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By: Morgan Chilson – April 8, 2025 12:00 pm
TOPEKA — Societal rules — written and unwritten — and how power is distributed and wielded within communities are a new focus in an annual report that offers insights into health at a county level.
The 2025 County Health Rankings and Roadmap report, put out by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute with funding provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is used by local, regional and state leaders to determine how to understand and impact the health of residents within their communities. Factors that impact health were updated this year for the first time since 2014, said Bethany Rogerson, County Health Rankings & Roadmap co-director.
“We are focused on lifting up policies and practices that can create the conditions so that everyone has the ability to thrive,” she said. “Where you live, where you work all play a really important role in shaping health, and that health is more than health care.”
The addition of societal rules and power categories encourages communities to assess those concepts and determine how to make policy and practical changes to improve the health of citizens, Rogerson said.
“We know that community conditions don’t just happen by chance,” she said. “So we realized an opportunity to invite people to explore how community conditions come to be. How did our housing, how did our jobs, our schools, all the aspects that we know shape health, how did they come to be and who shaped them and how?”
SENT Topeka, an organization that works to support Topeka residents through building resilience and relationships, uses the County Health Rankings for data and health insights. Founder and executive director Johnathan Sublet said the new measures fit into the work the organization is doing. He pointed to the food pantry at SENT, which is structured to work like a grocery store where people have choice.
“The first thing a person often loses when they become under-resourced is choice,” Sublet said. “When we define poverty, it is not just the access to money. We define it as lack of choice in a person’s life. Every single person has infinite dignity, value and worth. We want to do everything we can to affirm that dignity, value and worth they have.”
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