Healthy Community Design

Vitalyst increased its efforts to work with all kinds of partners and stakeholders to help guide public policies that improved access to healthy food, transportation, affordable housing, and innovative community planning. FY 21 highlights included:

• Vitalyst was a key partner in the Regional Collaborative on Homelessness, which produced a strategy document for use by municipalities to promote regional coordination. This will reduce duplication and maximize the resources available to finding solutions to homelessness. 
• In response to provider requests, Vitalyst and eighteen other funders raised $480,000 to launch the AZEvictionhelp.org project. The website provided users with eviction resources and legal experts to discuss their situation. The website has had more than 242,550 page views and 188,884 unique visitors since January 2021, with 87% of people being new visitors to the site.  
• Vitalyst helped to nurture the Home Matters to Arizona fund. Along with seven Medicaid organizations, more than $30 million in grants and loans has been raised, and $2 million has been used for affordable housing grants.  
• We produced a Schools and Housing report. This report showed how schools districts could legally build attainable housing on school property.  Vitalyst also received a $100,000 grant from The Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation to build a coalition of housing providers and school districts interested in workforce housing on their campuses. For a podcast highlighting this report, click here.
• Vitalyst continued its support and collaboration for the third year of the Live Well Arizona Incubator. Working with The Arizona Partnership for Healthy Communities, the Incubator sponsored five projects: two from Tucson (Sugar Hill Community Land Trust led by the Sugar Hill Neighborhood Association and the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association) and three from Phoenix (TigerMountain Foundation, Cartwright School District, and the Cesar Chavez Foundation led by the Si Su Puede Neighborhood Association).
• We strove to incorporate Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) into multiple elements of the AZ Health Improvement Program and worked with the Maricopa County Department of Health to fully incorporate SDOH into its Health Improvement Plan.