Adloris Foundation Primers
Six sub-series, one per aligned SDG. Filter primers by goal or author, or browse each series for its full catalog.
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All primers
SDG 3 · Good Health and Well-Being · Draft for author review
A Seat at the Table: Civic Participation as Health Infrastructure
Jonathan Moore · 2026
Most lists of the social determinants of health name housing, food, income, and care. A quieter one belongs on the list: whether people have real influence over the decisions that shape their lives and their neighborhoods. Civic participation, the genuine kind where residents help decide rather than merely being consulted, turns out to be both a health outcome in itself and a means of producing better health. This…
SDG 3 · Good Health and Well-Being · Draft for author review
Counting What Counts: Standardizing the Data Behind the Social Determinants of Health
Amber Avery, PhD · 2026
There is broad agreement that the conditions in which people live, work, and age, the social determinants of health, explain a large share of health outcomes, often more than clinical care itself. Housing, food security, transportation, income, and social connection shape who gets sick and who recovers. The agreement is near-universal. And yet the health system records this information so inconsistently that it ca…
SDG 3 · Good Health and Well-Being · Draft for author review
Speaking the Same Language: Common Data Models and the Promise of Shared Evidence
Sigfried Gold, PhD · 2026
Ask two hospitals the same clinical question, say, how often a particular medication is followed by a particular complication, and you will often get answers that cannot be compared. Not because the medicine differs, but because each institution records its data in its own structure, with its own codes, its own conventions, its own quiet assumptions. The information is there. It simply does not speak a common lang…
SDG 3 · Good Health and Well-Being · Draft
The Generative City Is a Healthy City: Designing Places That Keep Producing Health
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
A person's health is shaped far more by where they live than by where they are treated. The walkability of a neighborhood, the quality of its housing, the air it breathes, the ease of reaching a job or a clinic or a park: these decide the baseline of a population's health long before any medical encounter. The clinic repairs; the city produces. This primer is about taking that seriously, and about a particular way…
SDG 3 · Good Health and Well-Being · Draft for author review
The Trusted Bridge: Community Health Workers and the Infrastructure of Trust
Katrina Polk, PhD · 2026
Most of what determines a person's health happens before they ever reach a doctor: where they live, whether they can get to an appointment, whether the prescription is affordable, whether anyone at home understands the diagnosis. The clinical encounter is brief and occasional. The life around it is constant. Bridging that gap is the work of community health workers, and this primer is about why that role is one of…
SDG 3 · Good Health and Well-Being · Draft
What Communities Keep: Governed Knowledge and the Afterlife of Health Projects
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Picture a familiar arc. A university and a community partner win a grant. Over three years they build something genuinely useful: a screening tool, a dashboard, a set of trusted relationships, a body of local knowledge about what works in this particular place. The project is celebrated. Then the grant ends. The faculty lead moves to a new study, the data sits on a server no one maintains, the tool loses its updat…
SDG 7 · Affordable and Clean Energy · Draft
Cooling Is the New Heating: Heat, Health, and the Air-Conditioning Gap
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
For most of the modern history of energy assistance, the danger to watch was cold. Programs were built around winter, around keeping the heat on, around the documented harms of a cold home. That framing is increasingly out of step with current conditions. Extreme heat is now the fastest-growing weather-related health threat in much of the country, and the systems meant to protect vulnerable households were largely…
SDG 7 · Affordable and Clean Energy · Draft
Geothermal Energy and the Social Determinants of Health
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Most people picture the social determinants of health as housing, food, income, and access to care. Energy rarely makes the headline list, yet it sits underneath several of the others. The temperature inside a home, the reliability of the power that runs a medical device, and the share of a household budget swallowed by a utility bill all shape health long before anyone reaches a clinic.
SDG 7 · Affordable and Clean Energy · Draft
Power Reliability as Clinical Infrastructure
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
A growing share of serious medical care now happens at home rather than in a hospital. This is mostly good news. People recover better and live more independently in their own homes, and home-based care costs the system less. But it quietly rests on an assumption that rarely gets examined: that the electricity will stay on.
SDG 7 · Affordable and Clean Energy · Draft
The Energy Burden Map: Who Pays the Most, and Why It Tracks Health
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Health systems have grown comfortable asking patients about housing and food. They rarely ask about the energy bill, yet that number shapes the same outcomes. When a household spends too large a share of its income keeping the lights and heat on, the consequences spill into nutrition, medication adherence, housing stability, and the chronic stress that wears the body down over time.
