Health Equity Guide

Your guide to growing a flourishing garden of health equity strategies.

A project of Human Impact Partners

The Health Equity Guide is a comprehensive resource for public health departments and practitioners to plan and implement health equity and racial justice work. It offers 15 strategic practices, organized using a cyclical gardening framework, to illustrate how each mutually supports health equity goals.

Join us in the garden

Imagine you are a gardener looking to grow health equity practices that will make just and equitable impacts in your community. To do so, you will need to cultivate a supportive environment for your strategies to flourish; plant strategies that grow well together and reflect community priorities; and harvest the impacts and lessons learned once your strategies bear fruit.

STAGE 1

Cultivate

Prepare your soil and gather the nutrients you need to begin your garden. Develop a supportive container and environment — with the necessary resources, leadership, and analysis — for your health equity strategies.

STAGE 2

Plant

Select, plant, and care for your growing seeds. Choose and implement a variety of mutually beneficial strategies that you will care for as they grow and advance your health equity and racial justice goals.

STAGE 3

Harvest

Harvest, enjoy, and share your fruit; prune and compost your plants for the next growing season. Celebrate your wins and learn from your successes and challenges before returning to the beginning of this cycle to further develop your health equity practice.

This work is collective, and should not be done alone or in silos. Relationships —internally, with the community, and across government— are foundational to developing equitable practices that center humanity, access, and a sense of belonging.

What’s New?
The new and improved HealthEquityGuide.org includes updated strategic practices mapped onto a cyclical gardening framework that is drawn from a Companion Planting Allegory. The new framework illuminates the importance of cultivating, implementing, and sustaining equitable and just public health practice.