Community & Public Health

The Magnolia Place Community Initiative brings together more than 70 county, city and community services and organizations to make children's lives better.

“Everyone agrees that housing is an important determinant of health, but that’s very hard to measure because it’s overly correlated with other aspects of poverty,” said Thomas Waters, a housing policy analyst in New York City.

Individuals like Loren Anthony, a fitness instructor from the Navajo Nation, are modeling healthy lifestyles and getting their friends and families involved. Grassroots organizations are starting group exercise sessions, basketball tournaments, traditional cooking classes and workshops.

Hurricane Katrina forced New Orleans' remaining gangs into the Central City neighborhood. With this mass concentration of drug traffickers came a bloody turf war, near-daily shootings and a rising body count.

It's those first 1,000 days — from conception until a child's second birthday — that the brain most needs the right mix of nutrients to fully form. But programs that focus on such developmental goals are now at risk.

This article was produced as a project for the USC Center for Health Journalism’s California Fellowship.

Officials at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Watts are trying to remedy that situation by focusing on preventative health.

The GOP’s House and Senate health reform bills both call for a massive restructuring of Medicaid that could lead to unprecedented funding cuts as states are forced to shrink their programs or make cuts elsewhere. But even if the latest plan founders in the Senate, governors and health officials in c

"I had to come to accept that the hospital wasn’t looking at me as a whole person — just a combination of vital signs, lab work, symptoms, and medical and nursing orders," writes Joy Victory.

The GOP's health care reforms would leave millions without insurance, and Florida could be hit harder than many other states. As a result, the Sunshine State's free clinics are gearing up for a wave of new patients.