May 1, 2015

Education is a human right: Opportunity to follow international law

| By Fred Patrick | Today’s guest blog post is written by Fred Patrick, Director on Center on Sentencing and Corrections, Vera Institute of Justice. International laws declare education to be an inherent human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economics, Social and Cultural […]
April 23, 2015

HIA Research: When is Qualitative Research Warranted?

| By Holly Avey | [As research director at Human Impact Partners, Holly Avey spends a lot of time not just looking at our findings but thinking about how we conduct and use research. This is one in a series of blogs about the role of research in HIA.] In […]
April 17, 2015

Saving New Yorkers Money by Turning on the TAP for Learning

| By Soffiyah Elijah | Today’s guest blog post is written by Soffiyah Elijah, Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York.  Currently, there is a ban in New York State on incarcerated people receiving financial assistance from the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) to pursue higher education while in […]
March 30, 2015

Was “Race Together” Wrong?

| By Sara Satinsky | Starbucks’ short-lived “Race Together” campaign, in which baristas wrote the phrase on coffee cups, generated lots of conversations – and lots of controversy. Was it a good idea, but poorly implemented? Did it succeed, however slightly, in nudging the nation to talk about racism? Or […]
March 19, 2015

An Uncomfortable Truth – Our Failure to Address Racism

This blog article is a re-post of an open letter to the public from Dr. Muntu Davis, who is the Health Officer and Director for Alameda County Public Health Department in California. Dr. Davis offers the kind of public health leadership we love, linking common health issues with their social […]
March 3, 2015

If Black Lives Matter, We Can’t Stay on the Sidelines

| By Jonathan Heller | Let’s not sit on the sidelines. With those words Dr. Mary Bassett, health commissioner of New York City, in a Perspective for The New England Journal of Medicine clearly and boldly declares that health professionals are accountable for fighting interpersonal and institutional racism, because of […]
February 25, 2015

The Misuse of Jails

| By Logan Harris | Most efforts to reform the criminal justice system have focused on state and federal prisons. But a recent report by the Vera Institute of Justice, Incarceration’s Front Door, examines a level of the justice system just as much in need of reform: Jails. Unlike prisons, jails are […]
February 13, 2015

HIP Interns: Where Are They Now?

| By Celia Harris | As we launched our search for a summer 2015 intern, we did a little reflecting on the wonderful interns we have had over the last seven years, and the important contributions they have made to our organization. We wondered: Where are they now? How have […]
February 10, 2015

Compassion for Individuals or Working to Change the System?

| By Lili Farhang | Two recent stories about people’s generosity toward strangers moved me deeply – but also got me thinking about the gap between our willingness to help individuals and the need to address the roots of our society’s problems. In Detroit, the Free Press featured the determination […]
January 12, 2015

Using an Inside-Outside Strategy to Build Power and Advance Equity

| By Jonathan Heller | HIP recently started the Public Health and Equity Cohort, a group of twelve emerging leaders from public health agencies around the country who are coming together to build their leadership to advance equity within their departments. In developing the 15-month curriculum for the Cohort, we […]