Revitalizing Communities Together

Abstract

Inequities in education, the urban environment, and health co-exist and mutually reinforce each other. Educators, planners, and public health practitioners share commitments to place-based, participatory, youth-focused, and equitable work. They also have shared goals of building community resilience, social capital, and civic engagement. Interdisciplinary programs that embody these shared values and work towards these shared goals are emerging, including school-based health centers, full-service community schools, community health centers, Promise Neighborhoods, and Choice Neighborhoods. The intersection of these three fields represents an opportunity to intervene on social determinants of health. More collaborative research and practice across public health, education, and planning should build from the shared values identified to continue to address these common goals.

The Impact of Higher Education on Health Literacy: A Comparative Study between Urban and Rural China

“…In particular, the health of the rural residents and elderly women is more sensitive to education [63,64], and HE reduces depression symptoms more for individuals from poor families than those from better-off families [65]. Consistent with the 'resource substitution' theory, the conclusion suggests that education can function as an equalizing factor to break the cycle of socioeconomic inequality and narrow health disparity caused by social origins [66,67]. Finally, the inequalities in household income, HE attainment, and healthcare can explain nearly half of the urban-rural HL gap, which indicates that the socioeconomic inequalities can translate into health disparities.…”

Social Determinants of Learning: Implications for Research, Policy, and Practice

“…The COVID-19 pandemic brought the interdependence among social sectors into especially stark light, as the same populations who have suffered the most from health, economic, and environmental inequities have also suffered from the greatest learning inequities, for similar reasons (Goldhaber et al, 2022; Levinson et al, 2021). Although all bureaucracies are distinct, public health and education agencies share many commonalities, and so there are clear opportunities for collaboration that could be improved by using similar vocabulary to describe shared goals and values (Cohen & Schuchter, 2013; Ream et al, 2015). For example, the San Francisco Unified School District has partnered with other city agencies—including the Human Services Agency; the Department of Public Health; the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing; and the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families; among others—to integrate select data sets to take actions designed to support students holistically.…”

“…It is no accident that many SDOH are also SDOL. Therefore, we encourage public health and education practitioners and policymakers to work together to identify structural interventions to address some of these shared social determinants, building upon shared values toward a goal of improving learning and health (Cohen & Schuchter, 2013; Levinson et al, 2021) and shared professional values (Ream et al, 2015). In addition to identifying shared interventions that could address SDOH and SDOL, we recommend identifying interventions that focus specifically on addressing SDOL.…”

Health Care in Cities Perceived as Smart in the Context of Population Aging—A Record from Poland

“…Their use is no longer the focus of urban decision-makers. What matters more is their usefulness to the community [71][72][73], which means that the identification of needs comes first, and only later the implementation of the desired smart city solutions follows. This phenomenon is identified and studied by Nakano and Washizu [74] using Japanese cities as an example.…”