Health is not relative: a community, or nation, is only as healthy as its least healthy member
A critical mass of community inspired, research backed evidence has established that the environment in which people live, including their social, physical, and economic conditions, is the major determinant of their health and safety status. Prevention Institute was founded on a vision of improved environments for all. Over time, the Institute has encouraged community health and health equity by facilitating a deeper collective understanding of how root causes—such as racism and poverty—shape community environments and norms which, in turn, keenly influence outcomes for health, safety, and health equity.
The impetus to reinvest in communities and to engender health equity is the common thread binding all of the Institute's endeavors. In the area of health equity, per se, the Institute has concentrated on three domains: strengthening the argument for such an approach, developing tools and strategies that are both grounded in quality research and have practical applications for communities and policymakers, and guiding these groups in applying effective strategies. The Institute has also been developing the economic case for community-level prevention as an underlying support to these strategies since its inception.
Health for All: California's Strategic Approach to Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities is the Institute's blueprint for increasing both access to and quality of health care services. It also serves as a framework for inter-sectoral collaboratives in redesigning community environments. The Institute coordinates some of these alliances, such as California's Healthy Places Coalition. A compendium resource that the Institute conceived and piloted for the U.S. Office of Minority Health is THRIVE, a community resilience assessment tool. In addition to developing initiatives and tools, the Institute has published an abundance of written material on this and other subjects. Recently, it co-authored Local Solutions to Reduce Inequities in Health and Safety for the Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Health Disparities.