The Role of Community Health Impact Assessments in Retrofit
This workbook has been developed through a collaboration between the National Retrofit Hub and Centric Lab, supported by Impact on Urban Health, as part of the Measuring Outcomes and Impact Evaluation project.
On Wednesday 4th March we launched the workbook alongside a webinar that was attended by around 60+ people from local authorities, the private sector, and community-oriented groups.
Watch the video below to learn more.
The work explored how broader outcome measurement could accelerate retrofit delivery and support better policy, funding, and delivery decisions, particularly in a fiscally constrained environment.
A key finding was the importance of place-based data that reflects lived experience and provides a nuanced understanding of local needs, opportunities, and challenges. This workbook aims to offer one way to generate such data.
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This playbook is not only for end users that will design and implement a CHIA in their own community, but also those that can advocate for localised and nuanced understandings of people and place. This includes but is not limited to community groups, combined and local authorities, and advocacy organisations. Whether or not you are working in health or retrofit, a CHIA could be a meaningful tool that furthers your advocacy journey. It provides an essential evidence base, offering a granular understanding of the context of place and people in which national or local policy is being delivered. We consider the main users of this work to be:
• Community groups in the retrofit, material and built environment space.
• Community groups in the health and social justice space.
• Tenants or residents that are not yet organised but on the brink of change in their neighbourhoods, or those that are recognising community health concerns in their area as a result of living environments.
• Those that are able to further the use of this tool on the ground - cheerleaders that can influence the take up the tool.
• Those that can incorporate this tool into design specifications, strategic or policy documents, or directly into retrofit scheme requirements.
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The CHIA is:
• a tool to baseline your community’s health
• a tool to assess the impact of an anticipated or present change
• a process to connect your community to deepen your mutual and collective understanding of your health in place
• an opportunity to identify and build upon health giving and life affirming infrastructures and activities in your community
• an opportunity to surface and spotlight what needs changing
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The best time to use this guide, and the workbooks, fits into 3 spaces.
Community groups can use the CHIA to explore health as an ecological experience by looking at all the different systems at play and seeing their overlaps. This helps point out where retrofit at scale can have an influence.
Community leaders can assemble at speed and use the CL-HIA to ensure that their knowledges can respond to upcoming plans on retrofit.
Policy and strategy designers of retrofit projects can work with public health professionals to evaluate how their efforts can ensure that a retrofit strategy can tackle a wide range of health determinants; issues such as governance, community wealth building, and collective action have all been shown to improve public health outcomes.
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Community groups can use the CHIA resources to investigate how the systems around them influence their health and then create plans to articulate how retrofit can impact them.
Community leaders build on the grassroots work by residents and use the CL-HIA to bring forward critical issues on retrofit to authorities when timescales are short.
Public health professionals work alongside community leaders and residents to produce a new HIA. As a longer term process this is about creating new infrastructure going forward and building the necessary political capital for new introducing the new CHIA to policies.
WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU
If you download the workbook we’d love to hear from you about your experiences. We can also offer advice and support.
Further Reading
