This program is grounded in a recognition that the infrastructure of public health, surveillance systems, data tools, research capacity, knowledge production, has been built primarily to serve institutions, and only secondarily to serve the communities whose health is being studied. The result is that communities most affected by health inequity often have the least access to the data, frameworks, and tools needed to understand what is happening to them or to act on what they know.

Our work studies the gap between institutional and community knowledge production, develops and tests models of community-engaged research that close it, and builds the data and methodological infrastructure that supports community-controlled health research.

The Sunnyside Data-to-Action Initiative is the program's anchor community partnership. Working with community members, partner organizations, and CTH researchers, the initiative has produced a community-defined health priority framework that connects local knowledge to action and to academic publication. The initiative continues to generate research questions, partnership models, and methodological insights about what community-led health priority-setting actually requires.

The program is also developing Groundwork, a partnership between TSU and the African American Health Coalition to build independent, community-controlled health data infrastructure for low-income Black and Latino communities in Harris County designed to remain operational and useful to communities regardless of what happens to federal data sources.

The Third Ward State of Health initiative is a community-engaged assessment of health conditions, priorities, and assets in Houston's Third Ward, conducted in partnership with multiple organizations in third ward. The initiative will produce a public report documenting the state of health in Third Ward, designed both as a research deliverable and as a tool community members and organizations can use to inform local action. The CTH Data Hub also serves as a research infrastructure asset for this program, and as a community-facing resource through the Institute of Urban Public Health.

Communities have been studied for generations without the studies translating into changed health, and frequently without communities themselves seeing the data, owning the questions, or shaping the response. CTH's commitment is different: to produce research with communities, build infrastructure communities can use, and treat community knowledge as a foundation of public health science rather than a supplement to it.