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Place-making practices refer to the ways in which people create and define physical spaces as meaningful and significant through their everyday activities and social interactions.[1] In Ethnography, the study of these practices is often referred to as ‘ethnography as place-making,’ which involves the exploration of the cultural meanings and practices that shape the physical and social environments in which people live. This can include examining how people create and maintain social boundaries, how they express their identities and values through the built environment,[2] and how they negotiate power and control over the spaces they inhabit.

This place in Gröpelingen is made a place through the interaction of the people tending to the urban gardening project. 

1. Pink 2008, 178ff. 

2. See: urbanization 

3. Pink 2008, 190. 

LCHE produces its own weekly radio show, Today's Health Topics, hosted by Ms. Alma Stewart-Allen. The show features various interrelated health topics relevant to Louisiana.

LCHE's initiatives have also been covered by regional and local news outlets like BR Proud and the Louisiana Illuminator. Notable articles include the following:

Canicosa, J. C. “‘We All Deserve to Keep Our Children’: Grieving Grandmother Calls Attention to State’s High Infant, Maternal Mortality Rates.” Louisiana Illuminator. April 15, 2021.

Mipro, Rachel. “Louisiana Activists Still Questioning Why Office for Women’s Health Wasn’t Created.” Louisiana Illuminator. October 7, 2021.

#LA40by2030 Campaign 

The 2020 America’s Health Rankings ranks Louisiana 50th in the United States. In response, LCHE has developed the LA40by2030 campaign to improve health outcomes and quality of life for children and families across the state. The goal of the campaign is to improve the state’s national ranking to 40th by the year 2030. LCHE recognizes that improving Louisiana’s health ranking by 2030 will require the participation of government officials, public healthcare professionals, and the general public. LCHE is inviting stakeholders to develop a health equity database and action platform and contribute to achieving #LA40by2030.

Annual Health Summit

LCHE leads an annual health summit with the goal of improving health in Louisiana through the lens of health equity and determinants of health. The summit is designed to engage a diverse array of stakeholders in better understanding rapdily changing conditions of health with the goal of informing policy and building partnerships for community health improvements. This goal of the summit is to inspire action on the state, regional and local levels, and to facilitate progress towards LA40by2030.

The 2023 health summit will focus on population heath, and women and children's health. The summit is also aligned with the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) state health improvement priorities: behavioral health, chronic disease, community safety, and maternal and child health.

Louisiana Resources and Educational Assessments for Children’s Health (LA REACH)

LA REACH is a pilot program to develop a holistic approach to improving school environments for teachers and students by decreasing instances of student disciplinary actions, violence, alternative school placement, increasing graduation rates, grade point averages, and standardized test scores. The program goals are to address the lack of awareness and resources for mental health, provide trauma-informed training to school personnel, and build stronger home and school relationships. The program strategy is to provide a safe and conducive environment for learning.

Office of Women's Health and Community Health (OHWHCH)

In 2022, LCHE’s organization and activism led to the creation of the first Louisiana office focused on women’s health. The Office of Women’s Health and Community Health (OWHCH) was established under a bill passed by the Louisiana Legislature on June 18, 2022. The office exists to improve women’s health outcomes and act as a coordinating agency and resources center for women’s health data and strategies. 

The Wade Institute for Youth Equity

The Wade Institute for Youth Equity is a year-round program dedicated to pursuing youth equity in key quality indicators, and promoting community safety in communities across Louisiana. For more than a decade, the Louisiana Center for Health Equity has devised and implemented a holistic public health approach to adolescent health. This includes, but is not limited to, youth violence prevention, positive youth development, healthy living including sexual risk avoidance, and mental health wellness. The Institute aims to create a well-rounded and equipped student for positive decision making. 

LCHE is dedicated to advancing health equity to improve the overall health and well-being of all Louisianans. Since its founding in 2010, LCHE has worked to eliminate health and healthcare disparities attributed to structural, institutional, or social disadvantages. LCHE educates, advises, and mobilizes in an effort to advance health equity by dismantling health disparities caused by poverty, lack of access to quality healthcare, and unhealthy environmental conditions. In recent years, LCHE’s agenda has centered around supporting the behavioral health needs of youth exposed to trauma and childhood adversity. 

