From the Field
Communities are complicated. The forces that shape health, wealth, and opportunity rarely move in straight lines, and understanding them requires careful thinking, honest data, and a willingness to sit with complexity rather than smooth it over. From the Field is where we share that thinking, explainers on the topics central to our work, data and research we find worth understanding more deeply, and books that have shaped how we see the problems we work on. This is not a blog. It is a place for ideas we think are worth your time. Added to that is a list of organizations and groups doing work we admire. So many groups doing so many good things.
We are still building most sections of our work. Keep checking back!
Book Club
We read a whole lot, and we think you should too. Our Book Club is a running list of fiction and nonfiction that has shaped how we think about community, health, wealth, and the structures behind all three. These are not textbooks. They are the kinds of books you keep talking to your friends about because they changed something about how you see your world. The list works in pairs: each novel sits beside the nonfiction that proves it true. Some you’ve maybe already read, like Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (earned all the cred it got), here paired with Dreamland, which teaches us how the opioid crisis was built. Others we hope you will, starting with The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, which leads the list because it’s one of the best books we’ve read in years. There’s also a short shelf of the practical books we swear by.
The Rolodex
The people doing the hardest work within communities are rarely working in isolation. They’re learning from each other, pointing each other toward the right data, and connecting with organizations that have already solved a version of the problem they’re facing. And, often, this comes directly from our own voices, captured by some of the better news outlets still operating independently.
Rolodex is our attempt to share some of what we’ve learned about who does good work and where to find good information. We’ve organized it by type because the right resource depends entirely on what you’re trying to do or what you may want to learn. None of this is exhaustive, and we keep adding to it. If something belongs here that isn’t here, let us know.
Features
The work we do sometimes raises more questions than answers. Our Features go beyond the brief, like why some people think declining teen birth rates are a bad thing, the economics of a grocery store that never came, and what it costs a rural community when its only hospital closes. They are written for readers who want more than a simple summary.
We write these because some stories don’t fit anywhere else. A Features piece might follow a single county’s decade-long fight to keep its emergency room open, or unpack why a policy that looks good on paper keeps failing in the same zip codes. If you’ve ever finished reading something and thought “but why,” this is where we try to answer that.
Field Guides
Good work requires good tools. Our Field Guides are practical, written resources developed from our experience working alongside health systems, communities, governments, and grant administrators across North America. Whether you are navigating a new process or building internal capacity, these guides are meant to be used.
We built most of these because we needed them and they didn’t exist. Some started as internal documents, checklists we kept refining after every engagement, frameworks we developed because the existing ones didn’t hold up in the field. If something in here saves you three weeks of figuring it out the hard way, that’s exactly the point. We keep updating them because the work keeps changing.
In Practice
The best way to understand how we work is to see it. Our In Practice pieces draw from real engagements across North America, some named, some anonymized, all grounded in actual work. They cover what we did, how we did it, and what we’d do differently next time, because how you do the work shapes what the work can do.
We include the hard parts too. Not every engagement goes the way you planned, and some of the most useful things we’ve learned came from a strategy that needed to be reworked halfway through or a community process that surfaced something we didn’t expect. We think that’s worth sharing.
Backgrounders
Some of the most consequential topics in community health and economic development are also the least understood. We try our best to help. Our Backgrounders help explain how things connect, like why a child’s reading level at 4th grade matters, how lipstick sales signal recessions, and why your ZIP code is often as important as your doctor.
We write these for the person who keeps reading past the headline because they actually want to understand something. Not talking down, not oversimplifying, just enough context to see how the pieces fit together. Some of the topics are dry on the surface. We promise they’re not.