The Dashboard Celebrates World Cities Day: Better Cities for Better Health

Join the City Health Dashboard in celebrating World Cities Day, designated by the United Nations General Assembly!

World Cities Day puts the spotlight on global urbanization, creating an opportunity for the international community to discuss the possibilities and challenges it presents. This year’s theme, Building Sustainable and Resilient Cities, invites us to think about how urban environments around the world can improve to empower communities and protect the environment.

Cities face a variety of social, environmental, and economic challenges that impact the opportunities for residents to live a long and healthy life. World Cities Day reminds us that innovative tools and approaches that empower citizens and governments are critical to build more resilient cities.

The City Health Dashboard can help.

The Dashboard, a one-stop resource of city- and census tract-level data, can help communities that may be under-resourced, strive for resilience and meet the goals for World Cities Day. It does this through providing a birds-eye view of a city’s social, economic, and health landscape; exposing challenges to a city’s performance on 37 measures of health and the factors that shape it, and identifying opportunity areas where a city can make gains.

In the spirit of World Cities Day, we asked users how they have been using the Dashboard to address health challenges today in order to make their city more sustainable and resilient tomorrow. Here is what they said:

• Grand Rapids, MI uses Dashboard data in their partnership with Invest Health, an initiative that convenes representatives from diverse sectors to tackle health equity issues in their city. The Dashboard enables the team to easily access and analyze information that is otherwise difficult and costly to find. This allows the city to better target strategies and interventions related to excessive housing cost, childhood poverty, racial/ethnic segregation, and unemployment, issues of high priority for the group.

• Prosper Waco, a collective impact initiative in Waco, TX, knows that sharing information is an effective way to ensure sustainable and resilient urban environments. Prosper Waco shares the Dashboard with various community members so they can better understand local data. Community Health Workers are empowered to use the Dashboard’s data as they design evidence-based preventative health community events in their neighborhoods.

• Members of the Community Host Group Leadership Team used the Dashboard as a tool to recruit volunteers for a Remote Area Medical free mobile medical, dental, and vision clinic hosted by the City of Lake Charles, LA. The Dashboard data helped city leaders verify the under-resourced neighborhoods and in turn target the health care to those communities. Several leaders at local healthcare facilities attended the press conference that introduced the Dashboard and are also planning for their upcoming Community Health Assessment in 2019. One tool, they know they’ll be using? The City Health Dashboard.

We hope these stories provide real world applications for using the Dashboard and illuminate the Dashboard’s potential to drive change in evolving and diverse communities across the United States.

Happy World Cities Day!

How are you using the Dashboard in your community? Interested in having your organization featured in a future blog post? Let us know on Twitter @cityhealthdata or email us at [email protected].