LCHE also provides opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to participate in experiential learning opportunties through internships and fellowships. Click here to learn more.  

LCHE often collaborates with the following organizations: Louisiana Department of Health, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Southern University Law Center, Dillard University, and Louisiana State University (LSU), as well as national, state, and community-based organizations, such as the National Collaborative on Health Equity, League of Women Voters, March of Dimes), American Association of University Women (AAUW), National Congress of Black Women, among others. Interdisciplinary collaboration is talked about as an integral component of health equity advocacy. In her Career Pathways interview, founder and director Alma Stewart-Allen has highlighted the importance of bridging gaps between policy, medicine, social science, social services, business, and law. 

LCHE also often works closely with high school and university students, including but not limited to the Louisiana Youth Advisory Council (LYAC). Youth play an integral role in LCHE’s research and advocacy initiatives, through which they acquire the leadership, research and advocacy skills necessary for advancing environmental justice and health equity (see LCHE programs). 

LCHE  acts on behalf of Louisianans who are most impacted by structural inequities. In 2020, ProPublica published an article highlighting the disparities in Covid-related deaths between Black and white patients treated by Oschner Health, the largest nonprofit, academic health system in Louisiana. The journal’s analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the local coroner’s office, found that patients that were Black were more likely to be sent home, and therefore also more likely to die at home. Families reported that Oschner staff pressured them into accepting hospice care. In response, the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus also called for an investigation of Oschner’s practices. However, the Louisiana Health Department responded by declaring that the complaint was outside their purview. Following this development and seeking more impactful systems-change, LCHE filed a civil rights complaint against Oschner with the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil rights. Results of the civil rights investigation are still pending. 

LCHE is led by founder and director Ms. Alma Stewart Allen, a registered nurse, former career state civil servant, entrepreneur, and public health policy advocate. For decades, she has testified at legislative hearings, run advocacy campaigns, and emphasized the significance of social and political determinants of health. She led an advocacy campaign to improve access to healthcare coverage, which resulted in Louisiana becoming the first state in the deep south to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in January 2016. Aiming to improve the state’s health rankings to 40th in the nation by the year 2030 (Louisiana currently ranks 46th), Ms. Stewart Allen continues her advocacy work by developing programs and initiatives aimed at improving health in Louisiana, particularly children’s mental health.

Lee references work from two main sources: Jill Lindsey Harrison’s book, From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice Within Government Agencies, and Ana Baptista’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Just Policies? A Multiple Case Study of State Environmental Justice Policies.” Harrison describes how EJ managers and staff undermine environmental issues resisting EJ integration. She argues this resistance is based on: “environmental protection is colorblind, bettering the environment overall means that the environment is improved for everyone, EPA is a science agency while EJ deals with social issues, and other “standard narratives” rooted generally in American normative societal values or in long-held premises that have shaped the environmental protection field for decades” (Lee, 2021). Baptista’s concept suggest EJ practice’s inactivity contributes to procedural injustice while also highlighting the importance of structural justice when dealing with environmental injustice as it is deeply rooted in racial discrimination and the perpetuating of racism through the skewed relationship between governmental entities and black communities. 

In addition to these references, Lee also highlights contributions from Rebert Bullard, who developed a public health model of prevention that focuses on community-outreach practices to address disproportionate impact. Ryan Holifield, who accentuated the difficulty for government agencies to define “disproportionate impacts” presenting another challenge in legally reinforcing the order. David Pellow, who highlighted the importance of critically looking at race and understanding how attributed meaning to concepts dealing with race change over time. 

In order to advance these referenced works, Lee argues that the best way to integrate earlier findings is by building the capacity of the EJ practitioner “to deploy the core theories that guide EJ practice.” In this instance, the ability to define and  contextualize the term “disproportionate impacts” is a crucial tool to ensure the Executive order becomes operational.       

