About the Health Equity Guide

The Health Equity Guide is a comprehensive resource of 15 strategic practices that support public health departments and practitioners to plan and implement health equity and racial justice efforts. The strategic practices are organized into three stages of a cyclical gardening framework that illustrates how they relate to each other and mutually support equity goals.

Stage one — cultivate — builds the foundation for equity through gathering the resources, structure, analysis, and leadership necessary to support successful implementation of equity practices. Stage two — plant — describes a diverse set of practices that practitioners can select and nurture to thrive in their particular environment. Stage three — harvest — includes practices for reflecting on impacts, lessons, and successes to bring forward into the future.

Through HIP's experiences working with organizations to advance health equity and racial justice, we have seen that this work is both progressive and iterative. Thus, our framework includes stages, while at the same time remaining intentionally non-linear. There is a place to start, which is also a place to return to throughout the work, as practitioners learn more through planning, implementation, and evaluation.

The Framework, rooted in a gardening allegory, is deeply influenced by the long-standing Indigenous practice of companion planting. For centuries, Indigenous cultures across the globe have practiced sustainable agriculture, focusing on growing plants together that have mutually beneficial relationships, and help nourish the soil. These principles of sustainability, mutuality, care, and cultivation are also ones we want to infuse throughout our health equity and racial justice practices.

Additionally, this framework joins a community of existing organizational change frameworks that center health equity and racial justice, including GARE and the storytelling work of Dr. Camara Jones. Dr. Jones, a preeminent public health leader and researcher, uses allegories like a Gardener’s Tale to illustrate racism and its impacts on health.

We are deeply grateful for the work and wisdom of these communities and experts, and the broader lineage of storytellers from across cultures and time who use allegory, myth, and parables to share truths, lessons, processes, and make meaning of the world around them — our framework was shaped by them for the better.