Up Close and Policy is produced by @uclpublicpolicy.bsky.social.
Lab director Araceli Camargo is speaking alongside:
🗣️ @ilankelman.bsky.social is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, and
🗣️ Poppy Lyle, currently Head of Air Quality at the Greater London Authority.
NEW EVENT
What role does language play in how we understand, communicate, and respond to environmental crises? And what happens when science, community advocacy, and policy adopt a shared vocabulary rooted not in abstraction, but in lived experience?
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/up-close-p...
We're currently working alongside this community group.
If you're feeling generous or righteous, please consider donating to their campaign.
Judicial reviews are powerful ways to set new legal precedence on environmental justice issues.
www.crowdjustice.com/case/judicia...
🧠 We had our work featured in the @ukri.org & @theyoungfdn.bsky.social's new report on their Community Knowledge Fund.
🔗 www.youngfoundation.org/our-work/pub...
Thanks to everyone who helps make this work happen!
🏘️ With the National Retrofit Hub we launched 'The Role of Community Health Impact Assessments (CHIA) for Retrofit', a workbook for community organisers and policy/strategy designers working on retrofit at scale.
🔗 nationalretrofithub.org.uk/resource/the...
cc @impurbanhealth.bsky.social
Quite a week it's been.
In case you missed it, here's what's happened in the world of Centric Lab this week.
📝 We launched the 'Introduction to Ecological Health' online course
🔗 www.thecentriclab.com/an-introduct...
It's free to access and allows people to learn at their own pace.
"The course was like a mini masters: the resources superb and the learning so wide ranging"
www.thecentriclab.com/an-introduct...
Four modules introduce learners to a range of topics. There's an opportunity to learn about how chronic stress and its relationship to the built environment, and how to use data to support advocacy, and how determinants of health frameworks help think to analyse how systems behave.
🔶 Introducing 🔶
AN INTRODUCTION TO ECOLOGICAL HEALTH
A self-led online learning journey.
We're trying to equip community leaders and organisers with the tools and resources that validate their lived experiences, sustain, and accelerate their advocacy work. This course helps to achieve that.
You can sign up and engage with the course (for free) via this link 👇
www.thecentriclab.com/an-introduct...
Screenshot from online learning course covering some Key Learnings and Reflective Questions for course participants.
Module 4 is a step-by-step guide to putting this learned knowledge into action by creating a Community Health Impact Assessment.
Screenshot from online learning course lesson on the determinants of health focusing on a task to complete.
Module 3 introduces determinants of health theory and analysis, inviting you to explore the connected systems that influence our health.
Screenshot from lesson example
Module 2 deepens learnings from Module 1 by exploring how factors such as gender and racial discrimination influence health outcomes and how factors such as environmental justice burden some communities more than others.
Screenshot of lesson summary page from online learning course
Module 1 course offers framings of health that are rooted in social justice, intersectionality, and an ecological model of health.
Quote on stock image of a city background: "New research fields on legal, commercial, and political determinants of health and health inequities have emerged; however, these have not become integrated adequately into broader social structural determinants of health and health inequities frameworks."
There's an opportunity to learn about how chronic stress and its relationship to the built environment, and how to use data to support advocacy, and how determinants of health frameworks help think to analyse how systems behave.
image of website header with title 'An Introduction to Ecological Health' alongside a stock image of people waiting at a bus stop in a city.
🚨 BIG NEWS 🚨
Today we launch the ‘Introduction to Ecological Health’ online learning course.
It's a free, open access, space that brings together numerous learnings that we've produced over the years.
Designed across four learning modules the course introduces learners to a range of topics.
Hannah from Centric Lab leading a workshop with Portland Inn Project for our collaboration with National Retrofit Hub.
Picture of some post-it notes featuring insights from the workshop
Our January Newsletter is OUT
CONTENTS
🔶 NEW COLLABORATION WORK: Health, Place, and Retrofit.
🔶 NEW BLOG: A Reflection on the Term 'Indicator' by Hannah Yu-Pearson
🔶 WHAT'S HAPPENING: A snapshot of the some of the projects we're working on a the moment.
mailchi.mp/6fe57ce12f0b...
@kinship.works Really enjoyed this report - www.kinship.works/publications... - some real alignments with some things we're working on at @thecentriclab.com, thanks for putting it together and sharing the knowledge! ✊
Today's article on the role of data and clean air advocacy:
Urban Sacrifice Zone and Red Route Case Studies
"If we socially accept pollution, the law only creates a boundary to dictate how much and in what context it is acceptable to pollute.”
www.thecentriclab.com/aik-data-hj/...
Wednesday's belated piece 🙈
Applying Air Pollution Research to Community: Imperial LTN Case Study
“…We draw too many conclusions from studies that are quite unique and quite related to one specific setting."
www.thecentriclab.com/aik-data-hj/...
Today's piece: The Relationality Between Air Pollution and Health
“Particulate matter is used to identify air quality and the condition of the environment but does not directly identify health as it does not account for the variance in susceptibility.”
www.thecentriclab.com/aik-data-hj/...
It's #CleanAirWeek by the @unep.org discussing solutions for improving air quality in the Asia-Pacific region and we're going to be sharing some learnings everyday on our work in this area.
First up: Defining Data for Health Justice
www.thecentriclab.com/aik-data-hj/...
You can read our short guest blog for @impurbanhealth.bsky.social on our story From Health Councils to Healing Hubs here: urbanhealth.org.uk/insights/new...
#6 From Leader to INFRASTRUCTURE
Realising that our role was not to be the voice on subject matters, but to create the infrastructure for others whose voices needed to be heard.
#5 From Breadth to DEPTH
Realising that it wasn’t important to be a think-tank and cover a wide range of issues ensuring all corners were covered. Instead, it was about going deeper into issues and building real relationships with partners.
#4 From Reform to AUTONOMY
Realising that it was not about asking the system to change, but to be building the capacity for communities to act in their own imaginations, to be creating their own systems of care, autonomously.
#3 From Urbanism to MEDICINE
Realising that there was a limit in which the built environment sectors could adapt to new, radical knowledge that was rooted in justice. This coincided with the emergence of medical and health professionals who could see how to apply our playbook to their sectors.
#2 From Structural to EMERGENT
Realising that it was not enough for us to research, analyse and comment on health matters, we needed to give space to people on the front line to lead what research looked like, and what the research was trying to solve.
#1 From Law to LORE
Realising that there was never going to be enough evidence to change the laws that create pollution via contamination and that our scope was on changing the lore.
From Health Councils to Healing Hubs
In 2021, Centric Lab leaned into an emerging ontological shift with knowledge production. The result was to set up the Urban Health Council. @impurbanhealth.bsky.social came on board as partners shortly after.
Here's our shared learnings from the past 3 years
