Healthy Eating Active Living
Healthy Active Communities for Portland's Affordable Housing Families
Portland, like many cities across the country, strives to provide all residents with access to services and amenities that promote and create healthy communities. Of particular interest to community-based organizations and political agencies is how neighborhoods outside of the city's urban core might be enhanced to maximize positive health outcomes. Adequate access to full service grocery stores, safe and convenient places for physical activity, and public transit options are a few examples of features that help residents maintain healthy lifestyles.
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Throughout the past seven years, Community Health Partnership: Oregon's Public Health Institute's (CHP) Healthy Eating Active Living Initiative has created a multi-disciplinary partnership of urban planners, public health practitioners, community development organizations. This partnership develops collaborative strategies to ensure that features that promote health are considered in urban planning and policy decisions, particularly for low-income neighborhoods in Portland. Click here to read a November 2009 article in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine about CHP's Healthy Eating Active Living Initiative from 2003-2009
Building on CHP's Healthy Eating Active Living Initiative and healthy community planning projects, CHP has been awarded a four-year, $360,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities program. This initiative, Healthy Active Communities for Portland's Affordable Housing Families, aims to expand collaborations with affordable housing partners to increase healthy eating and active living for children and families living in affordable housing communities in Portland.
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This initiative will take a systematic approach to find policy and environmental solutions to improve healthy eating and active living opportunities for families in affordable housing settings. Families in affordable housing settings struggle to stretch their household income to meet a number of basic needs including adequate and nutritious foods, transportation to work and school, community gardens and urban agriculture, and access to amenities. Recent GIS mapping and community input initiatives illustrate an inequitable distribution of healthy eating and active living environmental supports in low-income neighborhoods. For example, many families living in affordable housing communities lack adequate access to an affordable full service grocery store or infrastructure for safe walking, biking, and outdoor recreation. These data and existing conditions reports are currently being employed to help guide complementary healthy planning efforts in one target area in Southeast Portland.
"We already have GIS mapping and other assessments conducted throughout the city to determine where infrastructure inequities exist," said Noelle Dobson, Project Director for Community Health Partnership. "This grant will help create healthy, complete communities for all Portland residents, not just for those who can afford to live in Portland's most desirable neighborhoods. We want all Portland residents to be able to live in a neighborhood that has health built right into the environment."
Key components of the project's first year will include integrating healthy planning efforts into a target neighborhood in southeast Portland and translating findings into recommendations for the City's Portland Plan. This summer after final assessment and partnership development, the partnership will identify additional policy and community change objectives to pursue for the next three years.
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The Healthy Active Communities for Portland's Affordable Housing Families initiative is led by Community Health Partnership: Oregon's Public Health Institute in partnership with Oregon Opportunity Network, Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, Community Cycling Center, ROSE Community Development Corporation, Janus Youth Village Gardens, Kaiser Permanente, and other housing, health and advocacy groups.
For more information on the project contact
Noelle Dobson at noelle@communityhealthpartnership.org, 503-227-5502, x224 or
Amy Gilroy at amy@communityhealthpartnership.org, 503-227-5502, x229.
