Fostering Healthy Neighborhoods: Alignment across the Community Development, Financial Well-Being and Health sectors

Build Healthy Places Network, Prosperity Now, and Financial Health Network partnered to explore how to foster alignment across the community development, public health, healthcare, and financial well-being sectors. Fostering Healthy Neighborhoods: Alignment across the Community Development, Financial Well-Being and Health sectors presents examples of existing alignment across sectors, opportunities and challenges for increased collaboration including place-based initiatives, and recommendations to foster cross-sector alignment. We conducted focus groups, interviews, and an exhaustive scan of the published and online resources and materials at the intersection of this work.

We created this brief because there’s substantial evidence that links financial well-being and health. As income and wealth increase or decrease, so does health. The physical, social, and economic conditions in our neighborhoods have a significant impact on both our health and financial well-being because they shape the opportunities we have and the choices that are available to us. Inequities in health and wealth outcomes show up across geography and race; building neighborhoods that support health and financial wellbeing for low-income communities and communities of color is an important strategy for ensuring that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to live the healthiest life possible, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they make. To achieve progress towards health and wealth equity, the community development, public health, healthcare, and financial wellbeing sectors can better align their work. These sectors have been working to address different components of healthy neighborhoods in the same places and often with the same people for decades, yet often without joining forces and leveraging each other’s efforts.

Use this brief to help you:

• Make the case that community development, health, financial well-being are closely linked and working together can improve health, prosperity and equity in low-income communities and communities of color.
• Identify opportunities for collaboration and integration across the community development, public health, healthcare, and financial well-being sectors including through place-based initiatives, to produce greater impact.
• Identify key leverage points for advancing collaborations, including the policy and system supports needed to speed and spread solutions.

Support for this report was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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