Pages: 8

This chapter introduces the book's focus and main purposes. This chapter also explains the scope, contexts, objectives, and key terms, and discusses how it contributes to the relevant literature. It further describes how the author frames the research to support this book. It then explains how the book is laid out to organize its contents and provides a synopsis of each chapter. This chapter emphasizes that, while the book is a scholarly work, it is bolstered by the outcomes of relevant practices in Detroit and other cities in the United States as well as by its focus on healthy community planning by leveraging equitable community development efforts in underserved communities. Finally, this chapter highlights these aspects of the book to differentiate it from other books that address community health.

Pages: 67

This chapter lays out an overarching framework for promoting community health by leveraging bottom-up equitable community development systems (CDSs). It explains how the Detroit Initiative was conceived as a citywide grassroots movement and the seven components of an equitable CDS, a key outcome of the Initiative. This chapter describes core concepts for the book's overall approach: three dimensions of support infrastructure (people, place, and ecosystem). These dimensions, which align with the seven components, build on several theories related to community development (community capital, social justice). This chapter further investigates how the seven components contribute to an equitable CDS and how it can enhance community health. It also examines how a framework integrating health and equitable community development can promote healthy communities more effectively. Finally, this chapter discusses how the three dimensions, an equitable CDS, community health, and social justice, can be aligned in ways that advance the health of communities.

Pages: 7

This chapter discusses vitality as a framework for promoting community health by building on the Detroit Initiative's key outcome—community vitality as a shared narrative for equitable community development. The Initiative operationalized community vitality with indicators to assess community success and defined the indicators to measure community health and well-being. This chapter explores the role that community vitality can play in enhancing community health and investigates how community vitality can be used as a shared vision to foster policy alignment across key agencies and cross-sector collaboration. Using the outcomes of the Detroit Initiative and case studies set in other cities, the chapter argues that community vitality can be used flexibly as a common narrative to promote healthy and equitable community development.

Pages: 7

This chapter discusses coordination of system capitalization through partnerships between financial institutions and community development organizations to enhance community health more equitably. It investigates how the efforts of community development financial institutions (CDFIs) can be improved and supported to promote community health. To address this question, this chapter builds on the Detroit Initiative's two main outcomes—the seven components of an equitable community development system and a vitality framework designed to measure community success. Informed by the outcomes of the Initiative and case studies in other cities, this chapter suggests how best to use the seven components and the vitality framework effectively to support CDFIs that seek to improve community health. The chapter provides insights into the importance of system capitalization, city–community engagement, and public–private partnerships, which together can help coordinate CDFI efforts more effectively, thereby achieving more equitable community health.

Pages: 8

This chapter discusses system governance and mechanisms for shepherding community development systems (CDSs) citywide to promote healthy communities through advancing resident voices and using interdisciplinary collaboration. This chapter investigates health and community development–integrated approaches to system governance—approaches that leverage intermediaries that play critical roles in shepherding a CDS citywide and facilitating systems of engagement with community development organizations, city governments, health agencies, and other entities. This chapter draws on examples in other cities that have used a wide range of approaches to promoting system governance in a coordinated and equitable manner to implement health-equity goals-centered community development initiatives. This chapter also presents lessons indicating that robust, community-engagement, cross-sector collaboration as well as intermediaries' facilitator roles are necessary to make system governance more effective in achieving better health and more equitable community development.

Pages: 17

This, the book's final chapter, concludes by discussing the implications of the study outcomes and lessons learned as applicable to the planning and designing of healthy communities. This chapter explains practical challenges and opportunities associated with the proposed integrative approach to community development and healthy-place development. This chapter also connects all previous chapters with respect to the Detroit system (a proposed system for equitable community development, a central outcome of the Detroit Initiative) and its viability as a support mechanism for improving health equity, and suggests recommendations for implementing the Detroit system as a system that integrates health and equitable community development for the next phase of the Detroit Initiative and for cities facing similar issues.