This post is one of five that will dig deeper into the issue areas that will be featured at the SDC’s Symposium on Poverty – Family Relationships, Community Violence & Public Safety, Community Development, Neighborhood Development, and Job Creation & Workforce Development.
In recent years, the SDC has proclaimed, “There’s no one way to end poverty.” The message behind this tagline is two-fold:
1) Poverty is not a singular social fact. It is a complex array of social, economic, psychological, and health constructs, which are experienced by different populations in different ways; and
2) There is no singular means by which to address poverty and its many debilitating consequences. Poverty also requires multiple constituencies in any approach designed to alleviate it.
In today’s economic recession where unemployment, education, housing, and race dominate the public discourse on poverty, public health epitomizes what the SDC’s tagline is all about. As an illustration of this from a new vantage point, the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, Bureau of Environmental Health will be presenting a session entitled, “Health Impact Assessment: A Community Tool to Consider Health in All Policies” at the upcoming SDC symposium on poverty.
Data from SDC's 2010 CSBG Needs Assessment clearly shows that people need jobs and education in order to move them out of poverty. The same research also identifies food, nutrition, health, and healthcare as being significant. In fact, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Urban Initiatives & Research in their summary report, found that, “participation in the FoodShare program has increased by 16% from 2002 to 2008, and the Hunger Task Force reported a 23.4% increase in monthly food pantry participation from 2008-2009. The percentage of MPS students qualified to participate in the free or reduced lunch program has similarly increased, from 71% in 2002 to 79% in 2008.” While not often thought of in these terms, FoodShare is a public health policy. Food pantry usage is a public health issue.
Furthermore, in a report from the Center for Urban Population Health, researchers conclude that, “It seems likely that improvements in the city’s and the state’s health outcomes will require solutions to their associated upstream, socioeconomic factors (p. 48).” The report empirically focuses on the health disparities between Milwaukee’s low, middle, and high socioeconomic groups. Through a wide number of health issues (infant mortality, obesity, premature deaths, teen birth rate, etc.), the authors clearly demonstrate that poor health outcomes are directly related to poverty. Once again, here is an illustration of where public health plays a role in examining poverty and vice versa.
The point here is not that poverty is singularly a public health issue but that conceptions of public health must be taken into account when crafting public policies designed to address poverty. A significant tool in this effort is the Health Impact Assessment (HIA) that the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, Bureau of Environmental Health will be presenting at the symposium on poverty. A wealth of information exists on this topic and some of the more prominent sources include the Wisconsin Health Impact Assessment Online Toolkit, World Health Organization, Health Impact Project, and International Health Impact Assessment Consortium
Please join the SDC in welcoming the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, Bureau of Environmental Health on November 10, 2010 and finding out how HIA can be used as a tool in a holistic approach to ending poverty in Milwaukee.
Steve Schultz
Policy Analyst
Social Development Commission
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