnify the burden of disease among people who experience poverty and other marginalized groups. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the flaws in our health care system and social safety net have been unmasked, highlighting how inequities in education, income, and housing can cripple a nation’s response to a crisis. Also laid bare is the…
    June 2020
    Policy and Practice, Systemic Determinants
  • Measures taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have had sudden and profound effects on the labor market, with millions of American workers being laid off since March 2020. The national unemployment rate increased from 3.5 percent in February 2020 to 14.7 percent in April 2020, the highest rate since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Experts believe that the sudden and…
    May 2020
    COVID-19/Coronavirus, Environment/Context
  • The relationship between housing and health is more than just the four walls that shelter an individual or family each night. More broadly, the link between health and housing is a result of influences from both the individual home unit and a variety of structural and societal factors within a neighborhood. These elements have the potential to provide safety, recreation, access to transportation…
    May 2020
    Housing Discrimination, Social/Structural Determinants, Environment/Context, Systemic Determinants, Healthy Housing, Racism
  • The importance of social isolation and loneliness on our health is widely recognised in previous research. This study compares loneliness in deprived neighbourhood with that in the general population. It further examines whether social isolation and loneliness are associated with health-risk behaviours (including low intake of fruit or vegetables, daily smoking, high-risk alcohol intake, and…
    April 2020
    Social Environment
  • Social determinants of health—the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age that affect health and quality of life—are strongly associated with disparities in health status and life expectancy. Nurses require a comprehensive understanding of social determinants and their associations with health outcomes to provide patient-centered care. Nurses can be leaders and change…
    January 2020
    Services & Programs, Social Environment
  • Recent attention to the interrelationship between racism, socioeconomic status (SES) and health has led to a small, but growing literature of empirical work on the role of structural racism in population health. Area-level racial inequities in SES are an indicator of structural racism, and the associations between structural racism indicators and self-rated health are unknown. Further, because…
    January 2020
    Social Environment, Systemic Determinants, Racism
  • Cultural behaviors have important implications for human health. Culture, a socially transmitted system of shared knowledge, beliefs and/or practices that varies across groups, and individuals within those groups, has been a critical mode of adaptation throughout the history of our species. Socioeconomic status, gender, religion and moral values all play into how individuals experience,…
    December 2019
    Systemic Determinants
  • Today’s public health challenges are complex, with many biological, environmental, and social contributors. One of the most intractable public health issues is the racial/ethnic disparity in health outcomes. To address racial/ethnic disparities in health outcomes, it is important to have a racially and ethnically diverse workforce that is capable of addressing such public health issues. Given its…
    November 2019
    Environment/Context
  • While the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness has decreased over the last ten years, the number of older adults experiencing sheltered homelessness is on the rise, as we report in Housing America’s Older Adults 2019. Incomes for the lowest-income older adults have not risen as fast as rents, leaving a growing number of older adult renters at risk for homelessness as they…
    November 2019
    Environment/Context
  • Millions of people in the United States face health disparities related to social and economic factors, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and income. Understanding and addressing disparities is critical to improving health equity nationwide. See the subpage on disparities in maternal health to learn more about that particular aspect of health equity. (website abstract) 
    November 2019
    Policy & Law, Systemic Determinants
  • Digital technologies shape the way in which individuals and health systems interact to promote health and treat illness. Their propensity to exacerbate inequalities is increasingly being highlighted as a concern for public health. Personal, contextual and technological factors all interact and determine uptake and consequent use of digital technologies for health. This article reviews evidence on…
    October 2019
    Systemic Determinants
  • Transgender people experience intersecting forms of social marginalization and are disproportionately affected by health inequities. We elucidate a novel conceptual framework for transgender health research that theorizes the constructs and pathways through which social inequities produce health inequities for transgender populations. Drawing on theories of intersectionality and structural…
    October 2019
    Systemic Determinants, Transphobia
  • Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH) is one of several initiatives in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF’s) ongoing efforts to build a Culture of Health and promote health equity. DASH supports collaboratives of community organizations focused on cross-sector data sharing to address social determinants of health. As the initiative entered its second phase, its focus expanded from…
    September 2019
    Services & Programs, Social Environment
  • Housing is a major pathway through which health disparities emerge and are sustained over time. However, no existing unified conceptual model has comprehensively elucidated the relationship between housing and health equity with attention to the full range of harmful exposures, their cumulative burden and their historical production. We synthesized literature from a diverse array of disciplines…
    September 2019
    Housing Discrimination, Social/Structural Determinants, Environment/Context, Healthy Housing, Racism
  • ContextImproving the health of the total population may be insufficient in eliminating racial disparities in population health. An expanding commitment to understanding social determinants of health aims to address the social conditions that produce racialized patterns in health inequity. There is also a resurging and evolving interest in the influence of cultural barriers and assets in shaping…
    September 2019
    Environment/Context
  • Most US cities lack built environments that support physical activity, which is a key determinant of health. Making permanent changes to the physical environment to promote physical activity is not always feasible. Play Streets is a place-based intervention that is typically organized by local governments or community organizations and involves temporarily closing streets to create safe places…
    September 2019
    Obesity, Physical Environment
  • Although the pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the US, little is known about the health consequences of growing up in gentrifying neighborhoods. We used New York State Medicaid claims data to track a cohort of low-income children born in the period 2006–08 for the nine years between January 2009 and December 2017. We compared the 2017 health outcomes of children who started…
    September 2019
    Asthma, Obesity, Anxiety, Depression, Physical Environment, Classism

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