JHA receives a community health impacts subaward

JHA is proud and excited to announce that it is collaborating with the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition (www.duwamishcleanup.org/) on an innovative community-based  project to improve health in the Duwamish Valley (DV), Seattle, Washington.  The DV Healthy Communites Project grant was awarded from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) Program (www.epa.gov/care/basic.htm).   JHA’s Executive Director, Linn Gould has been assigned as Principal Investigator for this 18 month project.

The DV encompasses a roughly 2-by-5 mile area that runs north-south along Seattle’s lower Duwamish River.  The DV is home to a large swath of Seattle’s industrial lands, which generates 75,000 family wage jobs in the city.  At the same time, the community includes some of the most ethnically diverse and lowest income neighborhoods in Seattle, who are disproportionately burdened by multiple sources of environmental pollution.

The project will identify and prioritize the health impacts that affect the DV community. This includes cumulative risks from multiple sources and stressors, and resulting from socio-economic determinants of health, such as employment, education, housing, transportation, crime, and food security, as well as potential impacts to sensitive or vulnerable populations within the community.

The project will: (1) convene residents, businesses, local governments, and other stakeholders to form a sustainable partnership committed to improving the local community’s health; (2) comprehensively identify the sources of health risks and assets in the community; (3) conduct a consensus-based process to prioritize health risks the community partnership will act on; and (4) develop strategies to reduce or eliminate these risks and leverage assets in order to improve the environmental and social health of the entire community.