The Building a Healthier Cincinnati project aims to build social and economic prosperity for Black women in Avondale. We realize this through bold policy efforts, an innovative healthcare career pipeline, targeted upward mobility supports, and social justice advocacy.
The Community Builders, Inc. (TCB) in partnership with the All-In Cincinnati Equity Coalition, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, INNOVATIONS, the City of Cincinnati Health Department, Health Care Access Now and Urban League of Greater Southwestern Ohio improves economic, health, and social outcomes for Avondale’s community, with a focus on Black women. Outcomes will be achieved through 1) The creation of a healthcare career pipeline to support those most impacted by health disparities. TCB connects residents to healthcare careers and provides individual supports to ensure their success. 2) Build a Social Justice Center to advance a bold racial equity agenda. The Center for Social Justice, located at TCB’s Avondale Town Center (ATC) development, serves as an anchor directly next to the only grocery store in the community. We support Black-owned businesses at ATC to ensure the success of this much-needed business hub.
BUILD and its communities apply bold, upstream, integrated, local, and data-driven (BUILD) approaches to improve health in communities that are adversely affected by upstream factors.
BHC leverages federal programs and housing organizations to solve systems-level changes. BHC creates an opportunity for affordable housing providers to engage in equitable policy adoption, data sharing, and enhance residents supports. Through the adoption of the pregnancy first policy, we seek to create a framework of systems change for housing and healthcare, to continue to move upstream and address organizational systems of racial inequities and roadblocks that prevent families from thriving.
Using a place-based approach, our efforts drill down to the root causes of health, wealth, and opportunity disparities, co-creating solutions with residents, building the capacity of local organizations, and growing sustainable partnerships. By centering on the voices of residents and shifting power to those addressing needs identified by the community, this initiative focuses on systemic solutions to create healthier neighborhoods and residents.
Through collaboration with resident leaders and community coalitions, our program ensures co-creating and shared decision-making. Our Building a Healthier Cincinnati project moves its efforts from community engagement to ownership, building capacity among resident stakeholders and leaders to create a structure for sustainability.
Empowered communities establish and enact place-specific solutions and our project’s partnership model is predicated on resident input. Residents form the foundation of the intervention model and are employed as Health Champions serving their community and informing this project. Health Champions are integral to this project’s governance structure, participating in regular process report meetings, acting as thought leaders, and helping to guide the vision.
Varied forms of data are interwoven in the Building a Healthier Cincinnati project and the needs will identify how we will determine impact. Quantitative data from housing stability, healthcare, workforce, economic mobility and social justice data systems will be connected and results disseminated. Health Champion training will include sessions on data analysis to teach the Health Champions how to utilize the data they are collecting and compare it to available community data.
