Grand Challenges and Research | Urban Studies & Planning

Community Well-Being:  Focus on Education, Health, and Family

Area of Concentration: Public Health, Safety and Welfare

Associated Grand Challenges

• Quality of Life, Public Health and Welfare

Mentor

• David Cleveland

There is a major San Diego based initiative underway that offers a fruitful platform for students to do civically-engaged research linking quality of life, public health and welfare. The long term plan is to create a UCSD-based Center for Community Well-Being with a focus on Education, Health and Family. Below is an excerpt from a proposal that describes the effort. The full proposal can be downloaded from this GC page (see link below).

Community Well-Being: Focus on Education, Health and Family

ABSTRACT
Assisting in the creation of positive economic and social impacts on the underserved communities of San Diego is an integral part of UCSD’s mission. Achieving this mission poses a number of compelling research challenges, at the same time as it presents opportunities to improve graduate and undergraduate education through engagement of a large, underserved community in a collaborative effort. We propose to leverage and expand the existing efforts of LCHC and CREATE by bringing in faculty, staff and students from the School of Medicine, Jacobs School of Engineering, Calit2, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Department of Ethnic Studies to develop a holistic model for promoting community well-being by bringing together Education, Health and Family. The field of operation will be the Diamond District in San Diego, home of 88,000 underserved residents.

The project organizers have posed a series of hypotheses:

1. Health provisioning and improved education, when coordinated in community settings, offer a mediating context for improved family dynamics, which in turn, we believe, will have a positive impact on the school performance of the community’s children and the health of all community members.
2. Integrating physical and social infrastructure is pivotal to the success of efforts to create reliable and scalable systems of inexpensive community health services.
3. Understanding/developing a successful model is crucial prior to attempting to generalize and scale this effort to other neighborhoods and other community issues and concerns reaching across many local community institutions.
4. Real-time monitoring and display of energy use and soil moisture conditions will entice residents to use resources more efficiently and live healthier.

UCSD’s Urban Studies and Planning Program has a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with TELESIS Corporation for the purpose of developing the San Diego Quality of Life Project. This Project consists of a multi-agency strategic planning model, supported by social science research. The types of initiatives that could lend themselves to student-mentor research teams include:

Develop the Quality of Life Indices used to measure health, social, criminal, economic and environmental efforts throughout San Diego County and the surrounding region

Develop science based composite indices, geographical information systems (GIS), and a world wide web site with advanced computer applications for data analysis

A specific project associated with the proposal noted above (i.e., the initiative to create a Center for Community Well-Being) focus on the Diamond District. The Diamond neighborhoods are located in the heart of San Diego’s Fourth District. It is home to 88,000 residents and includes the communities of Chollas View, Emerald Hills, Lincoln Park, Mountain View, Mount Hope, North Encanto, Oak Park, South Encanto, Valencia Park, and Webster.

Community challenges: The Diamond District is a low-income neighborhood plagued by gang-violence, few-employment opportunities, low-achieving schools, little health care. The majority of single-parent families suffer from poor diets and poor health due to lack of adequate health care. These conditions affect the youth in the Diamond District. Therefore, a comprehensive approach to improving the wellness of the neighborhood is needed. There is an immediate need to create a database and map of community assets (people, resources, institutions and process).