RWJF Report Highlights the Need for Health Promoting Communities

A new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) brings together an impressive body of research illustrating the role of geography and the built environment as determinants of health. RWJF believes that your zip code should not be more important than your genetic code when it comes to health. To this end, the RWJF Commission for a Healthier America made three recommendations to improve the health of America’s communities:

Invest in the foundations of lifelong physical and mental well-being in our youngest children
Create communities that foster health-promoting behaviors; and
Broaden health care to promote health outside of the medical system.

Copyright 2014 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America.

The US Green Building Council (USGBC), University of Virginia (UVA), and RWJF have been working together over the past year to advance the second two objectives through the “Green Health Partnership.” The collaboration has helped investigate connections between green building and human health, including a detailed analysis of current green building rating systems, description of current metrics, and development of innovative new tools and strategies. Learn more about this work from Senior Research Fellow Dr. Matt Trowbridge. Over the coming year, the team hopes to offer practical recommendations to improve the connection between green building intentions and public health outcomes. We will also explore practical applications of emerging information technology to engage Citizen Scientists in real world experiments. We hope that this work will contribute to RWJF’s vision for building a healthier America for all.