How the Private Sector Community Benefits Movement is Advancing Health Equity
April 30, 2025
Overview
The private sector community benefits movement has the potential to have a positive and significant impact on social determinants of health. Public health practitioners and others working to improve the health of their communities should be familiar with this movement and consider opportunities to support these efforts towards the common goal of advancing health equity.
Improving the conditions in the environments where people are born, grow, work, live, and age is key to advancing health equity as these conditions are known to drive a large proportion of health outcomes. The private sector community benefits movement seeks to do just that, but it has largely fallen under the radar of those in the public health space. This movement promotes the social determinants of health (SDOH) through embracing a Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach and is one that merits attention from public health practitioners and others working to improve the health of their communities.
The Social Determinants of Health and Health in All Policies
Over the past two decades, public health professionals have increasingly recognized the importance of the SDOH, which comprise the many non-medical factors that may affect and influence health status and outcomes. SDOH encompass a wide array of considerations, including the impact of economic, educational, and environmental factors on health. Sociocultural factors such as discrimination, racism, and lack of social cohesion represent SDOH that can undermine health outcomes and exacerbate health disparities.
SDOH play a vital role in efforts to pursue health equity, yet influencing SDOH presents a challenge. Health care systems usually ignore SDOH and even when public health officials target SDOH, effectively changing social, cultural, and economic factors often requires politically-difficult systemic changes to laws, policies, and entrenched practices. HiAP has emerged as a practical, flexible approach to addressing SDOH and pursuing better health outcomes through recognizing the health impacts that arise in policies across multiple areas in the public and private sector and intentionally incorporating health considerations into these policies. Law plays an important role in this process and can facilitate cross-sectoral policy-making. Community benefit agreements and ordinances embody this HiAP approach and have the potential to greatly improve health outcomes.
The Private Sector Community Benefits Movement
Community benefits campaigns are a tool for impacted communities and residents to obtain meaningful improvements from economic development projects. Economic development projects’ footprints are often purposefully located in low-income communities of color and economically and politically marginalized neighborhoods. Traditionally, economic development projects promote and intend regionalized benefits, while frequently seeking breath-taking tax incentives from the local municipality. This has often led to the residents in impacted neighborhoods, in effect, paying for their own displacement and the razing of their homes and community. A community benefits agenda seeks to push back against this model and translate economic development into a tool for impacted residents to build sustainable communities.
The community benefits movement began in Los Angeles and was successfully implemented in other cities on the west coast before spreading to communities across the country. Through sustained community campaigns, residents in several communities have been able to bring developers to the negotiating table. This has resulted in binding community benefits agreements where developers contractually agree to provide specific benefits during specific projects in exchange for community support. A few such agreements include those arrived at during the development of the Staples Center in Los Angeles, a new soccer stadium in Nashville, and on other stadium and mixed-use projects in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and New York. These agreements have provided communities with job training and opportunities, affordable housing, and community services and amenities.
In Detroit, advocates proposed a ballot initiative to adopt a city ordinance requiring developers to enter a binding community benefits agreement prior to seeking significant tax abatements or other subsidization from the city. After a contested campaign, an ordinance was adopted requiring the establishment of neighborhood advisory councils to negotiate project benefits for residents on each project receiving significant subsidies from the city. Detroit’s was the first ordinance of its kind and since its adoption other cities such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Louis’ Sewer District have adopted their own model ordinances and regulations providing various types of community engagement and benefits on subsidized projects. The movement continues to grow, and those with like-minded goals should consider offering their support.
Potential for Partnership
The community benefits movement was created for and is led by communities that have been historically disenfranchised, and it embodies HiAP in a way that ensures a community-led narrative because community members are integral to the process. Private sector community benefits have the potential to greatly progress SDOH. Public health practitioners and others working to improve the health of their communities should be familiar with this movement and consider opportunities to support these efforts towards the common goal of advancing health equity.
To learn more about the private sector community benefits movement, visit the Sugar Law Center’s Community Benefits Resources website to explore the map of community benefits across the country and register to attend the Network for Public Health Law’s May 15th webinar “Advancing the Social Determinants of Health – The Private Sector Community Benefits Movement.”
This post was written by Phyllis Jeden, J.D., Senior Attorney, Network for Public Health Law—Mid-States Region, and guest contributors, Lance Gable, J.D., M.P.H., Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School, and John Philo, J.D., Executive and Legal Director, Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice.
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