SDG 7 · Affordable and Clean Energy · Draft
Weatherization as Preventive Medicine
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Insulation, air sealing, and a tighter building envelope are usually filed under energy efficiency. This primer argues they belong, just as accurately, under preventive medicine. A home that holds its temperature, stays dry, and resists mold is a home that produces fewer asthma flare-ups, fewer respiratory infections, less cardiovascular strain, and better mental health. The upgrade that lowers the energy bill is …
SDG 7 · Affordable and Clean Energy · Draft
Who Owns the Community Microgrid? Energy as Governed Infrastructure
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Community solar arrays, neighborhood microgrids, and shared battery systems are spreading quickly, and they hold real promise for the households this series keeps returning to: renters, residents of multifamily buildings, and low-income families who cannot put panels on a roof they do not own. But underneath the optimism sits a question that determines whether the promise lasts. A community can host an energy asse…
SDG 11 · Sustainable Cities and Communities · Draft
A City That Keeps Giving Back: Generative Cities and the Cost of Living
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Strip away the abstractions and a city has a simple job: to let the people who live in it afford a decent life and build toward a better one. A place that does that is working. A place where the rent outruns the wages, where getting to work costs more than the work pays, where longtime residents are priced out of the neighborhoods they built, is failing at the one thing that matters most, however impressive it loo…
SDG 11 · Sustainable Cities and Communities · Draft for author review
Getting There: Transportation as the Cost of Access to Work, Care, and Food
V. Viyas Thilagarajan, MS · 2026
A job is only a job you can get to. A clinic is only useful if you can reach it on the day of the appointment. Healthy food is only an option if the store is within reach and the trip is affordable. For a great many households, the binding constraint on work, health, and nutrition is not the thing itself but the distance to it and the cost of crossing that distance. This primer is about transportation as access, a…
SDG 11 · Sustainable Cities and Communities · Draft for author review
Knowing Their Own Ground: Community Data and the Power to Govern a Neighborhood
Amber Avery, PhD · 2026
A community trying to keep itself affordable and stable faces a practical problem before it faces a political one: it often cannot see its own situation clearly. Which blocks are losing affordable units? Where are rents climbing fastest? Which households are one shock away from displacement, and which streets lack a reliable transit connection to work or a grocery store? The information exists, scattered across ag…
SDG 11 · Sustainable Cities and Communities · Draft for author review
The Foundation Under Everything: Housing Affordability and the Cost of Instability
Brandy Hampton, MBA · 2026
For most households, rent or the mortgage is the largest single expense, the one that gets paid before food, before medicine, before saving for anything. When that cost climbs out of reach, everything else in a family's life bends around it. This primer is about housing affordability as the foundation under every other measure of a livable community, and about why instability, the constant risk of losing one's hom…
SDG 11 · Sustainable Cities and Communities · Draft for author review
The New Utility: Broadband as the Infrastructure of Opportunity
Samuel Washington, MS · 2026
Applying for a job, seeing a doctor, helping a child with homework, managing benefits, running a small business: each of these increasingly assumes a reliable internet connection. What was once an amenity has quietly become a utility, as essential to participating in a community as water or power. This primer is about broadband as infrastructure of opportunity, and about why the gap is no longer mainly about wheth…
SDG 11 · Sustainable Cities and Communities · Draft for author review
The Power to Stay: Community Control When Neighborhoods Change
Jonathan Moore · 2026
There is a cruel pattern in American neighborhoods. A community endures decades of disinvestment, and then, when investment finally comes, rising costs push out the very residents who held the place together through the hard years. The improvement they waited for becomes the reason they have to leave. This primer is about that pattern and how communities resist it, and its argument is that the decisive question is…
SDG 9 · Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure · Draft for author review
Accountable by Design: AI Infrastructure in the Public Interest
Sigfried Gold, PhD · 2026
Artificial intelligence is moving from novelty to infrastructure, taking on roles in how public services are delivered, how decisions are made, and how resources are directed. When an AI system helps decide who gets a benefit, how a case is prioritized, or what a clinician sees, it has become infrastructure, and infrastructure that makes consequential decisions about people carries a special obligation: it must be…
SDG 9 · Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure · Draft for author review
The Fine Print Decides: Governance and Procurement as Infrastructure Policy
Adil Eastwood · 2026
The most consequential choices about public digital infrastructure are often made not by engineers but in contracts, procurement rules, and governance charters, the documents almost no one reads. Whether a public system will be open or locked in, whether the public will own its own data, whether a vendor can be replaced or holds the institution captive: these are decided in the fine print, long before the first li…
