Across the United States, state and local health departments and community power-building organizations are collaborating to challenge the social, environmental, and economic conditions that create health and racial inequities.
This work is more important than ever given the intersecting and cascading crises of COVID-19, police violence, and housing and economic insecurity. Health departments are accountable to these crises and should increasingly seed and nurture collaborations with groups explicitly focused on building community power as a strategy to achieve health equity. In that spirit, this discussion will highlight a framework to approach this work, along with examples of health department and community organizing collaborations.