HEALTH EQUITY CHECKUP
MORE RESOURCES
Several resources exist to help you learn more about the social determinants. Please use them as resources for your own learning and, when appropriate, with your youth as you engage them in learning about the social determinants.
The World Health Organization provides access to an online training course in the social determinants as well as other resources.
Sponsored by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), Roots of Health Inequity is an online learning community that provides courses on health inequity.
The United States Center for Disease Control also provides literature and resources.
The MacArthur Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health is a multi-disciplinary collaboration of leading scholars in several fields. Reaching for a Better Life details the social determinants and related health impacts.
Unnatural Causes is a documentary that explores health inequality by looking at socioeconomic status and race.
DEAR EDUCATOR
Teaching about health from an environmental or social perspective has proven a challenge for many health practitioners, educators, and community activists. However, current research has produced a framework of social determinants of health that links our overall health to the social and physical environments where we live. This makes it easier to discuss environmental health, and it changes how we address the complex, interrelated issues of the environment, poverty, and health. Through this body of research, factors such as socio-economic status, race, and “place” (a physical location where people live and work) are all understood to impact the overall personal and collective health of people (Healthy People, 2012).
As an educator embarking on an environmental service-learning journey that is framed by a health equity lens, you will undoubtedly want to feel prepared while using the social determinants of health and other public health tools to help you along the way. Please see the "health characteristics" page for an introduction to the social determinants. To the left is a list of resources that you can use to build your own knowledge in order to support youth in their health equity service-learning process.
This website is part of Earth Force's Health Equity toolkit, a resource that makes it easier for the educator to guide young people in addressing health issues that arise out of their surrounding communities and local environments. As such, we tried our best to put ourselves in the shoes of the youth, knowing that the larger framework of the social determinants might be too complex for a young person to fully understand, and knowing that certain data and research experiences involving these four determinants — transportation, food, a clean and safe environment, and access to recreation — might better appeal to a younger audience. In addition, these four determinants allow youth to observe their surrounding physical environment: an essential element of the Earth Force Six Step Process. This focus helps ground youth in the reality of “place”— the community in which they live — and allows for them to collect their observations. As students go through the entire six steps of the Earth Force Process, they navigate the scientific, cultural, historical, and political perspectives of their selected issue, thus expanding their knowledge of the issue, and bridging the three categories of the social determinants: economic opportunity; community and environment; and social factors.