Fragmented and siloed systems impede equitable public health outcomes by inhibiting a community’s access to needs such as housing, education, income, healthy food, and safe places for social and physical activity. Known as social determinants of health these factors are defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as conditions in the environment in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks and have an outsized impact on the wellbeing of a community. A suggested solution for addressing poor health outcomes due to health determinants is to ensure information and data sharing across domains (e.g., health, housing, and education). Comprehensive data sets can create a picture of the healthcare landscape and are foundational to informing evidence-based service delivery, intervention implementation, and policymaking. The Athens Wellbeing Project (AWP) is an ongoing initiative focused on aligning health, government, and social service systems by collecting and sharing primary, representative data with greater hyper-local geographic specificity than previously available in Athens-Clarke County. This data provides a voice to the community bringing visibility to the disparate needs of vulnerable communities. Through a mixed-methods research design the following dissertation uses the AWP as a tool to operationalize a Culture of Health ensuring that good health and wellbeing flourish. This study is grounded in the first two action areas of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health Action Framework and principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR) known as the gold standard for empowering non-academic community participants to become part of the research process. The intersection of a Culture of Health Action Framework and CBPR highlights the integrated nature of social determinants needed to prioritize collective community concern. As an archetype embodying this intersectionality the exploration of AWP provides an example of sustainable wellbeing as a community-driven initiative. The key findings from these quantitative and qualitative studies form a foundational basis to better understand the AWP data’s ability to catalyze community stakeholders to make health a shared value and foster cross-sector collaboration.
