The document summarizes interviews conducted about the development of the Illinois Food Marketing Task Force and the healthy food financing policy in Illinois. Key points from the interviews include:
- The Task Force was diverse but lacked community input from affected areas and transparency in the process.
- $10 million allocated for financing was not seen as adequate and progress stalled after The Food Trust ended involvement.
- Barriers include the high costs of developing supermarkets in urban areas, racism, and a lack of focus on community development and social determinants of health.
- Moving forward, interviewees recommended prioritizing community participation, transparency, and addressing underlying causes of lack of access to healthy food.
1. Presenting Author: James E. Bloyd, MPH Regional Health Officer Community Epidemiology and Health Planning Cook County Department of Public Health Tuesday November 1, 2011 139 th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association Washington, DC
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Editor's Notes
Tension: created a platform for advocacy, at the same time the lack of community, lack of transparency, lack of public opp for comment, input and involvement (comment here: this related to lack of rep of community on tf.)
Everyone doesn’t agree that we need to put stores in food desert areas. Is this a contradiction, this is a tension a different outlook: some people want a more broad appraoch than just putting in a store: related to the opposition to ‘food desrt’ term. There are underlying problems in a comm that may not be solved by ‘putting in a store’ this problem can be identified and resolved better by a broad inclusive approach to the problem, an inclusive approach to the policy development process, which was shortcuted, the exclusivity of the process laid the problems that are now being seen, the opposition. The people who know the community best, the market expertise, the priorities of the community are to be found within the communities. Blocks comment on fear of the neighborhood, two others comments on disc of fear and theft. Possibly a reflection of the white dominated grocery corps that choose where to invest and build big stores.
The Priority Public Health Conditions Knowledge Network shares the holistic and value-driven view of social determinants taken by the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, namely that the structural determinants and conditions of daily life constitute the social determinants of health and that they are crucial to explaining health inequities. More specifically these include distribution of power, income, goods and services, globally and nationally, as well as the immediate, visible circumstances of peoples lives, such as their access to health care, schools and education; their conditions of work and leisure; their homes, communities, and rural or urban settings; and their chances of leading a flourishing life ( 1 ). In addition, these structural determinants influence how services are provided and received and thereby shape health care outcomes and consequences. WHO p. 5 WHO Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Equity, social determinants and public health programmes / editors Erik Blas and Anand Sivasankara Kurup. However, equity is clearly not only about numbers that can be statistically processed and presented in tables and charts – it is about people, their values and what they want from life. There is a need to “ focus not only on the extremes of income poverty but on the opportunity, empowerment, security and dignity that disadvantaged people want in rich and poor countries alike” ( 6 ). Social position exerts a powerful influence on the type, magnitude and distribution of health in societies. The control of power and resources in societies generates stratifications in institutional and legal arrangements and distorts political and market forces. While social stratification is often seen as the responsibility of other policy sectors and not central to the health sector per se, understanding and addressing stratification is critical to reducing health inequity. Factors defining position include social class, gender, ethnicity, education, occupation and income. P.6 1.4 Towards an actionable agenda There are five clusters of possible interventions corresponding to each of the five levels of the analytical framework, ranging from the top societal level to the two individual levels. One of the prime tasks of public health programmes is to translate knowledge on causes into concrete action. Consideration of interventions and how these are to be implemented, while being sensitive to possible risks and assumptions, has therefore been key to the work. Implementing such action may be the responsibility of public health programmes, the wider health sector or sectors beyond health. The upstream levels of the framework, namely context and position, differential exposure and differential vulnerability, can be usefully considered in relation to the classification of structured interventions suggested by Blankenship, Bray and Merson ( 11 ): • interventions that acknowledge health as a function of social, economic and political power and resources, and thus seek to manipulate power and resources to promote public health; • interventions based on the assumption that health problems result from deficiencies in behaviours, settings, or the availability of products and tools, and thus seek to address those deficiencies; • interventions that recognize that the health of a society and of its members is partially determined by its values, cultures and beliefs, or those of subgroups within it, and thus seek to alter those social norms that are disadvantageous to health.