In 2019, community stakeholders invested in addressing social determinants of health came together to share their respective work and brainstorm innovative and effective ways to address health disparities and poor outcomes now and into the future. Corewell Health Healthier Communities, Calvin University, and the Kent County Health Department continued to meet to discuss implementing a place-based community-based participatory research model that built upon the community surveying work done by Calvin University over the last 20+ years. The aim was to create a new, collaborative model that fits the landscape of Grand Rapids neighborhoods with the possibility of scaling and building it across multiple neighborhoods to have a broad community-wide impact.
In 2021, Corewell Health received funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to begin to implement a Community-Based Participatory Research Model, ultimately named Our Neighborhood, Our Health (ONOH), in the Roosevelt Park neighborhood in Grand Rapids, MI as a pilot.
During the summer of 2022, the project team visited Rhode Island with funding from Invest Health to learn about their Health Equity Zones. This model introduced the concept of having a Backbone Organization with a leadership role in the project and presence in the neighborhood of focus. During 2022, the Community Advisory Board selected the Hispanic Center of Western Michigan as the Backbone Organization, who later contracted with KConnect to guide the process for identifying neighborhood health priorities and implementing solutions.
This evaluation sought to understand how the current model was implemented in the Roosevelt Park neighborhood, how and to what extent residents were involved in the processes used to prioritize health issues, to what extent the work was centered in the needs of the community and, finally, to identify how the success of Our Neighborhood Our Health should be determined.
This project would not have been possible without the financial support of The W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Healthier Communities Corewell Health.
Each Our Neighborhood, Our Health partner, and their team members played an important role in this effort.
We are expanding our site in the near future to include more content and resources. Visit us soon to learn more about the Our Neighborhood, Our Health model.
