Where we live, work, and play has a major role in shaping our health. Rates of chronic diseases attributable to the design of the built environment—including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and asthma- are on the rise. The built environment also has direct and indirect impacts on mental health, including depression and anxiety. This is true for everyone, but is felt even more among vulnerable populations, who are less likely to have access to nutritious, affordable food and opportunities for physical activity and are more likely to be exposed to environmental pollutants and circumstances that increase stress.
Addressing growing health challenges and inequities requires new partnerships and collaboration between built environment and public health practitioners, and a health-focused approach to landscapes, buildings, and infrastructure. The Joint Call to Action to Promote Healthy Communities brings together eight national organizations calling upon members to collaborate with one another to create healthier, more equitable communities. When professionals in the fields of the built environment and public health work together, we multiply our potential to improve health.
The prevalence of low-density, automobile-dependent communities has resulted in unsustainable lifestyles that increasingly threaten human health and well-being. In addtion to inflating housing and transportation costs and increasing carbon emissions, disconnected communities reliant on cars create sedentary lifestyles. The lack of access to environments that encourage daily exercise, provide clean air and water and offer affordable services and nutritious food has meant growing epidemics of depression, obesity, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease.
Communities can promote human health and well-being by encouraging the development of environments that offer rich social, economic, and environmental benefits. Healthy, livable communities improve the welfare and well-being of people by expanding the range of affordable transportation, employment, and housing choices through “Live, Work, Play” developments; incorporating physical activity into components of daily life; preserving and enhancing valuable natural resources; providing access to affordable, nutritious, and locally produced foods distributed for less cost; and creating a unique sense of community and place.
Communities need to maximize opportunities for daily exercise like walking and biking. Landscape architects encourage communities to move towards compact, transit-oriented land-uses that connect mixed-use developments, neighborhood schools, and a range of affordable housing choices. They assist communities in developing healthy green buildings and open spaces that promote efficient water and energy use and provide substantial amounts of vegetation to clean air and cool temperatures. In doing so, these communities can avoid the expensive health epidemics associated with automobile dependence, sedentary lifestyles, along with the high costs to the environment brought by dysfunctional patterns of living.
One of our long term goals is to build a facility inspired by the design of the Center for Urban Agriculture. The building will include fields for growing vegetables and grains, greenhouses, and rooftop gardens. It will also include a supermarket, health clinic, and affordable housing. We will use EB-5 financing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, and New Markets Tax Credits.
How a Health Clinic Made a Local Grocery Store Part of Its Prescription
Together, BNHC and Vicente’s tapped into a complex mix of public, private, and philanthropic funding to help open the doors, including $12 million assembled from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation’s (LISC) national lending pool and Healthy Futures Fund. The project had strong support from local policymakers and community leaders, but nothing would have happened had Joss and Barbosa not spent many hours talking, planning, and driving it forward.
The thinking behind the partnership was basic: Good nutrition is a critical component of good health. Indeed, with nearly one in four Brockton residents living in poverty—along with high rates of diabetes and obesity, and a population of immigrants and first-generation residents for whom food is a cultural touchstone…
It would be difficult to tackle chronic health conditions without a focus on food.
Creating Millionaire Employees
We must develop business models that create good jobs.
If you don’t want poverty in your community, your businesses must pay living wages with decent benefits. And if you don’t want polluted air, water, and land, your businesses must behave in environmentally sustainable ways.
One business to consider is a privately held, majority employee-owned American supermarket chain based in Boise, Idaho called WinCo Foods. At one store in Corvallis, Oregon, the combined retirement savings of 130 employees roughly comes to an astounding $100 million.
WinCo Supermarket employee Cathy Burch, 42, here with her husband Kevin. In her 23 years at WinCo, she has worked a variety of front-line jobs including checker, shelf stocker, and inventory order.
Most Americans in her situation have either no savings at all or an account such as a 401k containing less than $50,000, but Cathy owns almost a $1 million in stock.
Silicon Valley is missing a ‘big opportunity’ because it doesn’t understand poor people – Medicaid chief
- Medicaid’s chief medical officer Andrey Ostrovsky said Silicon Valley has a long way to go to evolve its health care thesis
- Most health apps are targeted to healthy, wealthy populations rather than on low-income groups.
