Brown County 2022-2024 Community Health Improvement Plan
For 2022 to 2024, the three chosen priorities are listed below:
- EQUITABLE ACCESS: Calling out racism as a public health crisis and amplifying the voices of marginalized groups in the community is a strategy aimed at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusivity in health. This includes people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ population, individuals with different abilities, those with financial, housing, and food insecurity and more. By intentionally taking steps to build trust in public health and mobilizing resources in targeted ways, we can reduce health inequities and improve agency and health outcomes for all.
- SOCIAL COHESION: Fostering high levels of social cohesion made up of social inclusion, social capital, and social diversity can positively influence individual and population health. The social, political, and structural institutions in our community have the ability to promote social cohesion and healthy norms by developing and aligning resources in a way that is responsive, supportive, and effective.
- UNIFIED PLANNING AND POLICY: Prioritizing health, diversity, equity, and inclusivity in policy planning and delivering policies in a coordinated and unified way can build and improve the well-being in the entire community. In addition, clear and unified communication about policy planning and delivery can build trust between the community and institutions/agencies/ schools, etc. and can positively influence individual and collective well-being in the community.
In Brown County, the Beyond Health Collaborative is the Steering Committee responsible for advancing this work in partnership with Strategy Leads who are moving action plans forward for each of the strategies. A summary of the work being done as a part of the CHIP can be found in this dashboard. This dashboard will be updated a minimum of twice a year as Strategy Leads share updates with the Steering Committee for awareness.
For additional information or to join in this work, please email bc_health@browncountywi.gov.
The CHIP is a document required by Wis. Stat. § 251.05(3)(c) and Wis. Admin. Code §§ DHS 140.04(1)(g)3-5.
Why Is This Important?
The ALICE Report, first commissioned for Wisconsin in 2016 through United Way of Wisconsin and its local affiliates, provided a clearer, more realistic picture of economic security across all 72 counties. The report provided crucial data, based on a truer cost of living in each county, that community stakeholders can use to develop strategies to remove obstacles to economic security and identify gaps in community resources.
According to the most recent Wisconsin ALICE Report released in April 2023), 1 in 3 Brown County households (36%) lives below the ALICE Threshold. This equates to more than 39,000 households that struggled to meet daily basic needs such as housing, food, childcare, healthcare, and transportation. The 1 in 3 statistic is comprised of 11% of poverty households (at or below the Federal Poverty Level or FPL) and 25% of Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) households.
There are several organizations and coalitions in Brown County currently working on economic security solutions. Brown County United Way (strategy lead) is in the process of bringing together these groups to determine additional measures to track over time; map and uplift current efforts; and identify gaps and new opportunities to collaborate. For more information, contact Sarah Inman at sarah@browncountyunitedway.org.
For more information on the Wisconsin ALICE Report and to access a free data dashboard, visit https://www.unitedwaywi.org/page/ALICE.
Why Is This Important?
Brown County works to improve access to safe, high quality physical environments. This is an effort that includes Brown County as a whole, so collaborative leadership and decision making among leaders in the community will be needed to address and improve environmental quality and physical environments for all.
Working to make sure that Brown County's physical environments are safe is important for all Brown County community members -- no matter their age, socioeconomic status, race, or gender. Air quality¹, water quality, and the built environment are linked to health impacts like asthma¹, food availability, and childhood lead exposure.
To take on the task of improving environmental quality and physical environments for all Brown County, a group of environmental leaders in the community from various backgrounds and industries will come together to work on this important topic together.
To learn more or join in these efforts, please contact Brown County Public Health at bc_health@browncountywi.gov or call (920) 448-6400.
Why Is This Important?
Access to affordable, culturally responsive, and timely health care can help prevent diseases and detect issues sooner, enabling people to live longer, healthier lives. Looking at individuals' access to clinical care helps us understand why some communities may be healthier than others. In fact, access to healthcare is called out as one of the social determinants of health by Healthy People 2030. The healthcare partners of the Beyond Health steering committee are working collaboratively on two health priorities which are closely related to access to healthcare: diabetes and mental health.
Mental health has been a past CHIP priority in Brown County and this work will continue under the equitable access priority. Similarly, talking about diabetes early detection, management, and prevention is not new for Brown County. Calling out diabetes rates in our community and developing plans to ensure access for historically marginalized community members is at the center of efforts to increase connections with medical providers and needed care in Brown County.
For more information, or to join in these efforts, please contact Jody.Anderson@bellin.org.
Why Is This Important?
