Who We Are | West Warwick Health

About The West Warwick HEZ

Health equity means that everyone has a fair opportunity and access to what they need in order to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments, and health care.

Our Vision

Everyone in West Warwick has equitable opportunities to grow, thrive, achieve optimal health, and feel a sense of belonging.

Our Mission

The West Warwick Health Equity Zone uses our community’s strengths and collective resources to ensure everyone has the opportunity to attain their highest level of physical and mental health and wellbeing.

Our Strategies

We use the following strategies to accomplish our work:

Collective Impact: We collectively set the direction of our work, collect data, share metrics, and leverage our individual strengths.
Weaving Connections: We make meaningful connections within the Collaborative and across the community and mobilize to meet the needs in our community.
Placemaking: We create intentional spaces, both physical and metaphorical, for connection and actively seek ways to cultivate pride in our community.
Community Action: We support our Ambassadors and community leaders in growing their leadership, advocacy, and action.

Our Story

Rhode Island’s Health Equity Zone (HEZ) initiative brings people together to build strong, resilient communities so all Rhode Islanders have the opportunity to be as healthy as possible, no matter who they are or where they live. Since 2015, Rhode Island’s HEZ initiative has supported community leaders and residents to form 15 Health Equity Zone collaboratives in communities across Rhode Island. West Warwick HEZ began work in 2015 and we are dedicated to creating positive change in our community through the collective impact model, which allows us to focus on deeply entrenched and complex social issues through a coordinated, collaborative effort among various partners. This approach recognizes that large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination and unlike isolated interventions by individual organizations, the collective impact model brings together multiple organizations from different sectors to achieve a common goal.

The collaborative focuses on areas that have been indicated as a priority by the community. These priority areas are Healthy Neighborhoods (housing and transportation), Food Access, and Overdose Prevention and Recovery. The West Warwick HEZ also incorporates a cross cutting pillar of focus on trauma, with the overarching goal of creating a trauma informed community. Each of these priority areas has a corresponding workgroup made up of residents, local organizations, town leaders and municipality. The HEZ relies on input and guidance from our Community Ambassadors, residents who are active and engaged in the community of West Warwick and have their own workgroup where they plan and execute their own projects to promote equity in West Warwick. Our Ambassadors and workgroups drive the action of the HEZ and are guided by our Steering Committee to ensure that we are accountable to our action plans and stay on track to achieve our goals.

Our Values

Our values guide how we do our work:

We are an impact network that values relationship-building, collaboration, and inclusion as we work towards our shared vision for West Warwick.
We work in an explicitly anti-racist, anti-oppression, intersectional, holistic, and trauma-informed way.
Our work is led by those with lived experience and their insight guides our work - nothing about us without us.
We center empathy, dignity, and respect for everyone in our community.
We are flexible and fluid in our approach and use different tools and ways of working to carry out our work.
We support and create recovery friendly spaces and community.
We work to intentionally shift power to the community.

Equity Statement

We believe that West Warwick and the people who live here are strong. We see the good in this community every day. We strive to make this the best place to live, learn, work, and play for every community member, not just those with power or the most privilege. We believe in the inherent dignity, value, autonomy, and right to self-determination of all members of our community. We center those with lived experiences and seek to lift up the voices of all those who rarely get a seat or a voice at the table.

Our work isn't only externally in our community. We know that to do our best work, we have to work on ourselves as well. We center justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in our work, partnerships, and operations and we continuously engage in learning and reflection so we can do better.

Affiliations

The West Warwick Health Equity Zone is a place-based, community-based collaboration of organizations and community leaders addressing social determinants of health. WW HEZ is partially financially supported by the RI Department of Public Health and partners with Thundermist Health Center for project management and administration.