Lee’s main argument is that disproportionate impacts are intertwined with the distribution of environmental and social impacts. He highlights structural and procedural issues with environmental agencies and the EPA, along with other issues of data injustice, where agencies were sometimes characterized as “black boxes,” closed off from population scrutiny and  from learning of the actual narratives in these communities. 

“Not only are we now able to construct inarguable empirical statements that are commensurate with the deep historical and systemic drivers of environmental racism and injustice, but mainstream leaders and the general public are finally listening. Indeed, new tools for operationalizing the consideration of disproportionate impacts are emerging, not the least of which is New Jersey’s recent landmark EJ legislation (S.232/A.B.2212). Hence, we can now discuss what some building blocks of a second generation of EJ practice may look like.”

Lee uses CalEPA’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee definition and recognition of “cumulative effects,” or the public health effects of combined exposure of environmental pollutants and toxins with other stressors that impacts people of a lower socio-economic status in accordance with existing research. This led to the development of the CalEnviroScreen

The article focuses on creating definitions and clarifying concepts while analyzing the impact of a disproportionate distribution of resources in a way that clearly shows the link to systemic racism and the “inequitable distribution of environmental burdens and benefits” (Lee 2021). It develops a framework for integrating concepts of environmental injustice with environmental policy-making in an effort to overcome the inaction of environmental justice (EJ) practice to address the EJ Executive Order No. 12898 by President Clinton in 1994. A mandate that addressed “disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects” of its operation population of lower socio-economic status. The issue being these agencies did not know how to define the term “disproportionate effect” leading to the immense challenge of holding agencies to an environmental justice standard. 

The article also discusses future EJ practice that addresses systemic racism using empirical data in the context of programmatic decision-making to visualize public health impacts which recognizes that as the demand of governmental regulation of “disproportionate impacts” increases the need for greater resources, scale of analysis, and level of quantification increases.

Lee contextualizes his argument in the era of March 2021 when discussing how current conditions are optimal for making progress in reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has uplifted black voices and brought visibility to black discrimination and the environmenatal, social, economic, health outcome, and cultural effects of systemic racism.

Lee uses “second-generation EJ mapping tools that have cumulative impacts as their core organizing principle,” this tool goes beyond demographic indicators, it spatially array the factors EJ researchers identified and contributors to the cumulative impacts affecting communities of colors. It was created by EJ researchers Manuel Pastor, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and James Sadd officially developing an EJ Screening Method (EJSM) - which laid the foundation for CalEnviroScreen. These tools are used to study cumulative effects, a combination of environmental pollutants and socio-economic factors that leave communities of people-of-color vulnerable to adverse health outcomes. Other modern technological and statistical tools include modern geographic information system (GIS) technology.

“Virtually all EJ practice has been con- fined to the procedural justice element, with EJ defined as solely consisting of more community involvement. This is inevitable if there is no understanding of the substantive core of such concerns speaking to the need for a systematic and rigorous way to operationalize the concept of dispro- portionate impacts.” (10209)
“The following is a first cut at a working definition of “disproportionate impacts”32: Disproportionate environmental and/or public health impacts are combinations of demonstrably greater pollu- tion burden and population vulnerability associated with socially and/or economically disadvantaged communities and populations. Disproportionate impacts may often reflect consistent patterns in the distribution of pollution and vulnerability, and are often a function of historical trends and policy decisions.” (10212)

“To be sure, anecdotal descriptions represent very compelling information, as countless community mem- bers testify at public hearings every day to express their concerns about their communities’ well-being. How- ever, we all know from bitter experience how they are often ignored, criticized, or marginalized. Having peer- reviewed, government-sanctioned, and quantitative data changed the terms of the conversation and went a long way toward ensuring that the data are taken seriously. It provided a basis by which we can define and discuss the concept of disproportionate impacts in analytically rigor- ous terms.” (10213)