Being healthy isn’t only about individual choices, like eating well or exercising. Homes with poor air quality, mold, lead, and pests can lead to diseases such as toxic poisoning and asthma. Because of unfair housing practices, these problems affect low-income communities and communities of color more than others. And since many indoor environmental threats are invisible, it can be difficult for families to identify and fix the problem on their own. So what makes a home unhealthy? And what can you do about it?
To address these problems CUP, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and designer Melissa Gorman came together to create Is Your Home Making You Sick?, a bilingual, fold-out poster in English and Spanish. Using colorful, user-friendly illustrations and visuals, the poster shows how things like neighborhood pollution and poor indoor air quality impact your health, and empowers residents to change and improve their home environments by holding landlords accountable and organizing for policy change.
WE ACT for Environmental Justice is distributing the poster widely through monthly community meetings, their network of community groups, and local political leaders. They are also using this guide as the basis for their membership and organizer trainings on the topic of healthy homes.
Is Your Home Making You Sick? launched at a community meeting hosted by WE ACT. More than 90 community members participated in sessions to learn how their home environment can affect their health, and how to get involved in changing policy to improve the health of everyone’s home.