Mobilizing the Community for Better Health : What the Rest of America Can Learn from Northern Manhattan

From 1999 to 2009, The Northern Manhattan Community Voices Collaborative put Columbia University and its Medical Center in touch with surrounding community organizations and churches to facilitate access to primary care, nutritional improvement, and smoking cessation, and to broker innovative ways to access healthcare and other social services. This unlikely partnership and the relationships it forged reaffirms the wisdom of joining "town and gown" to improve a community's well-being.

Staff members of participating organizations have coauthored this volume, which shares the successes, failures, and obstacles of implementing a vast community health program. A representative of Alianza Dominicana, for example, one of the country's largest groups settling new immigrants, speaks to the value of community-based organizations in ridding a neighborhood of crime, facilitating access to health insurance, and navigating the healthcare system. The editors outline the beginnings and infrastructure of the collaboration and the relationship between leaders that fueled positive outcomes. Their portrait demonstrates how grassroots solutions can create productive dialogues that help resolve difficult issues.

Allan J. Formicola is dean emeritus of the Columbia University College of Dental Medicine and founder of the university's Center for Community Health Partnerships, which has now merged with the Center for Family and Community Medicine. Over the past two decades, he and his colleagues have developed far reaching programs to improve general and oral health care for underserved communities.

Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero is an assistant professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. She directs the Center for Youth Violence Prevention's CLIMB (City Life is Moving Bodies) project, which works with northern Manhattan-based organizations to promote youth development, physical activity, stewardship, and social capital through community mobilization.