Advancing Health Equity for All : On the Front Lines of Justice in New Orleans

Abstract

Advancing Health Equity for All captures stories of lived experience and additional research from 30 experts who presented at the Equity Summit, hosted by Tulane University Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and sponsored by RWJF in December 2022. The Gulf Coast region—with its rich culture and resources, its aching poverty and enduring structural racism, and the intensifying immediacy of a changing climate—offers a window into the interwoven risks that lie before the entire nation. Yet the region’s rich culture and resources also offer a measure of hope, exemplified by the vigorous, equity-oriented work that is unfolding along so many intersecting pathways. A starting point in any power-building effort is to define community, or, more accurately, to ask people how they define their own communities—geography, history, ethnicity, religion, and gender identity are potential commonalities that encourage people to stand together. In this volume, we consider many kinds of communities and the relationships within and across them that can seed transformation. Local leadership is key, allowing those most directly affected by inequity to determine their own action agenda, construct the research questions and data-gathering techniques needed to pursue it, and establish indicators and outcomes of success as they seek it. RWJF’s commitment is to help communities build the capacity necessary to do that.