Harnessing New Technologies to Promote Opportunity
Mapping Health Opportunity

The opportunity to enjoy good health is crucial to the security of all Americans and to our nation’s strength and prosperity. But millions lack that opportunity, and low-income communities, women, people of color, and immigrants are especially likely to face obstacles. While access to quality health care is an important gateway to good health, social investments in neighborhoods, in such wide ranging factors as environmental protection, safe and affordable housing, child care, and healthy food markets, also play a major role in protecting health opportunity.

The Challenge
Although research supports investment in community-level solutions to expand health opportunity, this approach has proven difficult to explain to the media, policymakers and the public. Instead, discussions tend to focus solely on how individual decisions affect the health problems people face. Advocates, researchers, and others who champion health opportunity need ways to illuminate how investment in public systems and structures influences health.

The Opportunity Agenda's Approach
We harness new media technology to illustrate systemic barriers to opportunity, particularly in the area of health. By demonstrating and promoting the use of blogs, social networking, interactive mapping, and other online strategies, we provide advocates with new tools for telling compelling stories and promoting policies that expand opportunity. Mapping is a particularly useful tool in showing the relationship between good health and community investment, highlighting the importance of policies that improve the health of all communities.

Our Activities
In New York, we developed www.healthcarethatworks.org, an interactive online map that illustrated how hospital closings in New York City have predominantly harmed low-income communities of color. Users of the map can follow the trajectory of hospital closings over time, contribute information and comments, and contact their local news outlets and elected officials.

Building on that experience, we developed a state-wide interactive map in California that illustrates a far wider range of health and opportunity data in even more interactive ways. We have engaged a range of advocates, community leaders, policy experts and others to build a map that speaks to the concerns of the state’s diverse communities. The map can be used by a broad audience for education, advocacy, and news reporting, and it can inform innovative policy change.