What would it look like for all people in your city to flourish? Everyone can thrive when a city has a generous heart and systems for sustainability. In the United States, we spend more than any other country per capita on healthcare, however our health outcomes consistently fall short: we die at younger ages, and the prevalence of common diseases including asthma, diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease are higher than in countries where they spend less. Halley Reeves reveals how we have built our communities contributes to these shortcomings, and how we all have a role in improving our systemic failures. By understanding that we operate within a complex, societal web rife with unintended consequences we can begin to maximize our positive impacts while working to address negative outcomes. And in turn, we can improve everyone’s health outcomes. Halley Reeves is a health strategist. As a public health practitioner and a city planner, she aims to improve our communities by looking at what creates and maintains health.

Having lived in Germany, Austria, China, India and several states within the United States, Halley concentrates on ‘Health in All Policies’ work specifically tied to community health planning in health care policy, the infusion of health considerations into the built-environment, and data to support all of the aforementioned activities.

As a result of the multi-disciplinary nature of her work, she focuses on cross-sectorial collaboration building with the aim of collectively impacting health and defining how to measure that impact. She spent the last decade and a half working on policy-related issues beginning from local-level community based participatory research to international governmental relations. Although much of that time was in locations where data were scarce, she has used data to inform work throughout her career.

She was first introduced to public health through an occupational health study with uranium workers in New Mexico seeking to influence US federal legislation. She then lived and worked in the Indian Himalayas helping to inform the development of a regional ambulance system through a demographic survey of subsistence farming villages administered by community health workers. Most recently she lived in Massachusetts managing the development of the state’s “one-stop shop” for health data and integrating the determinants of health more directly into the state’s community benefits ecosystem. Halley holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Washington and a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx