Centering Equity & Justice in Rebuilding the Nation’s Public Health Infrastructure

Centering Racial Justice to Strengthen the Public Health Ecosystem advances a systems-level approach to public health transformation rooted in racial justice, shared power, and community leadership. Drawing on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, this project challenges the field to move beyond fragmented or crisis-driven responses and instead strengthen the interconnected systems, narratives, and investments that shape community conditions and health outcomes. Working in partnership with Big Cities Health Coalition, this work advances an ecosystem approach that positions racial justice as foundational to prevention, trust, and long-term wellbeing. This project runs from August 2021 to November 2022.  

This project strengthens the public health ecosystem by embedding racial justice into both emerging and existing public health systems and processes. Guided by two core questions—how equity and justice can be built into new public health processes from the outset, and how they can be meaningfully embedded into existing systems—this work aligns structures, practices, and narratives with community-led priorities and solutions. Through analysis, narrative development, and field engagement, the project contributes to systems of prevention by reinforcing upstream approaches, strengthening narrative power, and supporting public health institutions to move from intention to action.

Primary activities:

• Analyzing lessons from public health COVID-19 responses and recent systems-improvement recommendations to identify implications for strengthening distributional, procedural, and structural equity.

• Examining trends in receptivity to equity- and racial justice–centered approaches across the public health field.

• Clarifying operational definitions of key equity and justice concepts and analyzing narrative trends at the intersection of public health and racial justice.

• Convening discussions with Big Cities Health Coalition members and other public health leaders to ground findings in practice-based experience.

• Synthesizing analysis and field insights into the report Centering Racial Justice to Strengthen the Public Health Ecosystem: Lessons from COVID-19, offering concrete strategies for transforming public health systems.

• Producing a companion video and advancing narratives of interdependence, abundance, and justice that support collective responsibility for community health.