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Lead Local was a collaborative research project between Human Impact Partners and the Right to the City Alliance. The research focused on community power-building and its potential to address social inequities that drive health outcomes. This project was not specific to COVID-19, but its findings apply to disease response and resiliency. It found that community power-building must be central to decision-making processes for true transformation.

This guide from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation offers best practices and suggestions in how people can frame discussions on health equity and social determinants. Its focus is on effective rhetoric. This includes the use of accessible language to talk about disparities, leading with arguments that your audience is likely to find agreeable, and focusing messaging on one or two compelling facts.

A toolkit by the City of Boston on safely creating community fridges in the city. Includes considerations such as fridge locations, permits, food safety, and other logistics to be aware of. The toolkit also offers additional food access resources that may benefit visitors to community fridges.

Program to Encourage Active, Rewarding Lives is designed to support older adults thorough depression education and skill building to increase self sufficiency and active living. The program is structured over 6-8 weeks of sessions and is designed to be administered by staff who have no previous counseling or mental health education. The program originally started in the 1990’s in Washington state and has since been implemented with a wide range of minority and hard-to-reach populations.

The Health Equity Assessment Toolkit (HEAT) is a software application that facilitates the assessment of within-country health inequalities. It was developed for use on desktop or laptop computers and mobile devices. Explore inequality, which enables users to explore the situation in one setting of interest (e.g. a country, province or district) to determine the latest situation of inequality and the change in inequalities over time. Compare inequality, which enables users to benchmark, i.e. compare the situation in one setting of interest with the situation in other settings.

This is the summary page containing the full guide to HEDA: Conducting a Health Equity Data Analysis: A Guide for Local Health Departments, Version 2. HEDA provides information on how to think about, collect, and analyze local data related to health equity. It provides a starting point for understanding how to document health inequities. This guide provides a detailed process for analyzing health inequities in a local jurisdiction. The guide describes how to use data to identify health differences between population groups, instead of only examining the population as a whole. The process includes steps to identify and examine the causes of population differences in health, and emphasizes the importance of working in partnership at every step with communities experiencing inequities.

The purpose of the project is to offer clear concepts, methods, data, and programming code to improve monitoring of, as well as actions to address health inequities, accomplished by using geocoding to link area-based social metrics to public health data.

The COVID-19 U.S. State Policy (CUSP) database documents the dates all 50 states and the District of Columbia implemented health and social policies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic ramifications. CUSP is designed to be a tool for researchers, policymakers, the media, and the public to better understand how policies impact population health and health equity. The CUSP team tracks when and how states implemented over 200 policies during the COVID-19 pandemic and includes original source documentation.

This tool is designed to support people in recognizing decision points in research and in choosing health equity – whatever and whenever their role may be in this cycle. By posing concrete questions to consider, and providing recommendations and resources for stakeholders to apply, the authors hope to encourage and support people in building a Health Equity Virtuous Cycle that continuously reinforces strategies to identify the drivers of inequities and develop solutions to dismantle them.

This guide is designed to help district leaders understand and respond to the specific teacher staffing gaps they’re facing, focusing on time-tested strategies that will make an immediate impact: ideas for covering absences, filling existing vacancies, and addressing chronic shortages exacerbated by the pandemic in key subject areas and in schools serving historically marginalized communities. It also offers advice on how districts can plan—in partnership with stakeholders inside and outside education—for longer-term changes to teacher pipelines, the employee value proposition for teachers, and the teacher role itself that will bring many more talented professionals into the classroom to support students in the critical years ahead.