Why "Healthy Orange?"
Healthy Orange is a growing coalition of dedicated stakeholders concerned about the health of the people in the city of Orange, NJ, a city of 30,000 located 5 miles from Newark.
Our coalition identified the critical role education plays in making a healthy city. Thus we are focused on creating and sustaining a “culture of learning” in Orange, NJ,
HISTORY
Once known as the Hat Making Capital of the World in the early 1900s, Orange—like many formerly thriving Northeast cities—experienced mid-century de-industrialization and the related out-migration of white residents. Both were the consequence of public and private sector policies that privileged suburban over urban residential and economic development. The result for cities like Orange: economic and residential disinvestment, job loss, declining incomes, under-resourced schools -- and poor health for the mostly low and moderate income black and brown residents.
Indeed, residents of Orange face many obstacles to good health, including limited educational attainment.
Just 19.9% of residents have a B.A. degree, well below the 35.8% state average.
20.7% don’t have a high school diploma.
Research shows that people with this kind of profile are likely to live shorter lives and experience worse health outcomes.
In recent years, various efforts have been mounted in Orange to improve housing, educational outcomes, job opportunities and health conditions for families and youth. While some efforts have yielded positive results, no framework existed to strengthen and sustain a coordinated array of revitalization activities.
In 2015, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health Initiative provided activists in Orange with the opportunity to apply leading-edge coalition-building tools to help stakeholders work together more effectively over the long term to improve the health and well-being of the city as a whole.
Orange was one of 10 communities in New Jersey selected to develop a coalition focused on building a culture of health. With 4 years of funding, the Healthy Orange Coalition is laying the foundation for a unified approach to increasing the health of Orange residents.
Our approach is based on an “upstream” intervention, instead of simply offering the usual health screening and healthy eating programs which tend to not produce sustained improvements in health status and longer lives. We decided to focus on increasing educational attainment and learning, which are positively correlated with increased life expectancy and better quality of life.
Specifically, our focus is on removing obstacles to learning and increasing access to learning opportunities. Because people with more educational attainment live longer and healthier lives.
In a healthy city, everybody will be learning all the time.