Can Hospitals Heal America's Communities?

I've been using maps to show high poverty areas of Chicago and to show assets, like hospitals and universities, who could be developing strategies that influenced the growth of tutor/mentor programs and community health in areas around each hospital. Here's a sample article from 2008.

Here's a set of articles on the MappingforJustice blog, that focus on  public health and hospitals. 

In my email today I received the Community Wealth.org newsletter, which featured a white paper titled "Can Hospitals Heal America's Communities?"

I started reading this, and was making mental notes of comments I'd like to add. If I printed the article, that's what I'd do. I'd get my yellow marker, and my pen, and add notes throughout the article. I've done this for nearly 40 years.

However, last week Terry Elliott posted a Tweet sharing with me an collection of my blog articles, which he had annotated, using an on-line tool title 'Diigio". 

@tutormentorteam Just did a quick annotation of your article: https://t.co/dCWqIEDESI

— Terry Elliott (@telliowkuwp) December 14, 2015

So I signed up and marked up the article this afternoon.  Here's the link. https://diigo.com/08835u

I hope readers will share this article with hospital and university leaders in their own community, who will read the article by Community Wealth.org, but also read my comments, and follow the links.  I think they can also add their own notes, and share it with others.

If you look at the map above, and draw a circle around each hospital, you create a network of circles, or influence areas,  This graphic is from a set of articles I've written showing my goal of influencing what others do to support the growth of high quality non-school tutoring, mentoring and learning programs in  high poverty neighborhoods. 

If this strategy were adopted by CEOs of some of Chicago's biggest hospitals it could have a much, much greater impact than what I've had thus far.

That's the goal.