Drawing on a national scan of nongovernmental public health and community power-building groups, this report explains how we at HIP approach our work to shift the field of public health, the research we conducted to better understand the gaps between public health and community power-building organizations, and the implications of what we’ve learned.
At the time of release of this report, right after Trump’s second election to presidency, the empowering of corporations, dismantling of the civil service, and the appointment of anti-science, anti-equity leadership pose a major threat to trust in public institutions and the health and safety of the public.
At HIP, we believe that advancing equity, especially in times of deep crisis and challenge, requires confronting the vastly unequal distribution of power in our society and dismantling systems of advantage and oppression that produce and maintain inequitable conditions. We also know that sustainable, long-term change occurs because of social movements that chip away at these structures until they crumble, while visioning and building new, just systems. We want the field of public health to see itself in these movements; to see the field’s power and potential to align with social justice movements leading the fight to advance health equity.
This report, Reimagining Public Health Advocacy, charts a path forward to a bold, justice-centered public health movement. We envision a public health movement that deeply partners with — and provides infrastructure to support — community power-building organizations and networks. In our view, public health practice is most effective when we design our work to shift, share, and help build the power of those most impacted by injustice to transform the economic, social, and environmental conditions that determine our health.
To understand what it would take for public health to build relationships with CPBOs and the wider social justice movements they lead, HIP designed a national landscape scan of public health entities and CPBOs. Drawing from interviews from 13 CPBO and national CPBO network representatives and f 22 public health NGOs (mostly large national organizations representing different aspects of public health and its workforce, as well as academic public health groups), we explored what gaps exist between the two and where there is possibility and excitement to build shared strategy and mutual support.
Despite the disconnects in cultures and structures revealed by our interviews, public health NGOs and CPBOs have powerful potential to work together on advocacy and policy strategies to achieve racial justice and health equity.
- Public health NGOs can identify campaigns they are willing to align with, and start by building relationships with CPBO partners and engaging in advocacy. Inside and outside of government
- Academic public health can explore setting up “activist labs,” modeled on those already in place, and/or incorporate advocacy skill-building and community power-building concepts into their existing curricula
- Funders can support all of these initiatives at the local, regional, and national levels, incorporating community power-building concepts and strategies into their own theories of change and funding streams.
- CPBOs can reach out to public health counterparts, and welcome them into advocacy opportunities (such as data, reports, and letter writing) that begin to build trust and relationships
To facilitate these actions, and responding to the findings from our landscape scan, HIP launched the Public Health for Community Power Coalition in the summer of 2024 to close the advocacy gap in the public health ecosystem by bringing public health organizations into relationship with CPBOs around these groups’ existing policy campaigns.
To learn more, contact Sophia (Sophie) Simon-Ortiz, Organizing Project Director, at sophia@humanimpact.org.
