Pathways to Power: The Impact of Building Healthy Communities
Summary: Building Healthy Communities (BHC) was a 10-year comprehensive community initiative launched by The California Endowment and designed to improve health in 14 California communities. BHC embraced a theory of change that investing in community capacity builds power, which in turn changes policies and systems to create healthy environments. Center for Outcomes Research and Education’s (CORE) BHC Impact Studies represent the first effort to systematically connect data on BHC’s specific power building investments to data and indicators that measure aspects of community power. Each of the BHC impact studies addresses how BHC’s power building investments contributed to community outcomes in one of four major campaigns: 1) Voice, Power, and Voting; 2) Agency and Belonging in Schools; 3) Housing and Transportation; and 4) Health Care Access.
Findings: In each of the four impact studies, researchers found at least some evidence that BHC investments in that area helped drive improvements in the key outcomes or indicators for which data were available. Investments were significantly and positively associated with voter turnout, even after adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of geographies across the state. At schools serving low-income families, authors observed a positive relationship between investments and the two outcomes conceptualized as “belonging” in schools: caring adult relationship and school connectedness, but they did not see evidence of clear impact on “agency.” Investments were associated with improvements in household overcrowding; this effect was even stronger in census tracts with a high proportion of immigrants. And investments were associated with fewer people delaying care due to cost and improvements in self-reported health.
The California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) is mentioned in this study.
Read the Publication:
- External Report: Pathways to Power: The Impact of Building Healthy Communities