The City Health Dashboard provides communities and city leaders with an array of regularly updated data specific to neighborhood and/or city boundaries – such as life expectancy, obesity, and children in poverty – to improve the health and well-being of everyone in the community.

Thanks to a grant provided by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in 2017, ICMA, as a subcontractor to New York University Grossman School of Medicine (NYUSOM), has helped connect local governments with the City Health Dashboard, a growing online database with over 40 measures of health and drivers of health in cities in the United States with 50,000 or more residents.

Designed to provide communities and their leaders with a clearer picture of the challenges they face, the City Health Dashboard helps local governments and community organizations target public health investments in high-need neighborhoods and expand support for budget allocations and evidence-based community health improvement efforts. Recently, City Health Dashboard has developed an index to help communities identify and address COVID-19 risk factors, such as mapped census tracks indicating a 1-10 risk level for the spread of the virus, and prioritizing testing for specific neighborhoods.

ICMA’s role is to provide the connection between local government and public health with subject matter expertise as well as promotion of the Dashboard to local government professionals and scholars through the facilitation of webinars and promotion at the ICMA Annual Conference.

By presenting data needed to understand population health status and its actionable determinants at the city level and allowing for ready cross-city comparisons, the project aims to support city leaders and community stakeholders in driving improvements in urban health and well-being.