New York State Impacts
Cornell Public Health’s founding mission is to use systems-based approaches to promote health equity through environmentally sustainable advancements, supporting community wellbeing locally and globally. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and after it, amidst increasing disparities in community health outcomes, the commitment to translate research into real-world impact has only grown, especially “right here at home” in New York State. Partnering with organizations across the state, Cornell Public Health’s faculty, staff, and students are working to advance health and wellbeing to promote equity for all, and sustainability for the future.
Recognizing that rural people often remain under-served by public health and economic development interventions, we make work with rural populations a priority.
Fundamental to our approach is the commitment to partnership—the integration of real-world and academic expertise to ideate, pilot, and improve powerful public health innovations. These partnerships result in ground-up initiatives focused on unique community needs, as well as broader, statewide efforts designed in partnership with New York State government agencies.
Commitment to Partnership
Responding to partner-defined priorities, Cornell Public Health faculty, staff, and students work with their partners to assess needs and assets, develop strategic plans, identify and adapt evidence-based interventions, implement strategies, and evaluate processes and outcomes to improve approaches for maximum impact. Current New York State projects focus on improving disaster preparedness, building community resilience, augmenting risk and crisis communication skills, improving health care access, improving housing and food security, and supporting an expanded workforce.
These impacts across the state are only possible through collaborative partnerships, where interdisciplinary academic, practice, policy, and community experts work together to find and test novel solutions to meet local public health priorities.
In the stories below, we present the breadth of our activities, which focus on strengthening our State’s public health workforce, promoting resilience to climate change, building and supporting healthy food systems, and tackling pressing challenges facing New York State communities and agencies.
Impact Stories
In the stories below, we present the breadth of our activities, which focus on strengthening our State’s public health workforce, promoting resilience to climate change, building and supporting health food systems, and tackling pressing challenges facing New York State communities and agencies.
Avian influenza discovered in NYS bobcats
Jennifer Bloodgood, Assistant Professor of Practice
Cornell Public Health faculty, student awarded community-engagement grant
NCPR: Bird flu is in the North Country. Here's what we know about the disease
Alex Travis, Director of Cornell Public Health
What Our Partners Are Saying
Collaborating with Cornell Public Health gave us the opportunity to co-design innovative public health interventions that leverage our community’s assets and strengths and are tailored to meet our community’s needs. We now have three strong proposals at our fingertips that will help us secure funding to improve health outcomes among people affected by incarceration, reduce recidivism, and ultimately, end the cycle of intergenerational incarceration in our community.
The New York State Commission on National and Community Service found an amazing partner in Cornell! They have been supportive of our efforts from the very beginning, even before our program developed into the largest Public Health AmeriCorps program in the country. Cornell has provided first-class training for our AmeriCorps members, allowing them to respond to the urgency of the COVID pandemic, and help communities recover, across our State.
COVID 19 and other public health emergencies have highlighted how hard it can be to communicate to the public during times of uncertainty. With Cornell’s help, we have developed a training to educate state and local officials on how to communicate more effectively during a crisis, and the feedback from the trainings has been extremely positive.
We are deeply committed to understanding needs from historically underserved or under-represented voices. Through partnering with Cornell Public Health, we’ve been able to expand our communications and qualitative research expertise, and are adopting a new community health improvement framework. This is already yielding new ideas, allowing us to more intentionally engage the community and improve our understanding of the needs and assets in Tompkins County.