A child’s health is important—not just to their parents and families, but to the community as a whole. There are many social and environmental factors that contribute to a child’s health, including having access to a high-quality education, an affordable place to live in a safe neighborhood, healthy food to eat, jobs that pay a living wage and comprehensive health care. 

At Children’s National and our partner site, HSC Pediatric Center, we are working together on a Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) to improve child opportunity in neighborhoods in D.C. and Prince George’s County, Maryland. The CHIP describes the goals and strategies that we are using to address the four priority areas identified in our Community Health Need Assessment (CHNA): early childhood education, healthy food, health insurance coverage, and employment rate.  

The nine strategies use a variety of tactics to improve opportunity for children living in our community — advocating for affordable early childhood education centers to implementing new programs that address food security to revising existing practices around employment.  

As we work with community partners and government agencies to implement the CHIP strategies, we will use the child opportunity index (COI) to measure how opportunity is changing for children in our neighborhoods. Read more about COI in our CHNA blog. Changes in the overall opportunity score – as well as within each of the four priority areas – are measurable over time and across neighborhoods.  

We are confident that our investments in changing policy, improving programs and allocating resources more equitably will be a part of how opportunity for children in our community improves over time. 

We invite all District of Columbia and Prince George’s County stakeholders—residents, community organizations, hospital employees and business leaders—to join us on this journey to help each child grow up stronger.  

For more details contact: communityaffairs@childrensnational.org