REACH is an initiative to improve the health and quality of life in three NJ cities facing food insecurity, unemployment, low high school graduation rates, and low household incomes. We bridge the wisdom of community-based organizations' focus on lived experience with the rigorous research of university faculty, staff, and students. REACH is primarily and generously funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation with additional support from the Rutgers University Office of the President and the four University Chancellors.
We recently created a short video bringing together some of the voices that exemplify what makes REACH work.
It is increasingly clear that people’s overall health outcomes have less to do with a doctor's care and more to do with social determinants of health: where they are born, grow, work, live, and age.
REACH's work focuses on five social determinants of health:
There is enormous expertise in those who have been working in the community for years, combined with the expertise of Rutgers faculty who have been rigorously studying these problems. By combining these levels of expertise, we believe we can deliver better solutions because we have this diversity of voices and ideas around the table.
As a presidential initiative, REACH leverages the full scale of interdisciplinary collaboration, recognizing our central role in promoting holistic intervention approaches to community health. REACH intentionally shifts how we relate to communities to improve quality of life and advance a more just and equitable future. REACH marks an intentional shift in how Rutgers aims to engage and serve the state of New Jersey by reorienting ourselves to the community.
REACH will provide community impact grants and research seed grants to Rutgers faculty and staff to partner with local organizations to advance our work.
The social determinants of health (SDOH) are the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies and political systems.
The work of REACH is focused on the cities of Camden, New Brunswick, and Newark. These three cities host the main Rutgers campuses and have majority Black and Hispanic populations that experience high adverse SDOH and health disparities. Our initial focus is to be good neighbors in our host cities, learn quickly, and then grow the model to expand to other cities in New Jersey as we build REACH into a sustainable, scalable initiative.
In the 2023 Annual Health Report by the United Health Foundation and the American Public Health Association, New Jersey emerged as the 13th healthiest state in the nation. However, there is a significant statewide variation in life expectancy, spanning 22 years. The most vulnerable zip codes in New Jersey, including Camden, New Brunswick, and Camden, have the lowest life expectancies in the state.
