Our Work
The Rural Health Institute of New York (RHI) is an independent nonprofit dedicated to addressing large-scale public health issues and disparities across rural New York. Initially formed as a Cortland County youth prevention coalition, RHI has evolved over 20 years into a public health institute with expertise using collaboration, improved collection, management, and use of data, and evidence-based communication to improve community health.
We have expanded to understand public health holistically, working on harm reduction, vaccines, literacy, mental health, lead, and housing. Our staff of project managers, full-time MPH-holding epidemiologists, database designers, and a full-time graphic designer bring a diverse set of unique skills to
Build tools and systems to help to supplement and build partners’ capacity
Collect, analyze, and use data to inform priorities and strategies
Design custom, place-based health communications materials and strategies based on local data to educate and encourage healthy behaviors
Coordinate similar work across agencies or counties, often through collaborative grant applications to ensure that the work is sustainable.
We take an infrastructure approach to solving public health problems
This means that we build systems, processes, and tools to support public health, and we test them out, learn from them, and try to improve them. We develop systems that can be used in any community based on the social, economic, and environmental factors that shape health. Then, we work closely with community partners, driven by local data, to adapt those systems to a local context.
Examples of public health infrastructure solutions
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Campaign Library
Library of existing health communications campaigns that partners can easily use or work with us to customize
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Whole Health Youth Survey
Comprehensive, whole-health, annual youth survey shows local needs & trends to drive action based on local data
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Community and Workforce Mental Health Training
Community suicide-alert trainings & a searchable, sortable mental health resource guide to keep resources accessible
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Workforce Capacity Dashboard
We’re working on systems to better track service delivery, fidelity measures, & social service workforce training and capacity across the entire community
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Client/Service Tracking and Reporting Systems
We’ve built systems that work for our on-the-ground staff and for our reporting needs, allowing us to collect real-time data and make real-time changes to how we deliver services
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Early Childhood Development and Literacy Platform
Hello Cortland platform makes local parenting resources, events, & programs easy to access & use
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Lead Poisoning Prevention Tool
A tool that tells people the age of their home, provides information about potential lead exposure risks based on that age, & directs them to local services for testing
Early on, RHI focused on evidence-based public health approaches to prevent youth problem behaviors including underage drinking, tobacco use, violence, delinquency, school dropout and substance use. Our work has expanded to cover data-driven public health initiatives throughout Central New York, and we are working to support all of rural New York. We know we won’t be able to work in every rural NYS community right away, but we’re trying to build partnerships across the state as we build toward that goal.
You can read about how we came to do the work we do on our history and our key funders and partners pages. You can also read about the team that makes it all happen.
RHI has expertise in three primary areas of expertise that contributes to our success: data & epidemiology, administrative and collaborative leadership, and design and health communications. These “core competencies” aren’t unrelated areas of expertise, but all feed into each other. We use data to drive our collaborative action planning and to inform our health communications campaigns with locally relevant information; we use our partnerships to identify key issues and disseminate evidence-based information to multiple audiences; we use our design and marketing skills to effectively share local data with relevant partners and help build data literacy.
We see these three areas of expertise all as different kinds of public health infrastructure–the systems and processes and relationships that support and facilitate public health work. Focusing on public health infrastructure allows us to make the most of the similarities between different rural communities, building systems and procedures that provide a strong and well-tested foundation to build on and to tailor to the unique needs of a given community. We can more easily translate solutions from one county to another, and can more easily facilitate regional collaborations, while still centering the needs of the community we’re supporting.
Data & Epidemiology: the core of RHI’s decision making process that guides all projects and activities. This decision-making process includes designing protocols that help answer targeted questions; collecting and analyzing data; and using a scientific approach in decision-making. We have two full-time epidemiologists to support our data-driven work.
Administrative & Collaborative Leadership: RHI’s work to plan, secure funding for, facilitate, and scale collaborative projects by building multi-stakeholder partnerships and grant applications. We serve as a network manager, providing backbone support to build capacity, assess readiness, align resources, coordinate activities, and assess outcomes.
Design & Health Communications: RHI uses local data and local relationships to design and implement effective, fact-based, locally relevant health communications campaigns aimed at educating and changing cultures and behaviors to make our community safer. The design process at RHI relies on continuous improvement, making small changes, testing, and deploying solutions.
