Lessons from a rural housing crisis: grounded insights for intersectoral action on health inequities

Local communities are struggling with persistent health inequities driven by income disparity, housing inadequacy, and other intersecting factors that constrain individual and community well-being. Increasingly, intersectoral approaches are recognized as essential to tackle such challenges, given their intersecting nature. This paper describes Equity-focused Intersectoral Practice (EquIP), a novel methodology that merges participatory research principles with the purposeful positioning of grounded expertise (lived experience) to shift the gaze of intersectoral actors towards the contextual factors that contribute to health inequities. The EquIP methodology creates uncommon spaces for intersectoral encounter that support critical reflexivity and relationship-building among institutional and community-based intersectoral actors. A case example of the EquIP methodology, implemented in a small, rural Canadian city in the context of a regional housing crisis, illustrates how investment in reflexivity and relational praxis among diverse intersectoral actors supports the identification of existing structures, beliefs, and practices within institutional settings that constrain effective intersectoral response to health inequities. Author Affiliation: (a) Centre for Environmental Health Equity, School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Queen's University, 28 Division Street, Kingston, Ontario, K7L 3N6, Canada (b) RentSafe Tenants' Rights Advocate, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada (c) Community Voices, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada (d) Canadian Partnership for Children's Health and Environment, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (e) Department of Geography, Queen's University, 28 Division Street, Kingston, Ontario, K7L 3N6, Canada * Corresponding author. Centre for Environmental Health Equity, Queen's University, 28 Division Street, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada. Article History: Revised 19 August 2020; Accepted 30 September 2020 Byline: Erica Phipps [erica.phipps@queensu.ca] (a,d,*), Tanya Butt (b,c), Nadine Desjardins (b), Misty Schonauer (b), Renee Schlonies (b,c), Jeffrey R. Masuda (a,e)