When the NIH Common Fund sought “transformative” research projects to address health disparities and advance health equity, Drs. Eugenia South and Atheendar Venkataramani teamed up to secure a nearly $10 million grant to study whether certain environmental and financial interventions in specific Philadelphia neighborhoods could move the needle on Black health disparities. Their trial, which began in late 2021 and is known as IGNITE, involves a suite of environmental initiatives paired with economic assistance for half of the 571 enrolled households.
The trial’s research-backed environmental interventions are greening more than 60 vacant lots, a nod to South’s research on how these spaces impact crime, mental health, acute stress, and prenatal health; remediating more than a dozen abandoned homes, which South and other colleagues had found reduces gunviolence; planting hundreds of trees, which could be protective against gun violence; and instituting weekly cleanups for all the trash that accumulates in neighborhoods outside of the cans picked up by the sanitation department.