Advancing Health and Resilience in the Gulf of Mexico Region A Roadmap for Progress (2023) / Chapter Skim
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5 A Road Map for Advancing Progress Toward Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf Region
5 A Road Map for Advancing Progress Toward Health and Community Resilience in the Gulf Region
Pages 99-110
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From page 99... ...
2) , the committee was charged with identifying major challenges or critical gaps to be addressed in advancing health and community resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region, considering opportunities that could lead to significant progress in health and community resilience, and developing an approach to measuring that progress over time, as well as reviewing efforts, challenges, and priorities around health and 99
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From page 100... ...
Included in the recommendations are actions that the committee believes will provide consistency and higher fidelity to efforts at measuring health and resilience going forward, and to the levels of planning, oversight, and accountability necessary for building and sustaining success. ROADBLOCKS ON THE PATH: MAJOR CHALLENGES AND CRITICAL GAPS Based on its efforts over the past year, the committee concludes that progress toward better, more sustainable health and community resilience efforts in the Gulf of Mexico region is inhibited by the presence of four significant roadblocks: • The lack of a holistic, systems approach to program development and service delivery; • Incomplete, ineffective, and uncoordinated efforts to capture data related to the health and resilience of communities' resulting in a lack of understanding of community need and community capacity, and an inability to translate needs and resources into action; • Insufficient financial and human resources reaching communities in need, with the support that does exist hobbled by bottlenecks, inequities, and limitations of oversight and accountability; and • An enduring failure of current systems to effectively account for the role and multiple dimensions of equity in rendering communities persistently vulnerable.
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From page 101... ...
On the human resources side, again the varying priorities across levels of government can make service delivery difficult for the community organizations delivering services, as can the limitations created by often ad-hoc, grant-based funding that in many cases does not provide for capability development within community organizations or the consistency of a sustainable focus and funding. Because of this ad-hoc funding, in cases where funding does exist, it often cannot be fully used by communities and community organizations owing to the challenges inherent in grant management, programmatic reporting, or other administrative limitations.
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From page 102... ...
On a broader level, the lack of consistent data across communities hinders efforts to identify factors that might require more targeted mitigation efforts because of community- or location-specific needs and inhibits program assessment as well as governance and accountability efforts on a regional or national scale. The committee offers several recommendations aimed at improving data at the local, state, and national levels, as well as a need for attention to more sophisticated analyses of those data.
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From page 103... ...
The committee's experiences on site visits in Houma and New Orleans, Louisiana, and discussion with community leaders around the Gulf region highlighted significant ability and opportunity for communities to drive progress, especially when organized and effectively resourced. This report makes recommendations for enhancing community leadership in health and resilience efforts, and the committee encourages communities and community organizations to use these recommendations to ensure their voice is heard.
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From page 104... ...
Finally, communities and community organizations can contribute to the implementation of Recommendation 3-2, that funders supporting research in the Gulf region should take steps to ensure that local communities are engaged in the research through a range of strategies, including the public participation approaches and more in-depth community engagement partnerships. Community engagement will be important for collecting, understanding, and translating data on health and community resilience.
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From page 105... ...
The committee finds that state leadership has not consistently ensured that infrastructure supporting community health and resilience is able to withstand a range of disaster impacts and that there are consistently limitations of the availability of resources flowing down to communities as a result of state-level bottlenecks. In response to this issue, the committee makes several recommendations about funding models and vehicles to support health and resilience initiatives (Box 5-1)
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From page 106... ...
The operational components of Recommendation 4-2's interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial strategy to support sustainable funding efforts in the Gulf of Mexico region should include development of plans, resources, and measurable milestones to: • Shift funding models to facilitate the engagement of and partner ship with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and minority serving institutions (MSIs)
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From page 107... ...
. These recommendations call for the creation and resourcing of a pair of national strategies, one focused on health and community resilience data collection, analysis, and use, and another focused on sustainable funding; individually and together they could reshape the future of health and community resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.
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From page 108... ...
Components of this strategy should include: • a consistent set of standards and measures for the collection of community-level health and resilience data and a set of uniform protocols for data collection and management; • the identification of methods for improving the quality of data collection (including instrumentation and population data quality controls) for marginalized communities in particular; • the identification of best practices and supporting mechanisms for engaging a diverse group of collaborators, including communities, non profit organizations, for-profit and nonprofit health care organizations, and academic institutions and researchers, in data collection and man agement; and • a strategy to support robust, consistent data collection and timely sharing efforts across government through NCHS's engagement with other federal agencies outside HHS collecting health and resilience data, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foun dation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as state-level data coordinators.
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From page 109... ...
• Practical applications: The development of funder portfolios that include research and programmatic efforts focused on practical applications and on impacts of value as identified by the local communities collaborating in the work. Operational components of this strategy include the development of plans, resources, and measurable milestones focused on the following objectives: • Shift funding models to facilitate the engagement of and partnership with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)
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From page 110... ...
110 ADVANCING HEALTH AND RESILIENCE IN THE GULF OF MEXICO REGION Consistent with the inclusive theme of this report, this chapter is not intended to suggest limited opportunities for communities, funders, or public officials at any level to engage around particular recommendations, but rather to suggest that in making progress toward health and community resilience and using this report as a resource to assist in that effort, different actors may be best positioned to lead in different places. The committee is also conscious of feedback from community members and community leaders seeking resources that are actionable to them, by them, and the first section of this chapter is an effort to be responsive to that feedback.
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