ResilienceHow Have Communities Been Faring During COVID-19? And How Will Lessons Learned Inform Future Response and Planning?
Now may be a good time to examine the choices communities made during the last year to see how these approaches shape continued COVID-19 response and recovery and help build resilience for future pandemic response.
As the country emerges from the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be time to examine the choices communities made during the last year to see how these approaches shape continued COVID-19 response and recovery and help build resilience for future pandemic response.
There have been important surveys of individual attitudes about the pandemic, but far less analysis of how whole communities have been coming together, or have not. How has the prepandemic approach to health equity been factoring into pandemic response? Are community institutions finding new ways to work together, and will this collaboration hold should new COVID-19 crises arise?
In 2020, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the nonprofit RAND Corporation began tracking the COVID-19 response and recovery efforts of nine communities across the United States—Finney County, Kansas; Harris County, Texas; Milwaukee; Mobile, Alabama; San Juan County, New Mexico; Sanilac County, Michigan; Tacoma, Washington; Tampa, Florida; and White Plains, New York—with the goal of better understanding how the pandemic, and the local response to it, was impacting health, well-being, and equity in those communities.
This was a deeper examination of nine of the 29 communities the team has been tracking since 2016, via the Sentinel Communities Surveillance Project, to monitor activities related to how a Culture of Health is developing in a set of diverse communities around the country. The team produced a series of four reports from July 2020 to July 2021.
So, what insights can be gleaned from the journeys of nine communities, and what might be considered as communities fully recover and renew?
What Have Been the Keys to Community Response?
Three themes emerged from this community analysis. It was clear that efforts to holistically address community health and well-being and health equity mattered when communities had those strategies and supporting structures in place before the pandemic. For instance, Finney County leaned on its LiveWell initiative, which predated COVID-19, to distribute personal protective equipment and connect families to food programs. Milwaukee had been pursuing various equity efforts to address impacts of racial residential segregation, employment gaps, and gun violence before the pandemic. During the pandemic, grassroots organizations within Milwaukee mobilized to raise awareness about differential health care access by race as well as other underlying inequities.
