About Us: Goals & Information
The overall mission of the HNON is bring grass roots/tops together with community sector leadership in an ongoing way on a more evidence and consensus-basis for community health norming to advance policy, environmental change, infrastructure development and community capacity development. In support of that mission, HNON intends to and is already providing, to a growing degree, a broad range of community data and implementation guidance, tools, technical assistance and other resources to New Orleans neighborhoods recovering from Hurricane Katrina and decades of community disparities so as to enable residents to build a sustainable community of healthy neighborhoods and a culture of health and health equity.
- Post-Katrina New Orleans has the opportunity to not only recover from Hurricane Katrina and the associated flood, but to make the systemic changes for improving social equity, population health and resiliency of the community on a strategic basis.
- Healthy neighborhoods are those which address the broad determinants of health that impact health, independence and well-being.
- Healthy neighborhoods are those where the residents have deliberate process and organization to stay aware of their status of health and well-being and to routinely prioritize evidence-based interventions to improve the status and implement the interventions in collective action.
- A healthy community must align all of its assets: human, built environment, non-profit and faith-based, governmental and marketplace. Thus, this healthy neighborhood plan must be in alignment with all other aspects of recovery planning and implementation.
- The most impacting changes are those that change the social “structure” and systems through policy change, environmental change, social norming and development of community capacity for services.
- Replication activities for other communities - proposed Community charter and governance (under development)
- Data/resource website (beta launched)
- Resident leadership development and civic organizing (i.e. effective neighborhood associations) (NPN and its Community College)
- Community Assessment (implemented at neighborhood level for REACH)
- Neighborhood liaisons for outreach and effective leadership/competency-building (3 liaisons presently)
- Multi-disciplinary technical assistance to neighborhood associations (already in place)
- Community health navigators for individual and systems support (pending)
- Mini-grants to neighborhoods for assessment, planning and/or implementation (in place x 2)
- Community clinics evolving to “Community-centered Health Homes” (under development)
- Creation of community data common or Community Information Exchange (CIE) (pending)
- Periodic higher order community analyses and reports (under development)
- Policy development and advocacy (available)
- NPN Advocacy Task Force – policy arm of neighborhood associations
- LPHI policy team
- Community policy partners
- Social marketing of vision and programs for social norming (pending)
- Hospital community benefit cooperative (pending)
- Robust volunteerism alignment (pending)
- Philanthropic collaborative (pending)
- Emergency preparedness support for collective civic engagement at neighborhood level
- National healthy communities consultation (periodic)
- Evaluation of changes in community and why (pending)
- Replication activities for other communities (under way with Healthy Baton Rouge)
NOTE: The website is fundamentally a set of complimentary, interactive functions. Its initial content is offered to launch the functions. The fullest exchange of data and other content over time will expand and improve and would be best achieved through a community data/resource “commons” informed by community public and private partners from all sectors of the community.
- Overview of the broad drivers of community health and the power of locally engaged people to make informed measurable changes to create healthy and resilient neighborhoods. These changes relate to changes in their environment, public and organizational policies, personal and collective behaviors, resource allocations, and community capacity for services.
- Over 120 Data metrics across domains of health, social, economic, education, environmental, and transportation with benchmarks presented as values and “gauges”
- Mapping of dozens of data metrics for a community-wide “picture” of distribution of factors and point mapping of neighborhood components of a healthy or unhealthy neighborhood, such as locations of clinics, child day care, groceries, libraries, farmers markets, fast food outlets
- Over 1500 “Promising Practices”: one page abstracts of model experience/evidenced-based community success stories from across the country to inspire and inform residents
- Tools and guides to support more detailed planning and implementation of neighborhood health interventions
- Local and national organizations that play a role in the community in support of specific healthy community activities, such as getting farmers markets or setting up obesity control program.
- Collaboration tool composed of ability, upon HNON program approval, to import any content into neighborhood page and ability to upload primary data or audio/visuals and to do project coordination.
- Topic center function allows user to find all content that relates to key topics
In addition, the multi-stakeholder formal governance will bring more deliberateness to health policy-making at the City level by applying the intense information brought to bear and the bottom-up mobilized constituencies. The value of establishing a holistic and collaborative governance structure is based on local and national models, such as the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance. Its structure is anticipated to be one of an executive committee that will serve like a board of directors and certain advisory committees to inform the governing board and the overall program in an ongoing way (ex. data committee, health, built environment). Its make-up would include representatives of neighborhood residents and a variety of sectors of the City, such as non-profits, faith-based entities, health and prevention-related entities, education, economic development, planning, academia, and philanthropy.







