Health Equity and Social Justice

Diversity Crop

The goal of NACCHO's Health Equity and Social Justice program is to advance the capacity of local health departments (LHDs) to confront the root causes of inequities in the distribution of disease and illness through public health practice and their organizational structure.

The program's initiatives explore why and how certain populations bear a disproportionate burden of disease and mortality and what power structures and institutions generate those inequities, in order to design strategy to eliminate them.

NACCHO's Health Equity and Social Justice initiatives include:

    Roots of Health Inequity

    Health Equity and Social Justice Workgroup:

    1. A group of subject matter experts whose work advances the equity and social justice within public health and beyond
    2. Policy statements informed by the workgroup include
      • Paid Sick Leave
      • Health Equity and Social Justice
      • Health and Disability
      • LGBTQ+ Health
      • Police Violence and Racism
      • Health Equity: Mass Incarceration and Structural Racism
      • Immigrant Health
      1. NACCHO 360: an annual conference bringing together public health professionals and local health officials to empower communities by sharing opportunities, providing resources, and creating a network.
      2. Preparedness Summit: an annual conference highlighting pressing issues in preparedness where professionals and local health leaders can better respond to, minimize, and prevent health threats. A recap of the 2023 conference is available here.
      1. Roots of Health Inequity Revised course
      2. HESJ Resource Repository

      Health Equity and Social Justice 101 Online Training Series was developed to build knowledge and inform the practices of LHDs and their partners on health equity and social justice (HESJ) key concepts, principles, and applications.

      • HESJ 101 Training: Part I The Politics of Health Inequity features Dr. Richard Hofrichter discussing how structural racism and class oppression are implicated as root causes of health inequities as well as strategies for acting upon root causes.
      • HESJ 101 Training: Part II Intersectionality discusses intersectionality, a framework for understanding how multiple social identities (i.e. race, gender, class) intersect and are experienced at the individual level and reflect interlocking systems of privilege and oppression at the structural level, as well as applications for public health practice.
      • HESJ 101 Training: Part III Stories from the Field features local public health practitioners discussing how to embed health equity and social justice into public health practice.


      Course Resources

      Roots of Health Inequity is an online learning collaborative and web-based course designed for the public health workforce. The site offers a starting place for those who want to address systemic differences in health and wellness that are actionable, unfair, and unjust. Based on a social justice framework, the course is an introduction to ground public health practitioners in concepts and strategies for taking action in everyday practice.

      Funded by the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health in 2011, the course is open free of charge to any professional interested in addressing the root causes of health inequity. The course material is written primarily for local public health department staff at all levels. The interactive site includes five units and features a rich source of case studies, readings, presentations, video, audio, and group-directed discussions.

      Participants can also expect to:

      • Build a community of peers dedicated to addressing health equity.
      • Strategize more effective ways to act on the root causes of health inequity.
      • Lay the foundation for an organizational culture committed to tackling social injustice.

      Go to rootsofhealthinequity.org to learn more about how to register and participate. For more information, including guidance documents about how your organization can use the course, please contact [email protected].

      “When the history of public health is seen as a history of how populations experience health and illness, how social, economic, and political systems structure the possibilities for healthy or unhealthy lives, how societies create the preconditions for the production and transmission of disease, and how people, both as individuals and as social groups, attempt to promote their own health or avoid illness, we find that public health history is not limited to the study of bureaucratic structures and institutions but pervades every aspect of social and cultural life. Hardly surprisingly, these questions direct attention to issues of power, ideology, social control, and popular resistance.”

      -Elizabeth Fee, introduction to George Rosen, A History of Public Health. Johns Hopkins University Press 1993 (1958): xxxviii.

      Public Health Infrastructure and Systems

      Hassanatu Blake

      Director, Health Equity

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      Public Health Infrastructure and Systems

      Glenda Young-Marquez

      Senior Program Analyst, Health Equity

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      Public Health Infrastructure and Systems

      Jasmine Akuffo

      Senior Program Analyst, Health Equity

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      Public Health Infrastructure and Systems

      Brianna Aldridge

      Program Analyst, Health Equity

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      Public Health Infrastructure and Systems

      Kayla Hall

      Program Analyst

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      Public Health Infrastructure and Systems

      Alexandra Halprin

      Program Analyst, Health Equity

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      For more information about our health equity program, contact [email protected].

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