Building Healthier, More Equitable Communities (BHEC) Paterson, New Jersey

The Single-State Approach with Collective Action.  Led and managed by the Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), BHEC was designed to address the social determinants of health through cross-sector collaborations in four New Jersey communities – Asbury Park, Camden, Newark, and Paterson.  BHEC’s goal was to build healthier communities by improving the social, economic, and environmental conditions that enable all residents, especially low-income residents and residents of color, to improve their well-being.  Overall, the final evaluation found that BHEC was successful in: a) advancing numerous built environment projects in all four cities – including affordable housing, mixed-use developments, and new community spaces; b) strengthening the food security and healthy food access ecosystems at the neighborhood, city, county, and state levels; and c) bolstering local community development systems more wholistically.

The BHEC city teams advanced 19 built environment projects during the initiative – 11 of which benefitted from direct BHEC assistance.  The BHEC projects attracted $103.0 million in total investments – nearly $4.7 million from BHEC resources and $98.0 million from public, private, and philanthropic sources for an impressive leverage ratio just short of 20:1.  Through the healthy food access work, city teams grew their networks to include new relationships with food pantries, corner bodegas, senior housing developments, farmers’ markets, and hospital systems and established new partnerships with urban, small, and disadvantaged farmers. Deeper cross-sector relationships fostered among the BHEC team members demonstrably led to new capacities for some participating organizations, attracted new resources, reinvigorated the engagement and empowerment of residents, and infused a health equity lens into the work while strengthening the engagement and empowerment of residents.

Prioritizing Underinvested Neighborhoods of Paterson.  The City of Paterson, in northern New Jersey, is typically just under a one-hour train ride from New York’s Penn Station.  Incorporated as a city in 1851, Paterson began as a mill town where manufacturing was powered by the Passaic River.  Today, Paterson is a highly diverse city with a population of just over 155,000.  Approximately 23.6% of Paterson’s residents live below the poverty line. With its proximity to New York City, Paterson has been experiencing development pressures with housing prices rising faster than incomes.  With a strong community development presence, Paterson was poised to build opportunity and not leave any neighborhoods behind.  But more than a program, the Paterson BHEC team was testing a new way of collaborating and addressing root cause issues like cycles of poverty.

Local Leaders Working Together.  In addition to its co-leading agencies, Health Coalition of Passaic County and Passaic County Habitat for Humanity, the original BHEC team included Oasis – A Haven for Women and Children, Boys and Girls Club of Paterson and Passaic, NJ Community Development Corporation (NJCDC), St. Joseph’s Health, United Way of Passaic County, and CUMAC.  As the BHEC initiative evolved over several years, Eva’s Village joined the collaboration as a central partner in advancing the work.  All of the members of the BHEC team are accomplished community developers and social services agencies.  Many of these groups came together with the advent of the COVID pandemic to coordinate responses to the needs of their city’s low-income residents.  The relationships deepened in the COVID response, formed the basis of a collaborative team culture that identified and filled capacity gaps by leveraging each other’s strengths.

Making Impact through Focused Collaboration.  Collectively, the Paterson BHEC team members led robust and impactful efforts that address the social determinants of health by providing affordable housing opportunities, health care access, child development services, adult educational and vocational support, and food security and healthy food access programming.  All of the partners could have pointed to some elements of their efforts that would have benefitted from BHEC support.  The Paterson BHEC team chose to focus their collaboration on a single project: a new supportive housing model for mothers and children, dubbed as the “Moms with Kids” project.

