Community Health Impact Assessments

Introduction

Welcome to the Community Health Impact Assessment programme page.

This programme has been co-developed with grassroots organisations in the UK.

This work aims to throw away the rule book on the status quo and imagine what an HIA could look like if it embodied the WHO four interlinking pillars of democracy, equity, ethical use of evidence, and sustainable development from a community and lived experience framing.

These exercise books, templates, learnings, and reportings are designed to help you imagine what you can do and why this area of work can be meaningful to change in the way things are done.

This programme grew from the long term collaboration between Centric Lab and Clean Air for Southall & Hayes (CASH). CASH are a grassroots organisation made up of multi-ethnic working class people from Southall, West London, who have been advocating for the rights to not be unjustly polluted and exposed to toxic chemicals.

Their ongoing campaigning demonstrates the entrenched power the Right to Pollute culture has in western worlds. A big question that has always been asked is why was such little care given? This work has aimed to encompass our years of working together, since 2018, and support grassroots organisations around the UK (and beyond) in ways to challenge the system and identify pathways for policy and practice change.

This work is dedicated to all the Angela Fonso’s out there standing up for their rights, protecting the air their kids breathe, and believing that things can be better.

More About This Project


    • A community-led HIA allows for peoples lived experiences of engaging with systems that change their neighbourhoods and livelihoods to shape what democracy, equity, ethical use of data, and sustainable development look like.

    • A community-led HIA gives power to citizens to shape how health, in an urban context, is experienced and discussed. This reduces siloed power and creates dialogue between stakeholders.

    • A community-led HIA endeavoured to be more accurate, create dialogues, be less-data determinist and reduce the concept of  “scoring”.

    • A community-led HIA without an equitable process of good governance will only break trust between communities and the people creating change around them.

  • We feel that our learnings are not isolated. The authors of the Influencing Healthy Public Policy with Community Health Impact Assessment 2009 report by the National Collaborating Centre for Health Public Policy of Quebec, Canada wrote:

    Community members who were involved in the CHIA continue to comment about the value of the process. It is clear that CHIA contributed to a respectful, participatory discussion where different points of view were heard and valued. The process helped to reduce the tension in the community, provided the Concerned Ratepayers with a forum for their concerns to be raised, and offered a reasoned, neutral report for the municipal council that outlined the potential positive and negative effects of the project. 

    Lastly, the HIA is not defined by any one piece of legislation or policy, it is malleable and within the powers of authorities and agencies to use to their best advantages. By creating spaces for community groups to (co)develop HIAs on different topics authorities and agencies are able to demonstrate other goals of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) in non-tokenistic ways - meaningfully shape policy and organisational practice.

    When an authority allows a community to co-develop practices based on their lived experiences they can tackle issues systemically and undo systems of harm and malpractice.

Related Reading

Supporting this Programme

If you are in a position of influence to help this programme develop further please get in touch with us: hello@thecentriclab.com

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Air is Kin

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Introduction to Health Justice and Healing