Align with and Support Social Justice Movements

How public health departments can effect long-lasting, transformative change in partnership with social justice movements

Social change happens through organized social movements: the intentional and sustained efforts of grassroots and advocacy movements to build power, deepen democracy, and transform material conditions. Many health departments have begun to see the connections between public health and movements for social justice. For example, health departments are committing to addressing structural racism as a strategy to achieve health equity and racial justice by passing resolutions, training staff, and shifting organizational policies, practices, and culture. However, much of public health remains siloed, and much work remains to be done to build a real and powerful alignment between the health equity movement within public health and larger social justice movements. Health departments have the power and opportunity to connect with social justice movements through integrating strategies that support community power-building and engage in local campaigns.

To make long-lasting change, it’s as critical as ever that public health departments strategically align with and support wider social justice movements that are transforming social, economic, and environmental conditions and pushing back against threats to democracy. Building deep alliances and alignment between health equity and other social movements calls for a transformative mindset and practice shift within public health. It requires undoing biomedical approaches to public health that have taken root over centuries, and adopting a new paradigm for what public health is and should be — one that goes back to the field’s more ambitious and radical roots.

Action Steps health departments can take to align with and support social justice movements

Align with movements:

• Learn about social movement history locally, nationally, and globally
• Explore the grassroots organizing landscape and campaigns in your community to understand their issues, processes, and narratives and how they build power and motivate their base
• Develop deep and meaningful relationships with local social movement organizers and organizations and commit to supporting campaigns they initiate and lead

Actively support movements:

• Prioritize, join, and bring resources to coalitions, actively organizing to transform material conditions
• Conduct direct and/or indirect advocacy in decision-making contexts to support campaigns and movements
• Develop and promote a narrative that connects the dots between social movements, health equity and racial justice