Our advocacy reports, toolkits, and health reports provide advocates with strategies to push for policies that create good neighborhoods with access to safe and affordable housing, healthy food options, quality transportation, and clean environments.
The publications below are either in text or pdf form and can be downloaded. If you'd like to purchase the printed copies, please fill out our order form.
Advocacy Reports
Advocating for Change provides strategies on building support for your advocacy agenda in the courts, legislature, and the ballot; and building public will by coalition building, conducting research, and working with the media. For strategies and tactics that focus on using the Internet for advocacy, see Click Here for Change: Your Guide to the E-Advocacy Revolution.
Advocating for Equitable Development helps advocates to build and apply advocacy skills to achieve social and economic equity. It focuses on community involvement to address community problems; addresses the needs of people in the context of the places where they live; sees communities as interdependent parts of the region; and promotes investments that produce benefits for residents and investors.
Toolkits
Healthy Food Retailing Toolkit focuses on increasing access to retail outlets that sell nutritious, affordable food in low-income communities of color.
Equitable Development Toolkit lists a comprehensive set of tools to ensure that investment benefits residents, businesses and institutions; links residents to regional economic opportunities; fosters participation of low-income communities and communities of color in local and regional planning decisions; and addresses gentrification to avoid residential displacement.
Health Reports
Designed for Disease: the Link Between Local Food Environments and Obesity and Diabetes
A landmark study by PolicyLink, the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, and the California Center for Public Health Advocacy shows the state’s first direct correlation between where you live and your risk for obesity or diabetes. The study examines the correlation between the health of nearly 40,000 Californians and the mix of retail food outlets near their homes. The key finding: people living in neighborhoods crowded with fast-food and convenience stores but relatively few grocery or produce outlets are at significantly higher risk of suffering from obesity and diabetes. (Click here to view a "Detailed Methodology" and click here for a one-pager of "Policy Recommendations" based on the study).
Why Place Matters: Building the Movement for Healthy Communities
Where you live determines how well you live; and available resources are not equally distributed. Communities of color and low-income communities face harmful community environments, such as poverty, toxins, or economic disinvestment, that compromise individual and community health. The framework described in this report provides a way to understand the relationship between community conditions and health, analyzes the connections among all the environmental factors that contribute to a healthy community, and identifies environmental effects on community health.
The Impact of the Built Environment on Health
The way we plan, shape and create our urban environment impacts the health of the people who live, work, play and move through these communities. The symptoms of poorly planned neighborhoods are often poor health outcomes. Communities of color and low-income communities face disproportionally greater health impacts related to poor land use planning. There is an effort, by the field of public health, to integrate health considerations into planning and land use to yield improved health outcomes. This report provides both a framework for understanding the necessary elements for building a movement for policy change and better planning, as well as numerous illustrations of innovative practices, projects and networks of advocates and professionals.
Healthy Food, Healthy Communities: Improving Access and Opportunities Through Food Retailing highlights three promising strategies—and the policies that support them—to bring healthy food options to communities: developing new grocery stores, improving the selection and quality of food in existing smaller stores, and starting and sustaining farmers’ markets.
The Influence of Community Factors on Health: An Annotated Bibliography is the most extensive annotated bibliography on the impact of community factors on health. The report discusses research findings from interviews and a literature review, and examines implications for programs and policies to strengthen community factors and improve health.
Reducing Health Disparities Through a Focus on Communities presents a framework for understanding the impact of different community factors on health and highlights policies and practices aimed at reducing health disparities—the higher incidence of certain diseases and conditions, including asthma, heart disease, high blood pressure, and infant mortality—in low-income communities and communities of color.
Regional Development and Physical Activity: Issues and Strategies for Promoting Health Equity explores the connection between development patterns, physical activity, and poor health. It shows neighborhoods that have become racially segregated and economically isolated as a result of sprawling development patterns, which offer few opportunities to be physically active, thereby harming the health of community residents. Policies and organizing efforts are highlighted to provide ideas for action.
Fighting Childhood Asthma: How Communities Can Win provides an overview of efforts to improve the prevention, tracking, diagnosis, and treatment of childhood asthma and accompanying opportunities for policy change.
Four reports were published in collaboration with the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center: Community-Based Strategies for Improving Latino Health; A Place for Healthier Living: Improving Access to Physical Activity and Healthy Foods; Breathing Easier: Community-Based Strategies to Prevent Asthma; and Building Stronger Communities for Better Health. These reports offer community-centered approaches that engage hospitals, public health clinics, schools, faith-based institutions, community-based organizations, and local leaders to improve the environmental factors that impact health.