Rhode Island’s Health Equity Zones: Addressing Local Problems with Local Solutions

The Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) developed strategies and infrastructure to fund its place-based initiatives to address the social determinants of health to eliminate health disparities. Using a data driven and community-led approach, RIDOH funded 10 local collaboratives, each with its own, geographically-defined “Health Equity Zone,” or “HEZ,” and, to support the collaboratives, created a new “Health Equity Institute,” a “HEZ Team” of 9 seasoned project managers, and direct lines of communications between these assets and the Office of the Director of Health.

The goal of the program was to recognize and address the diversity of local health disparities by marshaling local community involvement in the place-based Health Equity Zones.

The framework established through the Health Equity Zones allows for the continued collaboration between governmental public health entities and stakeholders in the community to address health disparities.

The accomplishments of the Woonsocket Health Equity Zone (HEZ) were illustrative of the benefits of a place-based initiative. Within the first year, the Woonsocket HEZ created a comprehensive report that detailed health inequities in their particular community (food access, drug overdose, teen health, domestic violence, and barriers to outdoor physical activity) and identified 17 partner organizations that were key stakeholders in the community. In the second year, the HEZ marshaled community resources to start enacting effective interventions to address those health inequities. This involved not only the partner organizations but also community ambassadors that could leverage social capital to work toward immediate, specific, and winnable objectives.