I’ve just completed the most amazing online course run by a really interesting and dynamic team of neuroscientists at Urban Health Council+Centric Lab
The team put their learning, expertise, networks and research at the disposal of people like me who are interested, involved and engaged in a wide range of community change and development projects, some of which they’ve chosen, others that chose them.
In the course we met once a week for an hour and a half, sometimes longer, to gain insight into the issues that our groups neighbourhoods, communities and groups are facing across the lifespan. We worked together to learn and find out each week a bit more about our groups: experience, skills, knowledge, beginning to see how we might use the toolkit of a Community Health Impact Assessment to help improve our own environments.
The course provided us all with an amazing range of resources and reading.
So,
-what is a Community Health Impact Assessment?
There are probably as many different kinds of CHIAs as there are problems to be solved, or different communities, experiences, demographics.
We started by looking at the way Angela Fonso and the Clean Air For Southall and Hayes group worked with Centric Lab’s Araceli Camargo and Josh Artus to develop their brilliant Health Impact Assessment. Clean Air For Southall and Hayes was a campaign launched six years ago against pollution from a former gasworks earmarked for housing development.
Josh from Centric Lab and Angela Fonso from CASH explained how the group and Centric Lab were successful in raising awareness of the problems householders were facing such as noxious smells, respiratory problems, publicising and challenging reports from the developer to the council.
Angela has continued the work, recently meeting with the father of Zane Gbangbola who died when the Thames flooded a landfill site and hydrogen cyanide was released: Zane’s father also suffered paralysis.
Centric Lab have produced Right To Know portals where we can understand our local neighbourhoods and shocks due to inadequate preparation and planning better.
A way of ensuring that democracy is working for more people, more of the time.
The course was over eight weeks, online, created and developed by very caring, knowledgeable and dynamic neuroscientists who welcomed an incredibly varied group of people from projects and organisations across the United Kingdom to share, think and learn.
Coming onto the course was a representative from Grenfell Tower Trust, Support Staffordshire (a cross county LLP supporting community action), Downham Dividend Society, Lewisham was established to ensure that regeneration initiatives strengthen the social capital of Downham’s existing communities. It is the successor body to Fusions Jameen which inspired two award winning community self-build projects.
The Portland Inn,Hanley Stoke on Trent, me on the MTVH Regional Customer Voice Panel and St George’s Medical Practice Patient Participation group,
Tarakī community mental health Birmingham developing research into housing and women’s health and wellbeing.
Rimrose Valley Friends and Save Rimrose Valley – Liverpool, Merseyside is a charity formed to promote, protect and enhance Rimrose Valley Country Park situated in a heavily urbanised part of north Liverpool. Since 2017 they’ve been fighting a road proposal which would bulldoze the park, severing it from top to bottom.
Medact is a community of doctors, nurses, and allied healthcare professionals living and working in Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, Middlesbrough and the surrounding areas. They are currently working alongside another local grassroots group, Stop Incineration North East (SINE), on a campaign against the ‘Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility’ (TVERF) incinerator which is planned to be built in Grangetown, Redcar & Cleveland.
Grangetown had already been identified by Centric Lab as an urban sacrifice zone, with a high pollutant count and high levels of deprivation as measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation.
signsofanopencity 