Team Profile Summary
The Boston team frames its work around racism as a root cause of inequities in health and recognizes comprehensive, multilevel racial justice strategies as fundamental to achieving racial and health equity. Our work is rooted in the understanding that health status is influenced by environmental conditions, social relationships, and institutional structures and that individual choices and behavior are largely shaped by the resources available in the places where people live and work. The Boston team is focused on changing policy and practice within the systems that shape the health of our communities, such as: education, criminal justice, employment, housing, land use and food systems.
Team Profile Details
The activities of the Boston team are reflected in these guiding principles:
- Coordination of a Health Equity Training Center that provides education, training, and technical assistance;
- Development of training curricula and materials to educate community health workers, health care providers, and public health professionals about the social determinants of health and racial and ethnic disparities;
- Establishment of the New England Partnership for Health Equity, which is a learning collaborative among New England communities engaged in health equity work;
- Development and implementation of blueprints for action and community coalition building;
- Facilitation of a variety of regional and national activities to support a broad-based health equity movement; and
- Advocacy to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities through data collection, policy, and strategy development at the local, state, and federal levels.
Team Objectives
- Prioritizing Health Equity
- Develop action plan to address health inequities in Boston
- Establish training center to expand health equity strategies across Boston and New England
- Raising Public Awareness
- Develop a city-wide Health Equity Campaign
- Legislative, Policy and Advocacy Development Data Collection
- Regulation Analyze hospital and health center data
- Establish a Health Equity
- Committee to review data and develop recommendations
- Train all Boston CHCs in the collection of data
- BPHC Anti-Racism Work
- Establish an Anti-Racism Advisory Committee
- Establish recommendations for policy, systems and process changes BPHC Health Equity Grants
- Continue to fund equity grants to community-based, faith-based and health organizations in Boston around top funding priority areas: Neighborhood Investment, Building Health Equity, Patient Education and Navigation, Workforce Diversity and Chronic Disease Prevention and Intervention.
- BPHC Health Equity Training Center
- Grantees receiving comprehensive training (undoing-racism, cultural competency, social determinants of health, and health equity)
