Ongoing Projects
Miki Hong
Policy Partner: Guido Persicone, Planning Manager, City of East Palo Alto
The Role of Tobacco Control in Community Health for Historically Underrepresented Groups
Miki is leading an evaluation project in the intersection of public health and urban planning. I currently propose to integrate evaluation models into emerging comprehensive plans in resource poor communities to encourage tobacco control. I will partner with the City of Hayward, California to evaluate local tobacco control and to identify population trends in response to smoke-free multifamily ordinance passage as directed by their comprehensive plan. The City of Hayward has updated its comprehensive plan to include an Environmental Justice Element and is committed to protecting the health of its historically marginalized residents.
This partnership with the City of Hayward aims to evaluate the urban plan’s smoke-free housing language and any pursuant outputs and outcomes, whether it’s ordinance passage, heightened community awareness of the harms of secondhand smoke as well as morbidity data. Our investigation aims to build capacity for local tobacco control by evaluating comprehensive plans, ensuring available metrics to indicate meaningful progress on tobacco control goals.
John Alexis Guerra Gomez
Policy Partners:Sonoma County Women’s Recovery Services; Ohlhoff House Addiction Recovery, San Francisco
Interactive Visual Exploration of opioid exposure on Preterm Births in Oakland, California
Preterm birth rates are a leading cause of newborn morbidity and mortality in the world. In 2021,10.5% of the live births in the US were preterm, a number that has been increasing since 2015. This increase is associated with long-term health problems such as cognitive impairment, development delays, and chronic health conditions. Moreover, preterm birth medical costs were four times more than those of term births. This condition is aggravated by the fact that communities of color tend to have bigger preterm birth rates in the US which means that lower income families are facing these higher medical costs. This project aims to enable decision- and policy-makers to extract insights related to preterm birth data in Oakland, California, and other communities. We will leverage the expertise of years of collaboration with the Kangaroo Foundation, our external partner, while inviting collaboration from other local partners and data sets to better address challenges faced by Oakland communities. Facilitating the extraction of insights from the research by policy makers is aimed to support data-based policies to improve public health in the region.
Adam Parker
Policy Partner: Yeen Lama, Associate Director of Research, Caring Across Generations
Care Can’t Wait
The research will evaluate the impact of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding on care workers and unpaid family caregivers in California. Specifically, this research will evaluate: (1) caregiver workforce development efforts to streamline training, attract new workers, and promote career advancement in the field with the end goal of improving patient care; (2) the impact of a multi-year state effort to raise the pay of caregivers serving people with developmental disabilities; and (3) whether supportive services and training offered by the Home and Community-Based (HCBS) spending plan alleviates unpaid caregivers’ economic, physical, and emotional burden.
Jeremy Sorgen
Cannabis Impacts on Tribal Cultural Resources
Through surveys, interviews, and GIS spatial mapping, this project investigated the impact of cannabis cultivation on Tribal ancestral lands, sacred sites, and archaeological sites as well as Tribal sovereignty in the cannabis permitting process.