“Over the past five years, leaders in New Haven have continued efforts to improve troubling community health outcomes as the city pursues revitalization goals.”
—RAND Corporation
RWJF Culture of Health 5-Year Community Landscape Report: New Haven, Connecticut
Report Apr-01-2022 2-min read
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Report Publish Date: April 2022
This report summarizes New Haven, Conn.’s health, wellbeing, and equity journey from 2016 to 2021, as part of RWJF’s Sentinel Communities Surveillance project.
Primary Takeaways
“New Haven’s capacity to promote health, well-being, and equity is led by the New Haven Department of Public Health (NHDPH), Yale University, and Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH), but also involves other healthcare organizations, educational institutions, city departments, a robust nonprofit sector, workforce development organizations and coalitions, and local foundations,” the authors write. “The healthcare sector is coalescing around improving primary care, and capacity and resources for health have increased over the past five years with new structures and partnerships established and funding made available.”
New Haven’s efforts mainly focused on community safety, healthcare delivery, and workforce development.
Overview and Objectives
Begun in 2016, RWJF’s Sentinel Communities Surveillance project tracks how a Culture of Health is developing in 29 communities across the country. The authors wanted to describe key challenges, opportunities, and insights in New Haven.
Hypothesis or Approach
For this report, the authors conducted 29 hourlong, semi-structured interviews between early 2017 and early 2022. Interviewees came from a number of different types of organizations and sectors
How This Influences Change
“New Haven’s journey to promote health, well-being, and equity is one that illustrates how a community can capitalize on both institutional and grassroots capacity, but also one that sheds light on how acute community challenges may inhibit collaboration and prevent action on long-term systems transformation,” the authors write. “Other communities can learn from New Haven’s approaches and challenges to inform their own journeys.”
Research: Go Deeper
New Haven is a diverse community in south central Connecticut, home to Yale University and a large array of nonprofits and social service providers. It is known for its community activism and capacity for health, but it also struggles with community violence, racial/ethnic health disparities, and intergenerational poverty. Yale New Haven Hospital and the New Haven Department of Public Health, under a new director since 2020, have provided leadership for health, along with a network of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), social service providers, foundations, and grassroots organizations. Initiatives focused on community safety and trauma, innovative approaches to healthcare delivery, food and housing justice, and equitable economic and workforce development have grown since 2017. These efforts reflect the broadening of the local narrative around health to center mental health, the social drivers of health, and culturally relevant approaches to healthy living, though this narrative has not permeated all local institutions. And though leadership in New Haven has been talking about equity for many years, “twin pandemics” of COVID-19 and racial inequity in 2020 hit the community hard and caused institutions and grassroots organizations to redouble their efforts, realigning funding commitments and taking a hard look at leadership and systems.
Figure 1: Population characteristics for New Haven, Connecticut Page 2
Research Team
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
- RAND Corporation
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