Build Your Container

How public health departments can cultivate supportive environments and norms to embody health equity and racial justice in practice

Containers for health equity and racial justice work are the practices and norms, rooted in shared values, that create a space for individuals and groups to be and do together.

Intentionally cultivating a counter-cultural container – one that prioritizes relationships, trust, and full humanity – is important to any space where people are learning and working together. It makes the hard work of addressing oppression a little easier while creating space for the group to have conflict, share emotions, and offer accountability. Containers for equity work allow teams to model on a small scale what they want to see on a larger scale in their health department, communities, and society. Replicating dominant norms and systems will not advance health equity and racial justice.

A well-curated and held container creates processes and spaces where:

• All group members feel they belong and can be themselves in all their beauty and complexity
• Group members have mutual, trusting relationships with others
• The group commits to and practices a shared set of agreements, which help them advance shared aims and work through interpersonal, team, and organizational conflict that arises in systems change work

Action Steps health departments can take to build containers for equity work:

While all members of the group are responsible for shaping and maintaining the container, it is often team leaders, facilitators, conveners, or organizers who initiate and guide the process of defining the container.

If you are in this role, here are some action steps for building the container:

• Build strong facilitation skills to effectively lean into conflict, address power dynamics, center humanity, and support group work and agreements
• Deepen your understanding of power and how it is exercised along multiple dimensions, including identity and social position, institutional role, expertise/experience, and others
• Design spaces that are fully inclusive and accessible to all, using access as a guiding principle, not an afterthought
• Build relationships with the people you work with, and share identities, experiences, skills and hobbies, families and communities, as ways to feel connected
• Identify shared values and use these as guides for decisions, actions, and ideas
• Encourage naming emotions and build in the support needed for emotional regulation