The Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, today announced eight new grant recipients that will receive funding to conduct health impact assessments, or HIAs. The projects will bring health considerations into upcoming decisions on topics including education, sanitation infrastructure, and energy. The grantees were selected based on their response to a national call for proposals.
"Our new grantees will use health impact assessments to uncover opportunities to improve health in a wide range of policy decisions, as well as to identify and avoid potential unintended consequences," said Aaron Wernham, M.D., director of the Health Impact Project. "These eight HIAs are the latest in a fast-growing field, as more cities and states find them a useful way to bring health into decisions in other sectors."
By the end of 2007, there were 27 completed HIAs in the United States. There are now more than 225 completed or in progress, according to the Health Impact Project map of HIA activity in the United States.
Two additional foundations joined the call for proposals with funding to support more HIAs: the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation and The California Endowment.
The new grantees include:
The Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, is a national initiative exclusively dedicated to promoting the use of health impact assessments in the United States. More information, including a searchable map of HIA activity in the U.S., is available at http://www.healthimpactproject.org .