Vital Stats: 62 – Health ranking of Bronx County. (Source: New York State Department of Health) 

The Bronx’s collective goal of improving public health has earned it the highly competitive “Culture of Health” prize from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).

After a yearlong application process spearheaded by hospitals, nonprofits, and the New York State Department of Health, the Bronx has been chosen as one of eight winners from a pool of 340 nationwide communities. For health professionals in a county that consistently ranks as New York’s unhealthiest, the prize is a symbol of positive change.

“It marks a turning of the page,” said Dr. Amanda Parsons, vice president of Community and Population Health at Montefiore Medical Center (also known as Montefiore Health System), the coordinating body for the prize application. “It was won by tens of thousands of people, working over decades; people who didn’t flee when others fled.”

The RWJF, a philanthropic organization based in Princeton, N.J., awards the prize to communities tackling public health issues from every possible angle. So when applications opened last fall, the prize committee looked for concrete action, not statistics.

Parsons and the Bronx application team highlighted a raft of ongoing initiatives, hoping to show that public health conditions are an interconnected web, with each strand pulling at another. Among the initiatives were a YMCA diabetes prevention program, a push for fresh produce in bodegas, school-based health services for underserved students, and collaborative data-sharing between clinics.

“The Bronx is thinking about health broadly,” said Abbey Clofsky, an RWJF senior program officer who vetted prize applications. “The physical environment, transforming schools, access to housing. We look at partnerships. We get a lot of applications that are highlighting just one organization.”

And yet, the Bronx ranks last in New York in the “County Health Rankings and Roadmap”—a nationwide list compiled by the RWJF. The ranking considers dozens of indicators such as life expectancy, childhood poverty and sexually transmitted infections. Every year since the list began in 2010 the Bronx has been at the bottom.

Clofsky noted it was the county rankings that actually spurred the foundation to create the Culture of Health prize in 2012. “What we found was that it allowed counties to compare to each other. They wanted examples of what their peers were doing,” she said. To the prize committee, the Bronx’s low performance on paper didn’t take away from the borough’s progressive approach to public health. “There are a lot of places that are healthy across the board. But that doesn’t tell us which are the communities that are working the hardest.”

Dr. Jane Bedell, at the Bronx District Public Health Office, isn’t deterred by the Bronx’s low ranking. For the last few years, she and other local health professionals have organized under the rallying cry “Not 62”—a reference to being ranked last of the 62 counties in New York. The hashtag #Not62 appears almost daily on Twitter, as Bronxites post about bike rides, community gardens or school nutrition.

“If we’re going to get out of last place, we’re going to need to do a heck of a lot of work,” Bedell said. “But we can all agree that people should be able to achieve their maximum health potential.”

At Montefiore Health System, Parsons believes winning the prize helps to clear the slate for a borough fighting a lingering negative reputation. “This isn’t a prize for potential. This prize was about demonstrating that really good things have happened,” she said. “It’s a very poor borough, and there’s been a lot of underinvestment. And yet, there’s this community that really cares.”

Along with receiving a $25,000 cash prize, winning communities are folded into the foundation’s network of previous recipients. “The cash prize is in some ways secondary,” said Clofsky. “It’s about giving them the opportunity to make a platform to tell their story.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.