Our mental and physical health is deeply impacted by the quality of our relationships, an fact brought painfully to the fore in the locked-down months of the pandemic. A large and growing number of studies[1] have revealed startling negative health outcomes for individuals who lack social connection:
- Equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day or having an alcohol use disorder
- Twice as harmful to physical and mental health as obesity
- Linked to depression, poor sleep quality, accelerated cognitive decline and impaired immunity
- Increased risk of stroke and coronary heart disease
- Direct and significant impact on longevity
As a defined social determinant of health, social connectedness has many facets at both individual and community levels:
- breadth and depth of relationships
- emotional and instrumental support from others
- opportunities to contribute to the well-being of others and to the community
- opportunities to feel valued by other people and by the community at large
- qualities of, and challenges to, connection among those who are very alike versus among those who are different from one another
- level of trust among individuals and across a community
- sense of community belonging
The WELLO Community Health and Well-being Survey 2021 identified Social Relationships as the lowest-scoring wellness domain for Brown County residents, with 10% of respondents reporting being “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with personal relationships and support they got from friends. The Brown County Area LIFE Study (2021) revealed that only 67% of respondents rated Brown County as “good” or “excellent” for “living together as neighbors”.
Strategies to improve social connectedness and belonging across Brown County can be achieved through many vehicles, among them individual choices, neighborly connections, voluntary and civic association membership development, connection-promoting local government policies and practices, nonprofit organization programming, and for-profit sector employee- or community-facing activities.
For more information or to explore opportunities to connect with this work, contact strategy lead Julie Filapek, Neighborhood Partners Program Manager at NeighborWorks Green Bay at julief@nwgreenbay.org or 920-217-8744.
Why Is This Important?
The food system serves as a powerful vehicle for social cohesion, community connections, and cultural traditions. Our current system is deeply inequitable, which threatens the health and economic vitality of communities across the country including those in Brown County. An increasing number of households in Brown County are dealing with food insecurity. Lack of access to affordable, culturally appropriate, healthy food can contribute to health disparities and inequities.
For additional information on the work that is being done around food systems in Brown County or to get involved, please contact Patrick Nehring at patrick.nehring@wisc.edu.
Why Is This Important?
A key driver of a healthy, well and economically vibrant community is the built environment - the human-made spaces that people live, work and recreate in on a day-to-day basis. This environment can promote good health, well-being and economic activity or detract from it. Since 2012, Wello has convened the Greater Green Bay Active Communities Alliance to build safer communities, increase walking and biking of people of all ages and abilities, and shift our culture to one where the environment is shared between people and motorized vehicles promoting community liveability. The 5E's guide this work: engineering, education, enforcement, evaluation, and encouragement.
Please reach out to Natalie Bomstad at natalie@wello.org to get involved.
Why Is This Important?
Beyond Health recognizes that including future health considerations into planning efforts now is a critical step in ensuring equitable health in Brown County. An intentional focus on the root causes of health is critical for the success of Brown County as a place to live and work. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls out the following conditions in communities, known as the social determinants of health, which are impactful on the health of communities:
- Healthcare access and quality
- Education access and quality
- Social and community context
- Economic stability
- Neighborhood and built environment
Advocacy aimed at improving these conditions has been identified as a priority within this Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP). Beyond Health puts an importance on formally acknowledging the importance of investing in health within key community initiatives. Integrating health into key community documents such as comprehensive plans, strategic planning documents, and visioning initiatives is an identified opportunity to bring positive change for the health of Brown County.
One such example is the prioritization of broadband infrastructure development and access. To consider a parallel example, significant infrastructure development and resource prioritization was needed in order to bring electricity to rural communities across the United States in the 1930s. The Rural Electrification Act of 1936 was adopted for just this purpose. A modern day example of gaps in equitable access could be widespread affordable broadband access. Beyond Health is committed to exploring opportunities to support these ongoing efforts.
Other emerging issues could be the opioid/fentanyl crisis in Brown County, housing and transportation concerns, and more. This CHIP-linked strategy work will advocate for and raise awareness for impactful public health programming, policies, and equitable resource distribution linked to new and expanding community initiatives.
To share additional community work that aligns with these efforts or to get involved, please contact David Lally at David.Lally@hshs.org.
Why Is This Important?
