Our Neighborhoods, Ourselves

Zócalo Contributors Explore Health On Their Home Turf

Our Neighborhoods, Ourselves

Zócalo Contributors Explore Health On Their Home Turf

Health is easy to define but hard to attain. Zócalo Public Square partnered with the California Wellness Foundation to explore how neighborhoods affect residents’ health: The conditions where we live, work, and play. To understand how Californians see the relationship between their health and their home turf, the Foundation and the Field Research Organization surveyed more than 2,000 California adults, in multiple languages. Their answers are as varied as the landscape of the Golden State, and in the dozens of accompanying essays you’ll find both the writings of community members and scholars articulating the myriad ways that neighborhoods make us tick. In each instance, the authors described and pictured below have contributed pieces representing a wealth of perspectives, all of them fundamentally tackling the question, “What does it take to make a healthy community?”