This special issue of Progress in Community Health Partnerships focuses on the health and well-being of the public housing residents, their neighborhoods, and the larger communities in which they are located. The importance of public housing to the health of our communities in the United States is substantial, given that 1.2 million American households reside in publicly supported housing, and many more people spend time in these settings as workers, visitors or neighbors as part of larger rural or urban communities 1 . Furthermore, in the broadest sense, creating and maintaining healthful public housing communities is in our collective self-interest. The public funding and policies for the provision of public housing, as well as the costs and benefits this housing brings to our larger communities, affect us all. This special issue grew out of the fourth HUD Livable Communities Conference, hosted by Drexel University School of Public Health in 2011. As the article by Confair et al describes 2 , our work in designing and conducting the conference and workshop brought together stakeholders from local and national government agencies, local non-profits involved in community health, academic researchers involved in urban health, and public housing community residents. At the end of the conference, we sought ways to continue the dialogue and share best thinking on the topic, and selected Progress in Community Health Partnerships as one mechanism for taking this discussion to a wider audience. We are grateful to both the Drexel School of Public Health and the Health Partners of Philadelphia for their financial support of this Special Issue. The Drexel School of Public Health, the only accredited school of public health in the Philadelphia region, was founded as “a school without walls”, focusing on partnerships within the City of Philadelphia and beyond, to address public health issues within a social justice framework. A true partner in health improvement efforts within the region, Health Partners of Philadelphia is a nonprofit managed care health plan committed to building healthy communities in southeastern Pennsylvania, and through its Foundation, working to fulfill unmet needs in disadvantaged communities of the Philadelphia region. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the Region 3 Office of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) each contributed their invaluable Federal stakeholder perspective and expertise. Through our Call for Papers, we selected the nine diverse articles that comprise our Special Issue. They describe initiatives related to public housing, and urban communities more broadly, in seven different locations across the United States, including two from the New York and Boston areas, and one each from Oakland, Los Angeles, Seattle, the District of Columbia and Philadelphia. In complement to their broad geographic focus, the reports are equally broad in their foci, methodology, approach, and range of partnerships involved in the work, with authorship teams giving voice to public housing staff, community members, service providers from a range of organizations and academic partners. Two of the reports focus on the tasks involved in gathering health status information from community members. Council and colleagues at the District of Columbia Housing Authority 3 , working with academic collaborators, used a mailed survey as a tool to both collect data on community needs, but also to engage residents in monitoring community health issues, and participating in health planning. Bowen et al. 4 used surveys and key informant interviews to highlight the differences in perspectives on health issues between residents and resident leaders, highlighting the need to reach beyond a community’s natural leaders and spokespeople to capture the full scope of perspectives and needs.
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jun 30, 2014
Nina Nurdiani 
