The Built Environment and Public Health Clearinghouse (BEPHC), launched in 2014, is a resource for community design and public health academic and professional multidisciplinary training and community building.  The Clearinghouse has been funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in support of the National Prevention Strategy, and was developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology, American Planning Association, the American Public Health Association, and the National Network of Public Health Institutes. It has been recognized by the U.S. Surgeon General's Office as a go-to resource for training at the university and professional levels, and for relevant news at the critical intersection of health and place.

"The public health and community design fields know that the way we build our neighborhoods, cities and regions impact population health," says Georgia Tech city and regional planning professor Nisha Botchwey. "The Built Environment and Public Health Clearinghouse provides training and retraining, and a community of resources to support professionals to build healthy places that can lead to healthy people."

The base for the Clearinghouse’s development took root in 2006, when Botchwey was prompted by an audience member's question at the 2006 American Public Health Association Annual Conference to create a multidisciplinary curriculum in planning and public health. In 2009, with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Botchwey launched the Built Environment and Public Health Curriculum, which housed much of the resources used to create the model course. "A Model Curriculum for a Course on the Built Environment and Public Health" was published by Botchwey and colleagues a few months later in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. This early stage of the Curriculum website provided resources primarily to the planning academy for development of planning and public health courses. 

The growing interest from other disciplines and evidence of the built environment’s impacts on population health led to a broader base of support for curation, expansion, and distribution of these resources. In 2012, Georgia Tech, with funding through the National Prevention Strategy and in Partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Network of Public Health Institutes (NNPHI), led the Building Bridges project, which focused on enhancing multisectoral community design and public health approaches to promote population health and safety, prevent injuries, and to integrate health into decision-making through maintaining and building “a skilled, cross-trained, and diverse prevention workforce.” Recommendations from the Building Bridges Expert Panel led to the expanded partnerships that helped launch the Built Environment and Public Health Clearinghouse earlier this year.

Today, the newly launched BEPHC website offers both academic and professional training resources that address the link between public health and planning, architecture, health impact assessment, transportation engineering, and other fields. The academic training pages provide information on courses taught at the university level that link Public Health to the built environment, while the professional training pages resources include multi-sector tools, training, case studies and best practices to create, promote and maintain healthy places.

The site additionally serves as a central source of information across the community design and public health sectors, and houses an expanded multidisciplinary glossary of over 1,100 terms. The Clearinghouse site contains 56 sources of free webinars with over 150 offerings on multi-sector approaches to population health, 23 academic planning programs, and a comprehensive list of informative blogs. 

To contact the BEPHC, email bephc@gatech.edu or sign up for the newsletter on the website. Follow @healthyplaces_ on twitter for frequent updates, and join the LinkedIn group to take part in the conversation.