Economic inclusion is central to building a culture of health in the United States that enables all families to lead healthy lives and support their children’s ability to thrive. There is substantial research literature that helps explain what leads to the lack of economic inclusion and barriers to better reaching economic inclusion. However, at the same time there are gaps that need to be addressed and research needs to be reframed in order to better translate and integrate the insights with expertise and lived realities of communities that face the greatest economic exclusion, and understand the implications for their children and families. To promote economic inclusion for all, we must shed light on critical gaps in the literature, understand what is needed to bridge the distance between community experience and researchers’ focus, and identify and motivate the community-centered path through which this knowledge can be leveraged towards action.
The Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC) at New York University (NYU) has received funding from the Healthy Children and Families unit at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to critically review scholarship on economic inclusion and family health and wellbeing and identify strategies to promote structural change to economic systems.
Why “economic inclusion”?
The term economic inclusion has not been well established or commonly utilized in United States-based research, economics, or policy discourses. Across fields, outcomes-focused terms like poverty and economic inequality have reigned in social science and economics, describing economic outcomes. However, in recent years, economic inclusion has been growing in usage in the United States across academic disciplines, as well as by financial institutions, non-governmental and nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic foundations to elucidate not only an outcome, but a process by which individuals can meaningfully and equitably participate in the numerous systems that make up the US economy.
Objectives and Activities
To bridge the distance between community experience and researchers’ focus, we aim to identify the community-centered ways in which knowledge can be leveraged towards action across different stakeholders and audiences.
The principal objectives for this effort include:
- Leveraging the research synthesis and community-level, grounded research conducted by the project team in the initial economic inclusion project to foster real and strong relationships between communities and researchers. It is essential to engage in direct dialogue and collective reflection with communities about what is known, what is missing, what lived experiences need to be understood, and what the implications are for action. A priority is to collectively identify the steps that all of us – community leaders, organizations, and researchers – need to take together to translate these ideas into action that will promote economic inclusion and child and family wellbeing.
- Identifying and developing community-centered resources that are informative and useful for action (for a range of audiences) to advance understanding of economic inclusion and child and family health and wellbeing. A key priority is to engage communities in research translation activities and identify actions that support community priorities for sustainable impact.
- Building upon cultivated relationships with community-based leaders (including some working group members from the first project, and adding new community voices) to advance ideas on promoting economic inclusion and child and family wellbeing most relevant to communities.
Funding support for this work was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.