Action 5: Create Public Awareness Through Outreach

Healthy Housing Workforce Toolkit: Creating Public Awareness

Introduction

Public awareness and outreach are essential components for cities developing a healthy housing workforce pipeline. Effective outreach ensures that communities understand the importance of healthy housing, what programs are available, and how they can participate in and support these initiatives. Being transparent and informative can help:

• Reduce long-term costs and avoid delays
• Enhance trust and understanding between communities and local government
• Broaden engagement with citizens who are sometimes excluded from the decision-making process

Making the Case for a Healthy Housing Workforce

Here are talking points you can share with your community and partners about the importance of building a healthy housing workforce.

Health hazards are still common in homes across America. Everyone deserves to live in a safe and healthy home. But the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, rising housing costs, and an aging housing supply pose a risk to the health and well-being of families and residents.

Healthy housing programs can help. Healthy housing programs like the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Healthy Homes Production Program (HHP) help to address these hazards by implementing energy-efficient appliances and building practices and hiring lead and healthy home contractors to identify remediation projects in the home. These programs can help preserve the existing housing supply, reduce utility costs and remove health hazards in the home.

To conduct these programs, municipalities need to have access to a comprehensive and knowledgeable workforce pipeline. Without a coordinated and comprehensive plan to train, hire and retain employees, municipalities will have a more difficult time implementing future healthy housing programs.

There are multiple benefits to having a workforce program that can support healthy housing goals:

• Lower the overall cost of utilities for residents and improve their economic situations by utilizing a green workforce to install weatherization modifications and implement energy-efficient appliances and building practices. Support the preservation of existing housing supply with a trained workforce certified to perform lead, mold, pest and other health-hazard inspections. Contractors that leverage the program can perform rehab and remediation on housing units.
• Develop a long-term talent pipeline and equip contractors and employees with the hard and soft skills necessary to improve health equity in the home.
• Support at-risk and disadvantaged communities with targeted programming.
• Create the opportunity to engage with new stakeholders and community groups that can support future programs. Recruited employees who complete accreditation can also play an advocate role in their community to help share knowledge and learnings.

Tools & Resources

Communication and engagement with the public is a crucial component to ensure continued community support. These tools offer messaging strategies to raise awareness around workforce programs.

To make the case for healthy housing generally, see the NLC’s Healthy Housing Messaging Toolkit, an interactive online tool that enables municipalities to customize messages for their communities.⁴⁰

The NLC’s Cities of Opportunity initiative has launched a series of “Plain Speaking”⁴¹ communication tools for conveying important concepts such as “well-being” and “social determinants of health” in simple language.

The National Center for Healthy Housing offers Communication Tools⁴², comprised of “bite-sized courses” for organizations to hone their messaging skills and tools to build specific communication needs.

Groundwork USA, a network of local organizations devoted to transforming the natural and built environment of low-resource communities, has created a document that identifies Best Practices for Meaningful Community Engagement.⁴³