Fixing Food presents case studies of programs from five U.S. cities that are helping residents grow and sell healthy food, training the next generation of farmers, and bringing healthy food to places where people gather.
While increasing access to health care and transforming the health care delivery system are important, research demonstrates that improving population health and achieving health equity also will require broader approaches that address social, economic, and environmental factors that influence health. This brief provides an overview of the broad factors that influence health and describes emerging efforts to address them, including initiatives within Medicaid.
This October 27-29, join fellow advocates, community leaders, policymakers, and innovators at Equity Summit 2015 where attendees will have the opportunity to engage across a range of cross-cutting topics and activities all aimed at developing collective strategies to rebuild local, regional, and our national food system with equity at the center. Learn more about the equitable food systems track in the pages that follow, including interactive mobile food tours, workshops, and a dedicated food system caucus.
This webinar is a discussion of equity and transportation. How can we measure the equity impacts of transportation investments? And how can we ensure that walking and biking investments meaningfully address the mobility and safety needs of urban and rural disadvantaged communities while not directly or indirectly leading to the displacement of low-income residents?
Governments and transportation agencies are growing more aware of the need to evaluate the equity impacts of transportation investments. To date, no concise framework or consistent measures have been developed for doing so. Such measures would aid in building a transportation system that provides fair access for all to jobs, goods, services, schools and other important destinations.
Mary Ebeling from SSTI speaks about early work on measuring various dimensions of transportation equity, including affordability, health and safety impacts, and ultimately accessibility across multiple modes. Erika Rincon-Whitcomb from PolicyLink speaks to background on the national transportation equity landscape, focusing on trends and opportunities in the federal arena. She also speaks about her work on prioritizing equity in California’s Active Transportation Program.
As members of the Transportation Equity Caucus, a diverse coalition of organizations promoting policies that ensure access, mobility, and opportunity for all, we appreciate the opportunity to submit this statement for the record today to express our priorities for the financing of the Highway Trust Fund.
In recent years a national discussion has been underway about the causes and effects of growing inequality, but one cause that has received little attention is the role of the U.S. tax code. The individual tax code contains more than $1 trillion in tax subsidies known to policymakers and economists as tax expenditures because, like spending programs, they provide financial assistance to support specific activities or groups of people. Of these subsidies, more than half a trillion, $540 billion, support some form of savings or investment (e.g., higher education, retirement, homeownership).
In theory, tax code–based public subsidies should help all families save and invest, but instead, wealthier households receive most of the benefits. In fact, a recent analysis of the largest wealth- building tax subsidies found that the top 1 percent of households received more benefits from these tax code–based subsidies than the bottom 80 percent combined.
This primer aims to answer key questions about tax expenditures for antipoverty advocates: What are they? How do they work?
Who benefits? In addition, since the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not collect tax data by race, the primer uses data related to the distribution of benefits by income quintiles and the demographics of each quintile to provide a rough approximation of how different racial and ethnic groups do or do not benefit from the different categories of tax expenditures.
This resource provides an overview of how to develop a state or community assessment in food retail settings. This version contains more details and ‘how-to’ information for practitioners to use. These assessments can help identify disparities in peoples’ ability to access affordable, nutritious foods. The document takes practitioners through a step-by-step process for conducting assessments, including focusing, planning, implementing, and communicating assessment findings.
Research Your Community is a new mapping tool available on the Healthy Food Access Portal that can help individuals and organizations better understand the communities in which they are working in to improve access to healthy food.
The tool can also be a valuable resource for your advocacy and fundraising efforts. The grocery landscape is ever changing, and data is one of many ways to paint a picture of a community’s need for healthy food access interventions. This webinar will train users about how to effectively leverage this new tool.