Grant: Catalyst Grant: Population and Public Health

This catalyst grant will help our new Vancouver and Toronto research-community partnerships to lay a foundation for a long term program of research focused on environmental health inequities in Canada¿ inner cities. This research is needed because current approaches to assessing the impact of urban environments on health defines ¿environment¿ too narrowly, and often measures environmental variables that have little relevance to communities who experience the greatest exposure to harm. We plan to use photography as a method to access community knowledge about ways that experiences in disadvantaged neighbourhoods impact the social determinants of health. The aim is to use this knowledge to improve the community relevance of environmental health assessment in urban settings in order to empower communities to support public health action. Community members from low-income neighbourhoods, Parkdale (Toronto) and Oppenheimer (Vancouver) will be trained on the use of photography as a research tool to document their health-related experiences in their neighbourhoods. They will then carry out field visits to low, medium, and high income neighbourhoods to take photos of things that make their neighbourhood particularly healthy or unhealthy relative to other neighbourhoods in the city. They will then gather their photos together to construct themes about environmental health inequity and the social determinants of health. A report of these themes will be written and discussed in a multisectoral workshop as the basis for the development of actionable indicators to support community-centred environmental justice action. Results will be broadly disseminated and discussed in order to build momentum for the development of a CIHR Operating Grant application aimed at developing community-relevant assessment and intervention tools that are designed to understand and overcome the complex social and physical determinants of health inequity that are entrenched in urban environments.