Organizing With Communities to Benefit Public Health

Left: Neighborhood gardener, Shanti Madison, teaches children about the plants in the garden. Behind the group, residents and volunteers erect the frame of the Little Red Hen garden’s hoop house: New Haven, CT, 2012.

Source. Jon Atherton.

Below: Neighborhood gardeners tend one of the raised beds of the Little Red Hen garden and discuss the variety of vegetables it contains: New Haven, CT, 2012.

Source. Billy Bromage.

Too often, community activists, striving to improve health in their neighborhoods, ask “Who will help?” and face the same response as the Little Red Hen in the children’s fable: “Not I.” But when a committed group of residents in the West River neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, asked its community partners, including researchers and community organizers from the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE) at the Yale School of Public Health, to help build a community garden, they answered: “We will.”

West River is a diverse, primarily low-income neighborhood composed of single-family and multifamily homes, apartments, residential service programs, and sober houses. Neighborhood violence and obesity-related chronic diseases have been consistent problems. Disparities in health vary greatly between New Haven’s lowest-income neighborhoods and surrounding high-income suburbs. In 2012, CARE completed surveys with adults from randomly selected households in the six lowest-income neighborhoods (n = 1298), including West River. DataHaven, a local nonprofit organization, concurrently conducted a 2012 regional telephone survey of 1300 households in New Haven and 13 surrounding towns. The rate of diabetes in West River was 17%, more than double the rate in the high-income suburbs (7%). The obesity rate was also more than double at 38%, compared with 16% in the highest-income suburbs.^1,2

Increasing access to healthy food became a high priority to improve health in West River. The West River Neighborhood Services Corporation president, Stacy Spell, invited CARE to join the neighborhood’s effort to develop a community garden. In 2012, partners identified a lot for the garden and secured a lease with its owner, the New Haven Board of Education, after negotiating a land remediation agreement with consultation from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Growing the garden could begin.

Over the next several months, many neighbors, CARE staff, and other supporters responded to Spell’s call: “Who will help?” Meetings were held with shovels in hand: spreading a mountain of clean fill over landscape fabric, covering it with mulch, building garden beds from salvaged wood, and filling them with soil purchased from an agriculture program at a local high school. Neighborhood residents and community organizers made trips throughout Greater New Haven as we identified plant donations: dozens of strawberry plants from a suburban gardener, leftovers from plant sales, and a friend with exotic species of tomatoes. To extend the growing season, Spell worked with CARE to write a grant application to build a hoop house, subsequently constructed in October 2012.

By the end of 2012, the Little Red Hen garden was recognized as a hub for neighborhood activity, camaraderie, and access to healthy food and fresh air. Spell described the garden:

It brings people together. It’s a place where wisdom can be exchanged through generations. It’s a place where neighbors, who normally might not have spoken to each other, can reconnect (http://care.yale.edu/multimedia/video.aspx#2-161943).

His fellow gardener and community activist Ann Greene added:

I take the phrase public health very seriously. And I really think it’s us non-medical folks, in other words, the public in public health, who can really lead the charge in shaping the lives of not just ourselves, but also the generations that come after us (http://care.yale.edu/multimedia/video.aspx#2-161945).

Community organizing methods hold an important place in public health research. Implicit in community-based research practices is the use and incorporation of community organizing methods^3–7: the process of mobilizing community leaders and residents to contribute their expertise and resources to create change.⁸ This includes identifying and cultivating leaders with a focus on leadership development, building community capacity, and using research evidence to transform communities. The Little Red Hen garden is just one small example that offers insight into the process of organizing communities for the benefit of public health.