Guiding Principles
These are frameworks and key terms for CARE’s work. What do the words we use at CARE mean?
The New Haven Community
While CARE works to improve health of all residents in New Haven, our target populations include those most impacted by health disparities. In New Haven, this means working with Black and Latinx communities and low-income populations. CARE focuses much of its community engagement activities in six neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income communities with mostly Black and Latinx residents.
Community Partners
CARE’s uses an inclusive definition of community partners that encompasses local residents, neighborhood groups, community organizations, hospitals and health centers, municipal and state agencies, elected officials, policymakers, and academic institutions and schools.
Health Disparities to Health Equity
Health equity means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be healthy. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination and its consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care.[1] We work with partners to address the factors that influence health, including employment, housing, education, health care, public safety, and food access.[2]
Health disparities are differences in health outcomes and in opportunities to achieve optimal health. Factors that influence health disparities include race and ethnicity, social status, gender, education, income, and geographic location. Health disparities result from multiple factors, including poverty, neighborhood infrastructure and environment, inadequate access to health care, behavioral factors, and educational inequalities. Health disparities are inequitable and are directly related to the historical and current unequal distribution of social, political, economic, and environmental resources.[3] In New Haven, health disparities are disproportionately experienced by Black and Latinx residents and low-income individuals.
The health of New Haven is determined by how effectively we work to eliminate health disparities among those experiencing a disproportionate burden of disease, disability, and death.
[1] Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
[2] American Public Health Association
[3] Centers for Disease Control
Social Determinants of Health (SDoH)
Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) are conditions in the environments in which people live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.
Healthy People 2020 organizes the social determinants of health around five key domains: (1) Economic Stability, (2) Education, (3) Health and Health Care, (4) Neighborhood and Built Environment, and (5) Social and Community Context.[1]
Structural, Systems, and Policy Interventions
CARE promotes the prevention of chronic disease by moving beyond individual behavior change and focusing on larger structural, system, and policy changes that impact these behaviors. Communities most at-risk for chronic diseases experience structural barriers within the built environment that prevent people from engaging in healthy behaviors – unsafe streets for walking and biking; lack of access to affordable, healthy foods; limited recreational resources and more. CARE has been working at the systems and policy levels to address some of these barriers to health.
Community-Based Participatory Approaches (CBPR)
CARE’s research and practice activities incorporate community-based participatory approaches – an approach guided by and for those most directly affected by the issue, condition, situation, or interventions being studied or evaluated. CBPA is based on Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), an orientation to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community and has the aim of combining knowledge with action and achieving social change. [1]
[1] WK Kellogg Foundation