Background Information
NIH Community Listening Sessions to Transform Health Disparities and Advance Equity
Listening Session Goal: Seek your perspectives on opportunities, challenges, and community needs related to interventions targeting social factors that influence health disparities including education, healthcare, financial resources, neighborhood environments, and social context.
- Economic stability
- Education access and quality
- Neighborhood and built environment
- Social and community context
- Health care access and quality

Interventions that attempt to intervene on these social determinants of health by altering the social, physical, economic, or political environments may influence health behaviors and outcomes. By intervening on these factors, interventions can attempt to shape the larger social context that contribute to health disparities. They target factors such as economic instability, limited educational and employment opportunity, societal racism, systemic discrimination, and lack of community resources, which limit neighborhoods’ access to healthy food, clean water, physical activity spaces, transportation, and health care.
Examples of interventions that aim to improve the root causes of poor health outcomes include:
- Community revitalization programs in poor, low-resourced communities, including improvements in park spaces and abandoned property renovations
- Minimum wage increases to support the living wage of community members
- Policy change to improve access to healthy foods such as the Green Carts Initiative in NYC and the Minneapolis Staple Food Ordinance
- Programs to support early childcare professionals to adopt practices and encourage better choices about where early care and education program are placed to reduce exposure to dangerous environmental exposures during their care
For more information:
- Social Determinants of Health, HealthyPeople2030: https://health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/social-determinants-health