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Deputy Health Director Brooke Logan, left, pitches plan to alders.
New Haven’s alders first voted to declare racism a public health emergency. Now it is looking for federal help to put the city’s money where its mouth is.
That news emerged Thursday night at a hearing of the Board of Alders Health and Human Services Committee.
The alders learned that the New Haven Health Department is submitting an application this week for a $500,000 grant that renews annually for the three years. The money would be used to comb through city laws and ordinances, while also comparing them with other cities’ policies, to take action to address the racial disparities in asthma rates.
The grant would come from the U.S. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Office of Minority Health, to support “community-driven approaches to address factors contributing to structural racism in public health.”
After hearing about the proposal, the alders fast-tracked approval for the city’s application by “discharging” it to the full Board of Alders for a vote at the next meeting (rather than take a vote in committee and need then to wait for two more full board meetings for a final vote).
City Deputy Health Director Brooke Logan spoke to the alders about the proposal.
With the money, the Health Department would “convene a multi-sector team including residents, caregivers for children with asthma, representatives from the health care legal industry, the Board of Education, housing and environmental sectors, as well as representatives from the Board of Alders,” Logan said.
This money would be used to hire a project coordinator, a community health worker position, and stipends of up to $700 annually for community members and leaders who participate in the program.
According to Logan, the project will work to evaluate policies across five domains and social determinants of health: housing, economic stability, the built environment, health care, and education.
“The team will specifically look at extending the social safety net for stronger programs such as SNAP WIC; look at providing free public transportation, expanding school based health center hours that go beyond the school calendar and school day, and adding mold, which is a known asthma trigger, to the residential licensing inspection checklist,” Logan told the alders.
After the first year of the grant, the Health Department would study expanding the team’s mandate to look at health issues past asthma. including lead poisoning, mental health and obesity. Asthma is the central focus of the grant for the first year: the Asthma and Allergy Foundation has ranked New Haven as the fifth most challenging place in the nation to live with asthma. The city’s child asthma prevalence rate is also 14.3 percent, compare to the statewide average of 12.9 percent.
Committee Chair Darryl Brackeen of Upper Westville, noting the last-minute nature of the request for approval of this grant submission, stressed the importance of departments giving alders more time to scrutinize proposals.
Brackeen also stressed that the alders plan to scrutinize the formal budget for the grant to see how money is being spent on the two specifically named jobs, which will make up about $155,000 of the expenditures, while the remaining $345,000 will be used for non-personnel expenditures to support the grant process.
This is great news. I believe an epicenter of asthma will be found around the St. Raphael's campus of now Yale New Haven Hospital Systems. The giant smoke stack has been a scourge on the historic Dwight neighborhood for probably close to 70 years or more. We had to sue St. Raph's to get them to update their furnaces back in the early 1980's. They only replaced the one producing the most egregious amount of toxic pollutants, but it improved the situation somewhat. A project going on in Dwight now is the placement of purple air monitors to document air quality at 3 key locations although more are needed. We also need to preserve and protect all mature trees in the city. Regular modest income owners and renters can not afford to do arborist work without support. City tree ways that have compromised trees are the biggest way the city could help - by providing more funding to the the Parks Department to hire more tree specialists to prune and save valuable trees. URI - Urban Resources Initiative is wonderful at replacing city trees with resident cooperation and they are doing their best to keep our urban forest intact. One mature tree removes a huge amount of carbon from the air, leaves actually trap toxic particulate matter and the tree itself emits precious oxygen.