SDG 9 · Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure · Draft for author review
The Code Beneath Everything: Open Source as Public Infrastructure
Samuel Washington, MS · 2026
Most of the digital services people rely on, government portals, health record systems, payment rails, the everyday web, run on open-source software somewhere in the stack. It is genuine infrastructure, as foundational to modern public life as the electrical grid, and like the grid it is largely invisible until it fails. This primer is about taking open source seriously as public infrastructure: understanding why …
SDG 9 · Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure · Draft for author review
Speaking to Each Other: Open Standards and the Case Against Lock-In
Alex Zhu, MS · 2026
When two systems need to share information, something has to define how. That something is a standard, and whether it is open or proprietary turns out to shape the entire future of the systems built on it. Open standards let anyone build compatible systems and move data freely between them. Proprietary ones quietly hand control to whoever owns the format. This primer is about open standards and interoperability, t…
SDG 9 · Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure · Draft for author review
Innovation That Serves: How Public-Interest Innovation Differs From the Commercial Kind
Shawn Swanson, PhD · 2026
Innovation is treated as an unqualified good, a word that ends arguments rather than starts them. But innovation always serves some goal, and the goal shapes everything: what gets built, who it is built for, and what happens to it once it works. Commercial innovation is organized to capture value for an owner. Public-interest innovation is organized to create value that stays available to the public. These are dif…
SDG 9 · Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure · Draft
Built to Last: Stewardship and the Digital Commons
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
We know how to think about a bridge. Someone builds it, someone owns it, and someone is responsible for inspecting and repairing it for the decades it carries traffic. We are far worse at thinking this way about digital infrastructure, the shared software, data, and platforms that increasingly carry public life. We celebrate the launch and forget the upkeep, and then act surprised when a critical system decays, ge…
SDG 17 · Partnerships for the Goals · Draft
The Work Between Organizations: Coordination as Its Own Infrastructure
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
The hardest problems in public life, health inequity, housing, the durability of the systems people depend on, share a frustrating feature: no single organization can solve them. They sit in the spaces between sectors, where a hospital, a city agency, a community group, and a funder each hold one piece and none holds the whole. This is why partnership is not a nice addition to the work but the work itself, and why th…
SDG 17 · Partnerships for the Goals · Draft for author review
Partners, Not Subjects: When Institutions and Communities Work as Equals
Katrina Polk, PhD · 2026
When a hospital, a university, or a government agency announces a partnership with a community, the word implies equals. Often the reality is not. The institution holds the funding, the credentials, the data, and the decision-making power; the community is consulted, studied, or served, but rarely in genuine control of the work meant to benefit it. This primer is about the difference between partnerships in name and…
SDG 17 · Partnerships for the Goals · Draft for author review
Many Hands, One Map: Civic Coalitions and the Discipline of Shared Measurement
Jonathan Moore · 2026
A neighborhood facing a complex challenge, say, the overlapping pressures of housing, health, and economic opportunity, often has many organizations already working on pieces of it. Nonprofits, clinics, faith institutions, businesses, agencies, and residents are all engaged. Yet the problem persists, not because no one is trying but because everyone is trying separately, each with its own goals, its own definition of…
SDG 17 · Partnerships for the Goals · Draft for author review
Funding That Holds: Blended Financing and the Problem of the Funding Cliff
Brandy Hampton, MBA · 2026
A great deal of public-interest work dies not from failure but from the calendar. A program is funded by a grant, demonstrates results, and then ends when the grant cycle closes, because nothing was in place to carry it forward. This is the funding cliff, and it is one of the most predictable and wasteful patterns in the social sector. This primer is about how partnership in financing, the braiding together of d…
SDG 17 · Partnerships for the Goals · Draft for author review
Closer to the Ground: Country Ownership and the Remaking of Global Partnership
V. Viyas Thilagarajan, MS · 2026
Global partnership for health and development is being rebuilt in real time. The financing landscape has shifted sharply, the long-standing architecture of international cooperation is under strain, and a new vocabulary, country ownership, regional alignment, local capacity, is emerging to describe what comes next. This primer is about that reconstruction and the principle increasingly at its center: that partners…
SDG 17 · Partnerships for the Goals · Draft for author review
Aligned but Unequal: Governing Partnerships Across the Public-Private Divide
Adil Eastwood · 2026
Public-private partnerships are widely promoted as a way to combine the strengths of business, government, and civil society on problems none can solve alone. The promise is real. But these partnerships join organizations with fundamentally different purposes: a business exists to create value for its owners, a public agency to serve a mandate, a civil-society organization to advance a mission. They can align on a s…
