CDPH-UIC Health Disparities Grant Evaluation

In accordance with their vision of eliminating long-standing health and life-expectancy inequities in Chicago, the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) has established two offices: 1) the Office of Community Planning and Equity Zones (CPEZ), and 2) the Office of Health Equity in All Policies (HEiAP). The CPEZ office is responsible for implementing the Healthy Chicago Equity Zones (HCEZ) initiative which facilitates the development and implementation of hyperlocal interventions for improving community health throughout all 77 Chicago neighborhoods. The HEiAP office supports institutional and systems changes that strengthen public health-relevant infrastructure across multiple health and non-health-focused sectors in Chicago. Together, the CPEZ and HEiAP offices, and their initiatives, aim to enhance the capacities of CDPH, other City of Chicago departments, and community-based organizations throughout the city to effectively promote health and racial equity.

In 2022, CDPH began working with a team of scholars and students from the Division of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health to evaluate these initiatives. This report describes the current results of this evaluation. The report begins with an overview of the foundational elements of each initiative, drawing on literature from implementations of similar programs in other U.S. contexts (sections 1.1 and 1.2). We then describe how these initiatives came to be in Chicago (section 1.3) and provide descriptive overviews of the main activities of each initiative (sections 1.4. and 1.5). Following this, we provide both a general (section 2) and detailed (section 3) synopsis of our methodology. We then report our main findings and interpretations (section 4), acknowledge the limitations of our work (section 5), and offer some recommendations (section 6) and conclusions (section 7).