The fundamental concept behind the Moms with Kids project was to create affordable housing on top floors of a facility that would include an early childhood learning center on the first floor.  The partners in the project would provide wrap around services for the mothers who lived there.  One of the central lessons of the BHEC initiative is that built environment projects – especially development projects in lower-income communities of service to lower-income populations – take time.  In the early days of the initiative, the BHEC team spent a significant amount of time seeking to identify and acquire a site for the project.  The search ultimately proved fruitful when Eva’s Village became more involved with the BHEC team and offered land it owned for the development site.  Initiative resources were deployed to hire a BHEC coordinator at Eva’s Village who also served as the project manager for the Moms with Kids project. The Boards of Habitat for Humanity, Oasis, and Eva’s Village voted to create a limited liability corporation controlled by the three organizations to provide a legal structure for the development.  The sponsors refocused the effort on a second, larger site for the development and revised their planning after subsequently concluding that a licensed early childhood education (ECE) facility was not viable.  The project continued to progress with some predevelopment and technical assistance support from BHEC and is currently refining the ECE approach and building the capital stack for the project.

Local Healthy Food Access. During the BHEC initiative, other members of the Paterson Team engaged with those on other BHEC city teams who focused on food security and healthy food access.  Representatives of the four BHEC city teams organized to network with their colleagues to compare insights on policy changes, resources opportunities, and practice innovations that could benefit and support the work. CUMAC (which provides a trauma-informed food distribution and supportive services) and United Way (which leads the Passaic County Food Policy Council among other food-related endeavors) were particularly important to these cross-city collaborations, which ultimately proved impactful in helping to strengthen the State’s food security ecosystem and policy environment.

The regular and ongoing interactions among the BHEC team members in Paterson also led a group to make a successful application for a New Jersey Economic Development Agency (NJEDA) food desert planning grant.  BHEC team members – Habitat for Humanity, United Way, and St. Josephs – joined with first ward-based Grace Chapel Baptist Church, Passaic County, the City of Paterson, and Rutgers Cooperative Extension on the application. While the grant study concluded that a full-service grocery store was not economically feasible in the target community, the planning collaboration led to several other meaningful interventions to bring healthy food access to the neighborhood – including the establishment of a mobile grocery operated by CUMAC and A Better Market – a healthy food corner store.  The plan itself won an American Planning Association New Jersey Chapter award for 2024.

The Opportunities Ahead. The central work of the BHEC team – the Moms with Kids project – is continuing and RWJF has providing additional support to help bring this project towards fruition.  The sponsoring organizations are working to assemble the capital stack resources and the design and construction teams.  The sponsors have also worked to reorient the support programs for the families living in the housing toward a Family Care Center model where the moms can learn to manage home- or community-based childcare businesses.

One of BHEC’s overarching and lasting accomplishments was its deepening relationships among the team members and fostering an enduring approach toward synergistic collaborations to address the complex needs faced by the people and communities they serve.  At least four of the original BHEC team members are now participating in a new, place-based, cross-sector community revitalization initiative organized by Montclair State University.  One Square Mile is centered on the neighborhood surrounding a community-based school, with the school’s students as the intended beneficiaries.

Perhaps the promise of a continued and increasing focus on BHEC’s core goals of advancing health equity and addressing the social determinants of health in the City of Paterson is manifest in the March 2025 news that the Health Coalition of Passaic County was designated as the first nationally certified Pathways Community HUB organization in New Jersey. When the Moms with Kids project is completed, HCPC has ambitions of building on this designation to bring the BHEC team back together to work on the goal of incorporating reimbursable onsite community health worker resources across the city.  To learn more about the Moms with Kids project, call 973-523-6220 or email info@evasvillage.org.

Acknowledgements
A very special thanks to Marco Navarro and Maryam Khojasteh from the RWJF for their funding support and thought partnership of BHEC; Alyssa Saunders and colleagues at Mt. Auburn Associates for evaluation and learning partnership; our many New Jersey state-level advisors; our colleagues at Reinvestment Fund, specifically Jennifer Fassbender, Jacob Kraybill, and Sara Vernon Sterman; and in humble gratitude to our city team partners from Paterson for their contributions and collaboration – Kimberly Birdsall, Scott Millard, Howard Haughton, Kaileen Alston, and Jen Brady. Learn more about the BHEC initiative HERE and its evaluation reports HERE.