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As a community organization, it can be hard to find partners who see community power and community engagement as essential to creating healthy communities. Human Impact Partners have the community at the center of their work, bringing rigorous expertise to the table, but respectfully contributing that expertise to the larger project of ensuring the community's voice is at the center of public decision making. It is hard to express the impact and potential that we believe can be unleashed through the kind of partnership HIP offers. It is also true that what HIP offers is very, very rare.
-- Doran Schrantz, Executive Director, ISAIAH, Twin Cities, Minnesota
Human Impact Partners is a wonderful ally. The solid, powerful, persuasive research they produce is invaluable to advocates working to improve the public health. HIP’s assessment of proposals like the Healthy Families Act, which would create a national paid sick days standard, demonstrated how our lack of paid sick days puts the public health at risk, and its analyses of local initiatives give us critical data that strengthens our advocacy and education.
--Debra L. Ness, President, National Partnership for Women & Families
The Health Impact Assessment of the proposed Humboldt County General Plan Update has clarified the contribution of community planning and the built environment to the health of the community. Public officials now more explicitly consider health outcomes of their decisions. HIP's technical support and familiarity with relevant research to analyze community selected indicators was invaluable. They masterfully partnered with our public health staff to maximize community input and insure relevance of the HIA to a rural setting, a new frontier for them.
--Ann Lindsay, MD, Health Officer, Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services
San Mateo County Health System was fortunate to collaborate with HIP on the first HIA conducted in our county. It was because of the skill of their team and the patience of their staff that this project was completed. Every time we hit an obstacle, they worked with us to develop a creative solution; every time we lost focus, they moved us to the next step. San Mateo County still wouldn't have a single HIA completed if it weren't for HIP.
-- SaraT L. Mayer, Director of Policy and Planning, San Mateo County Health System
HIP has been an essential partner with us in advancing the concept of health in all policies. Moreover, HIP's work on-the-ground with local and regional groups has fostered a unique array of multidisciplinary partnerships that have resulted in tangible gains for communities throughout California.
--Diane Aranda, Program Officer, The California Endowment
Too often, land use and development decisions are made without the benefit of an understanding of their health impacts. Health Impact Assessments are an exciting new tool for planners and policy makers, and HIP is leading the field in developing and implementing HIA around the country. HIP's work with us on Oakland's Central Estuary Plan provided stakeholders and policy makers with a real, quantifiable assessment of the effects of several possible development
concepts on a broad spectrum of neighborhood health and livability measures.
-- Timothy Rood, Principal, Community Design + Architecture
The HIA that HIP did on paid sick days in California really turned around the campaign for us. It helped policymakers see paid sick days as a public health issue not just a workplace issue. This led to other states and national groups using the HIA in their paid sick days campaigns. HIP worked so well with our Coalition; they included us in the process and produced a report that has been invaluable to advocates as well as policymakers.
-- Netsy Firestein, Executive Director, Labor Project for Working Families & Chair, CA Work and Family Coalition
Human Impact Partners provided instrumental help in our campaign to win more affordable homes near a future BART station. They not only conducted an in-depth analysis of health conditions and impacts, but also translated all that technical language into two easy-to-use handouts so that residents could understand the issues and actively participate in planning their
city's future.
-- Chris Schildt, Community Planner, TransForm
HIP has been instrumental in our work at a redevelopment site near downtown Denver. Creating a baseline with the HIA allowed us to measure existing public health concerns and determine appropriate measures to improve health for our residents. This approach will lead us to our goals for holistic sustainability.
-- Kimball Crangle, Project Manager, South Lincoln Redevelopment, Denver Housing Authority
To stem the rising tide of chronic disease and create safe, thriving communities, health needs to be regularly factored into policy and program decisions in sectors that do not traditionally focus on health outcomes. The Health Impact Project promotes and supports the use of health impact assessment (HIA) in public decision-making as a practical means to inform decision makers about the potential health risks and benefits associated with a proposed policy or project to develop practical, feasible solutions that protect community health. We chose to work with Human Impact Partners in our HIA work because they are the leading non-profit organization in the U.S. dedicated to conducting HIAs and training other organizations to do HIA. Human Impact Partners’ even-handed, science-based approach and their dedication to engaging the community and other stakeholders throughout the HIA process set a high standard for the field.
-- Aaron Wernham, MD, MS, Director, the Health Impact Project
The Health Impact Assessment training Human Impact Partners provided to the California Department of Public Health helped us understand the concepts behind HIA, gave us hands-on practice with the steps of HIA, and helped us strategize about how CDPH can most effectively use HIA. HIP's subsequent technical assistance on the Cap and Trade HIA we are conducting with the Air Resources Board has been invaluable in guiding and focusing our work on this complex policy. We see HIA as an excellent tool to help us evaluate the ways in which policies that are viewed as outside of health may actually have a huge impact on the health of our population. We hope to do more work on HIA, and to help local health departments expand their capacity to conduct HIA to assess the impact of local policies on community health.
-- Linda Rudolph, Deputy Director, Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CA Department of Public Health
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