Moment #25: Health, Wealth and Housing - Promoting Cross-Sector Collaboration for Equity Conference

We are pleased to report that LA LISC’s first health equity conference was a smashing success! Co-hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the UCLA Iris Cantor Women’s Health and Research Center October 4, 2017, we had over 125 participants join us to talk health, wealth, and housing at the Downtown LA Fed building. Check out the conference materials here. 

Why Health, Wealth, and Housing you ask? 

At LISC, we know that a safe, affordable home is one of the basic requisites of life—a key to individual health and well-being, and the foundation for sustainable, economically vibrant and diverse neighborhoods. Housing is where LISC started. And it’s still the cornerstone of our mission, even as our vision has expanded to incorporate work to improve education, health, safety and economic growth in the places where we work- all basic needs that must be tackled at once so that our communities can thrive. 

When people choose a home to live in, they choose a whole community as well. And thriving communities offer decent schools, parks where children feel safe to play, healthy places to shop, and access to living-wage jobs. 

Research shows that those issues of financial, physical, and mental health are irrevocably linked. The World Health Organization defines Health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” estimating that 80 percent of a person’s health is determined by social factors like their jobs and communities rather than access to and quality of medical care. 

Growing awareness of this intersection has sparked an exciting expansion of focused investments in both asset building and access to safe affordable housing as a way to promote health. 

For the conference, we were fortunate enough to have gathered an impressive group of elected officials, expert practitioners, and community leaders who are working advance the equitable development of health and well-being in our low-income communities. 

Check out the presentations from Measure of America, LA County Department of Public Health, and Blue Sheild of California Foundation here.

We want to say a big thank you to everyone who came out to make the day a success, including our National Health Director, Shai Lauros. We especially want to acknowledge our amazing sponsors: CIT One West Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Kaiser Permanente, Blue Shield of CA, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco.