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$3.68M grant brightens health outlook for 6 New Haven communities

New Haven Register - 11/12/2018

Nov. 12--NEW HAVEN -- Local experts believe a recent grant award from the Centers for Disease Control to a New Haven health organization could have a positive impact on the health outcomes of underserved people in the Elm City.

The Community Alliance for Research and Engagement, which is co-housed at Southern Connecticut State University and the Yale School of Public Health, received a five-year federal grant for up to $3.68 million to fund community-based solutions to improving health care for low-income residents of New Haven.

"This grant really builds on a lot of work that has been taking place and we've been building toward over several years in the community," said Alycia Santilli, director of CARE. "It's allowing us to take some of our current work and take it to the next level."

Santilli said CARE takes triannual assessments of six low-income neighborhoods in the city where there are higher rates of poor health outcomes, like a doubled rate of diabetes compared to the rest of the city.

Those communities also have 33 percent food insecurity -- meaning a lack of reliable access to nutritious food -- while the city of New Haven has a rate of 22 percent food insecurity, Santilli said.

The grant is limited to improving health outcomes in three categories: nutrition, physical activity and community health workers. Santilli said a community-based approach to health, where people who live in their communities become advocates for and identify their community's health needs, rather than professionals who do not, is seen as a best practice.

Under the grant, CARE is able to pay members of the community to receive training to become health advocates.

"They understand the community in a way someone like myself might not," said Darcey Cobbs-Lomax, executive director of Project Access-New Haven, a nonprofit with the mission to increase access to health care for underserved individuals. "Community health workers are not currently funded through any insurance reimbursement, so grants like this are really important to communities like New Haven. They're all funded by grants and philanthropy, which is not a sustainable model."

It is the Project Access community-based care model that CARE will follow as it carries out the grant.

Cobbs-Lomax said many health challenges are also exacerbated by race or class. She said issues like unreliable transportation and hunger are more prominent issues in low-income and underserved neighborhoods.

"Insurance doesn't necessarily mean equal access; just because someone is insured, it doesn't mean you'll get the same access to care," she said. "If you are a Medicaid recipient, sometimes your options are a bit limited, especially for speciality care."

Santilli said the community health advocate model is based on giving communities a direct voice in how programs and projects are developed in their communities.

"A key piece of this is working directly with residents to shift the culture of health," she said.

Sandra Bulmer, dean of SCSU's School of Health, said the hope is if the program maintains a high quality of service for all five years of the grant, it may lead to future grants.

"We hope over a period of time we can move the dial in improving some of these health measures," she said. "Right now, they are hiring community members; several job announcements are out and they're interviewing health leaders, people are training in the community and they hired a community coordinator full-time to work with all of the community-based programs."

Bulmer said that, although the scope of the grant was narrowed to nutrition, physical activity and community-clinical linkages, there are still many other areas of health to be addressed outside of that lens, such as smoking cessation and gun violence.

brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com

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