Roanoke’s Invest Health Team awarded $75,000 grant as part of inaugural nationwide City Health Dashboard Data Challenge

Roanoke, Virginia, is 1 of only 10 small and mid-sized cities nationwide participating in the City Health Dashboard’s inaugural Data Challenge. A $75,000 grant will help Roanoke leverage data to better understand local health and neighborhood condition challenges and help target resources to community development strategies that ensure everyone has a fair and just opportunity to achieve their best health.

The City Health Dashboard, a free online data and mapping resource with community-level health, social, and economic metrics, is launching the Data Challenge in partnership with Reinvestment Fund’s Invest Health initiative, a project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that seeks to build healthier, more equitable communities.

Roanoke’s team, comprised of representatives from City of Roanoke, Roanoke College (project lead), Carilion Clinic, Freedom First Credit Union, and the Roanoke City Health District, will be working to enhance the city’s data capacity to encourage health-promoting community development and investment strategies. In addition to informing new cross-sector and citizen-led initiatives, the team seeks to evaluate the impact of recent strategies designed to improve resident health and access to health-promoting resources.

The selected cities will also participate in a year-long working group that will use data and collaboration to advance more equitable community development investment that improves the social drivers of health.

The 10 communities selected for the Data Challenge are: Buffalo, New York; Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Hartford, Connecticut; Jackson, Tennessee; Missoula, Montana; New Britain, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; Roanoke, Virginia; Roseville, California; and Savannah, Georgia.

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About The City Health Dashboard: A first-of-its-kind tool, the City Health Dashboard is an online resource for city and neighborhood-level data on over 40 key measures of health, such as diabetes and life expectancy, and conditions that affect health, such as housing affordability and high school completion. Created by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine's Department of Population Health, and with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Dashboard helps cities target their efforts to improve the health and well-being of all residents, neighborhood by neighborhood.

About Reinvestment Fund: Reinvestment Fund is a mission-driven financial institution committed to making communities work for all people. Reinvestment Fund brings financial and analytical tools to partnerships that work to ensure that people in communities across the country have the opportunities they strive for: affordable places to live, access to nutritious food and health care, schools where their children can flourish, and strong, local businesses that support jobs. Reinvestment Fund uses data to understand markets and how transactions can have the most powerful impact, which has consistently earned us the top Aeris rating of AAA for financial strength and four stars for impact management. Our asset and risk management systems have also earned us an AA- rating from S&P. Since our inception in 1985, Reinvestment Fund has provided over $3 billion in financing to strengthen neighborhoods, scale social enterprises, and build resilient communities. Learn more at reinvestment.com. For press inquiries, contact: media@reinvestment.com

About Invest Health: Invest Health is an initiative of Reinvestment Fund in partnership and with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) that began as a forum for 50 cities to define community needs and investment challenges, devise solutions, and align investment capital, other resources and policies to address the social determinants of health. Learn more at www.investhealth.org.