Strategies

What Works for Health includes evidence-informed strategies to create communities where everyone can thrive.

17 Strategies
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Participatory budgeting

Engage community members to determine how public budgets are spent, ideally to improve neighborhood conditions and reduce inequality.

Evidence Rating:
Mixed Evidence
  • Family and Social Support

Public libraries for community building

Lend materials, offer gathering space, and provide educational, civic, and social programming; open to the community and publicly funded

Evidence Rating:
Expert Opinion
  • Family and Social Support

Secondhand smoke education interventions

Use counseling, informational materials, etc. to inform smokers and non-smokers of the harms of secondhand smoke and encourage them to implement home smoking bans

Evidence Rating:
Mixed Evidence
  • Tobacco Use

Tax increment financing (TIF) for affordable housing

Create designated tax districts that generate revenue to invest in affordable housing initiatives, blight remediation, and economic development efforts

Evidence Rating:
Expert Opinion
  • Housing and Transit

Trauma-informed approaches to community building

Support and strengthen traumatized and distressed residents and communities and address effects of community trauma (e.g., poverty, violence, structural racism, etc.) via a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder, and multilevel approach

Evidence Rating:
Expert Opinion
  • Family and Social Support

Trauma-informed juvenile justice systems

Support a trauma-informed juvenile justice system to recognize and respond to trauma’s impact on youth through staff training and broad adoption of trauma-informed practices and policies

Evidence Rating:
Expert Opinion
  • Community Safety

Youth football full contact rules

Restrict full contact between youth football players via limits to the number of contact practices, head hits per player, delay tackling until a certain age, etc.

Evidence Rating:
Expert Opinion
  • Community Safety