Episode 75: Health in All Places

Unedited Transcript – Episode 75 Health in All Places

On this episode of the Mpact podcast, Jon Ford, Senior Regional Field Manager for Community Development with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco leads a conversation about the connections between transit, housing and health, with Mimi Narayan, Health Programs Officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts and John Vu, Vice President of Strategy for Community Health at Kaiser Permanente. 

The speakers highlight examples of collaboration across these sectors, with examples from Phoenix, Charlotte and the Purple Line Coalition in Maryland. And they spotlight tools, such as Health Impact Assessments and Community Health Needs Assessments, that can be a basis for aligning policy, projects and resources to achieve healthier communities. 

Did you know:

• Every nonprofit hospital system must do an assessment every three years of the community health needs in the footprint around its hospital. Kaiser Permanente has 47 of these reports. 
• There are 445 Health Impact Assessments, of which more than 200 are on transportation decisions. 
• A joint study by public health and transportation officials in Charlotte, NC, found that after light rail opened the average rider lost 6.45 pounds. A similar study in Salt Lake City found that people who stopped riding light rail gained weight.

“We have had this awakening. We’ve been on this journey for at least a decade now where there’s earnest, real effort to work on housing, to work on transit, to work on these things. . . . We don’t need to be constantly reinventing the wheel. There’s nothing going to bring greater power than pooling our efforts and our resources in any community. “  — John Vu, Vice President of Strategy for Community Health, Kaiser Permanente, Berkeley, CA

“When we make policy decisions, our goal is to include community in those decision-making processes, because at the end of the day, they’re the people, the people with lived experience in those communities, that are going to be affected by whatever decision that we’re making, whether it’s about transit, whether it’s about housing, whether it’s about community development. . . . We want to engage community to understand, okay, what does best health mean for you?”  — Debarati “Mimi” Majumdar Narayan, Ph.D., Officer, Health Programs, Pew Charitable Trusts, Washington, DC