Why Does PLACE Matter?
The mission of our health department is to work in partnership with the community to ensure the optimal health and well being of all people. So why does "place matter" to us? Community residents have told us and a growing amount of research also shows us that the neighborhoods people live in have a big impact on both the community’s and residents’ health.
Certain groups of people in Alameda County are getting sick and dying prematurely from "unnatural causes." In Alameda County, access to proven health protective resources like clean air, healthy food, and recreational space, as well as opportunities for high quality education, living wage employment, and decent housing, is highly dependent on the neighborhood in which one lives. These inequities cluster and accumulate over people’s lives and over time successfully conspire to diminish the ultimate quality and length of life in these neighborhoods.
The Place Matters Initiative
PLACE MATTERS is a national initiative of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Health Policy Institute (HPI) designed to improve the health of participating communities by addressing social conditions that lead to poor health. The Joint Center HPI’s approach to eliminating health inequities involves identifying their complex underlying causes and defining strategies to address these root causes. A growing body of research clearly supports the notion that interventions targeting social conditions can indeed impact health, illness, and health inequities. Addressing root causes of health, through action and policy development, and using data to look at changes in the social conditions that impact health are at the heart of the PLACE MATTERS work.
The Mission and Goals of the Alameda County Place Matters Team
The Alameda County PLACE MATTERS team will promote more equitable distribution of social goods, and thus health equity, by influencing policies in:
Presentations
- Affordable Housing: An Investment in Individual and Community Health
Presented to the East Bay Housing Organization
- Creating Great Communities in the San Francisco Bay Area
- Transportation Justice
Testimonies and Letters
- Transportation 2035 Plan
- AC Transit Fare Hike
- Foreclosures and Water (March 10, 2008)
- Written Comments to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (August 13, 2007)
- Port of Oakland and Health (October, 16, 2007)
- Redevelopment Funding and Affordable Housing (September 18, 2007)
- Pacific Renaissance Settlement
- Comments on Oakland Housing Authority Dispossession Plan (September 11, 2008)
