Community Engagement
The workplace might seem like an island, but a growing body of research has found that employee health is intrinsically linked to the health of their communities. Fundamentally, communities are made up of workers and their families. The Greater Lawndale Healthy Work Project, a study conducted by the Center for Healthy Work in Chicago, has found that community well-being is negatively impacted by a lack of healthy and equitable work. Work stress, long hours, and poor working conditions impact individual workers and their families, as well as those who live, work, and play around them. Employers can partner with community organizations to improve the health of their workers and the communities they live in. On this page, you’ll find examples of what that connection looks like and what research can tell us about community-engaged occupational health.
Featured Resources
The Greater Lawndale Healthy Work Project from the Center for Healthy Work focuses on community-level approaches for improving residents’ health at work. The Center partnered with the Greater Lawndale community to better understand how work impacts community health and to identify community solutions to promote worker health. Their researched interventions include policy analysis and community wealth-building. Check out their infographics (in Spanish and English) that recap key findings regarding community and workplace interactions, as well as their research briefs and roadmaps.
Research Projects
Research Brief: Community Resident Perceptions of and Experiences with Precarious Work at the Neighborhood Level overviews the Center for Healthy Work's mixed-methods community health assessment. Community researchers conducted focus groups with residents in two high social and economic hardship neighborhoods on Chicago’s southwest side. Community and academic researchers engaged in participatory data analysis and developed and implemented member-checking modules to engage residents in the data interpretation process. Three major themes emerged: systematic marginalization from the pathways to healthy work situations; contextual and structural hostility to sustain healthy work; and violations in the rights, agency, and autonomy of resident workers.
Greater Lawndale Lotería: an evidence-informed, historically grounded and worker justice themed card game is a game from the Center for Healthy Work designed to promote awareness of precarious work at the neighborhood level. Educational narratives co-authored by Alison Dickson and GLHW Team for each card that highlights assets, precarity levels, history about Chicago labor movements, and know your rights information.