Hassanatu Blake

2021-2022 | City of Birmingham - Department of Planning, Engineering, and Permits

HASSANATU BLAKE is a strategist and leader with more than 15 years of experience in the public health and educational technology sectors. She is dedicated to global, cross-cultural technology-powered exchange and evidence-based community interventions. She has experience in stakeholder engagement, strategic partnerships and planning, research, and program design and development. Most recently, she has focused on community development and research to address some of the greatest challenges and opportunities in the health sector. Hassanatu holds an MBA from Plymouth State University, an MPH in health policy and management from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and a B.A. from Tufts University. She is also a doctoral student at the School of Public Health at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Project

Birmingham recognizes that social determinants of health are major factors in health inequities across the city. These factors include the ways in which neighborhoods are designed, the materials used in their buildings, access to green spaces, and other aspects of the “built environment.” In the Community Health Assessment of Birmingham’s 99 neighborhoods, North Birmingham ranked as the lowest quality of life in the City – a neighborhood that is 97% Black. To address this injustice, the city created ShapeBham, a tool to integrate equity measures into the planning process at the neighborhood level. FUSE will operationalize ShapeBham and target the root causes of health inequities in the city, showing measurable progress against concrete health indicators.