Housing has been identified as a key building block to health and healthy communities, with access to safe, stable, and affordable housing listed as one of the social determinants of health by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People experiencing homelessness have more challenges to accessing health care, and therefore face higher rates of poor health outcomes than people with housing. A 2021 study found that people experiencing homelessness have higher rates of chronic health conditions, behavioral health disorders, communicable diseases and infections, and history of head injuries compared to the general population. Since many conditions are best managed with regular medication and treatments, stable housing is perhaps the most important factor in improving health conditions. Community leaders in Brown County identified that a significant investment in improving access to housing is a critical community initiative, resulting in the development of the Greater Green Bay Blueprint to Prevent and End Homelessness.
The Blueprint highlights the following: "Homelessness is a complex issue with many variables impacting the rise and fall of trendlines. One of the biggest being the most obvious – lack of affordable housing - that is also accessible to those that may have lower credit scores and/or prior justice involvement. What also cannot be denied, is the long-term historical impact of race on social structures, policies and systems and the trauma associated with the impact of racism on the disproportionality of people of color experiencing homelessness in the Green Bay Region and across the nation. The COVID-19 global pandemic in many ways has shown a bright light on the racial disparities in health, housing, education, justice, access to services, access to savings, and access to vaccines while it also had a large impact in increasing the numbers of individual and families falling into homelessness across the nation." It goes on to say "The pandemic provided a multitude of challenges, the main one being the loss of many jobs in the health care, hospitality, restaurant, and retail industries. The pandemic increased attention and concern for these individuals living on the edge along with those individuals who had already fallen into homelessness prior to the pandemic. It also illuminated the need to create targeted solutions to ensure people experiencing housing instability and homelessness receive the services and housing they need to remain or become stably housed, and to work on systems change efforts that increase access for those populations who have been historically disenfranchised from access to housing, services, and generational wealth building opportunities."
The Blueprint, created with input from experts in the community and people with lived experience of homelessness, provides strategies and tasks that must be implemented to help prevent and end homelessness in Brown County. Beyond Health has aligned efforts with the Blueprint Director and the various community partners and coalitions who are committed to the work of addressing this basic need in Brown County, highlighting successes along the way, and focusing on housing and health for all in the community.
For additional information or to get involved, please reach out gbblueprintdirector@gmail.com
Why Is This Important?
According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: “Health equity means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), health equity is achieved when every person has the opportunity to "attain his or her full health potential" and no one is "disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances”. Health inequities are reflected in differences in length of life; quality of life; rates of disease, disability, and death; severity of disease; and access to treatment.
With that in mind, the Brown County Health Equity Coalition was established by a collaborative group of community partners. Through the development and implementation of a guiding charter, the following key concepts were mutually agreed upon as foundational to the work at hand. The Health Equity Coalition will:
- Conduct ongoing assessments of community need
- Take an aligned and collaborative approach across organizations to navigate what work is being done and being planned to avoid redundances and capitalize on existing assets for crafting and implementing initiatives that fill gaps in the work being done to promote health equity
- Share and support funding/resource opportunities with the aim of promoting/supporting grassroot organizations/programs in an equitable way
- Share and support initiatives/opportunities aimed at increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion for marginalized populations in our community
A Key Principle
“Nothing about us without us”. This will increase prospects that the coalition can move forward smoothly, with mutual respect and in the same direction. In other words, people affected by an issue must be at the table.
Members must include true stakeholders, who are so well connected with their communities that they can provide trustworthy information about demographics, health statistics, issues, organizational dynamics, and other stakeholders who might be engaged. Stakeholders are individuals who have reasons to be deeply concerned with an issue. The reasons may be organizational (their organization’s mission is to address these issues), or they may be personal (based on a person’s own experiences or the experiences of the racial and ethnic group to which they belong.)
Building Trust and Mutual Respect:
The building of trust begins with understanding, which is achieved through respectful, patient listening and accommodation. Mutual respect is based on the acknowledgment, appreciation, and experience of another’s path, contributions, and abilities. Developing trust and respect takes time and should be ongoing. It starts with honoring the individual as a person first, and then, the community he or she represents.
Shared Priorities
In February of 2022, the Health Equity Coalition adopted the following overarching statements which will guide the scope of the work completed:
- Priority Area: Improved health equity in Brown County
- Problem Statement: Structural and systemic policies create health inequities in Brown County
- Goal: Ensure health equity for all marginalized community members in Brown County
Opportunities for Engagment
The Health Equity Coalition identified three key opportunities for engagement to advance this important work: education, advocacy, and structural change. The adopted strategies align with these three overarching concepts. To join in these efforts, please contact Brown County Public Health at bc_health@browncountywi.gov.
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