- There are many huge IT businesses to be built that improve outdated technology processes for Medicaid
Silicon Valley might be hunting unicorns in the wrong places.
According to one top federal health official, entrepreneurs and investors are overlooking one massive population: Low-income Americans who qualify for Medicaid.
“My gut is that it’s a big opportunity with $500 billion in federal spend every year in a system that hasn’t evolved technologically much since 1965,” Ostrovsky said.
According to Ostrovsky, investors have shied away from Medicaid populations in part due to the complexity. But he suspects that another major reason is the lack of empathy and understanding of human needs.
So he recently took to Twitter to publicly invite Silicon Valley investors to spend a “few weeks homeless, functionally impaired or caring for a child with complex needs.” On a phone call with CNBC, he said an experience like this is “bread and butter” for design thinking and customer development. “How else will a VC understand deal flow for a population for served by Medicaid?”
Read more: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/09/medicaid-chief-andrey-ostrovsky-silicon-valley-missing-unicorns.html
Next-level AI Community Health App
No suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime.
For our talk on Applying AI to Local Retail, we will demo CHHE, a next-level AI community health mobile app.
The Community Health & Holistic Eating mobile app is based on the fact that community and autonomy are very important elements in determining health and also on the idea that the production, marketing, and consumption of food is key to nearly everything.
In addition, CHHE is exploring connecting businesses with music artists in a similar way as Citi Private Pass.
Jennifer Breithaupt, Citi’s Global Consumer CMO
Can you give an example of how Citi works with the music industry and even artists directly? When did music first become part of your strategy? Can you give us a sense of how effective it is relative to other types of content/partnership?
We launched our entertainment access platform, Private Pass, over a decade ago as a means to differentiate our brand. In the first year, we launched it with handwritten invitations to 50 events and since then, have been growing it into one of the largest consumer access platforms of any brand. Last year, we offered card members access to over 12,000 events with the world’s biggest artists and had the most successful year to date with year-over-year double-digit growth in ticket sales and revenue.
Counties and parishes with a greater concentration of small, locally-owned businesses have healthier populations — with lower rates of mortality, obesity and diabetes — than do those that rely on large companies with “absentee” owners.
Applying Artificial Intelligence to Local Retail
Monday, February 25th @ 7 pm
Larchmont Public Library
121 Larchmont Avenue, Larchmont, NY
As a local retailer, if you think keeping up with Amazon is expensive and time-consuming, consider the alternative: extinction.
Iceland Succeeds at Reversing Teenage Substance Abuse The U.S. Should Follow Suit
Iceland may be the world’s most progressive country at reducing teenage substance abuse. In the more than 4 decades that I have studied, researched and written about substance misuse, I have not seen a more promising approach.
The enormity of Iceland’s progress is evident in the figure below. From 1998 to 2016, the percentage of 15-16 year old Icelandic youth drunk in the past 30 days declined from 42% to 5%; daily cigarette smoking dropped from 23% to 3%; and having used cannabis one or more times, fell from 17% to 5%. These results are truly phenomenal!
Better than Dope
Promoting alternative recreational activities, strengthening family ties, improving self-efficacy (a person’s experience of competence and self-regard), building social competence (comfortably and responsibly relating to others), and broadening cultural experiences are the most effective strategies for delinquency and drug abuse prevention. At-risk youth can turn their lives around when exposed to and engaged in fulfilling alternatives to drugs and crime .
Iceland has succeeded at implementing these ideals on a national scale…other countries should urgently consider taking a page from their book!
Loving Your Neighbor is Good for Your Health
What is the greatest risk factor for your health?
“There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.”
Social isolation is the public health risk of our time. Now, a third of the population says they have two or fewer people to lean on.
Getting towards the top predictors are two features of your social life. First, your close relationships…. And then something that surprised me, something that’s called social integration. This means how much you interact with people as you move through your day.
You couldn’t understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community — the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with — has a profound effect on who we are.
StartUpTown 