P4HE's 2022 summit: On the front lines of equity and justice

In December 2022, the Partners for Advancing Health Equity and the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, hosted the inaugural Partners for Health Equity Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana. Day one focused on discovering New Orleans through immersive, place-based experiences. Days two and three featured sessions focused on advancing health equity and justice across a range of topics.

Check out the following pages for learnings from each of the Summit sessions.  

• Conversations with Thomas LaVeist, Alonzo Plough, and Sheldon Watts: This opening plenary session from the Partners for Advancing Health Equity 2022 Summit held a conversation around health equity and next steps in advancing the conversation.
• Community & Coalition Building: How to Amass Power and Make Change: This breakout session explored the work of the Austin Justice Coalition (AJC), a community organization that focuses on improving the quality of life for people who are Black, Brown, and poor by developing, organizing, and providing robust programs and events.
• Public Education, Racism, and Community Health: Lessons from New Orleans: This breakout session featured clips from the film documenting community efforts to influence the rebuilding of New Orleans’ public education system after Hurricane Katrina. It highlighted structural flaws in the American charter school system through community and board meeting footage, as well as interviews with parents, students, and teachers.
• Measuring Progress on Health Equity: This breakout session examined effective strategies for measuring health equity across various contexts. A central focus of the discussion was the necessity of concurrently assessing both health equity and the underlying determinants of health inequities. The session emphasized that meaningful evaluation of health equity outcomes must account for systemic resource disparities, an area often overlooked in the healthcare sector.
• Advancing Health Equity through Equitable Grantmaking: This breakout session presented an overview on the current field of equitable grantmaking in health equity and the five building blocks needed to achieve better health for all through better philanthropy.  
• Addressing Historical and Intergeneration Trauma for Health Equity: This breakout session explained how power, love, and vision are foundational elements needed when addressing historical and intergenerational trauma for health equity in the context of Native American settler colonialism.
• Leveraging Data for Sustainable Justice: This breakout session highlighted the need to align health and racial equity goals with data collection and research efforts. It introduced the Trust, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) framework as a guiding model for using innovative, collaborative research to drive action toward eliminating racism and promoting equity. The session also emphasized the importance of shifting public and policymaker perspectives to address structural and internalized inequities.
• Climate, Disasters, and the Future of Health in Gulf Cities: This plenary Q&A session revolved around a series of questions on how lower-income minority communities are impacted by climate change and natural disasters, as well as what the future could look like for these populations.  
• Lessons Learned from the HIV Epidemic: Harmonizing Policy and Priority to Support Ending the HIV Epidemic in America: This breakout session discussed the current state of the HIV pandemic, how the country actionably got to this point, and what the national strategy is moving forward.  
• Use and Misuse of Race in Medicine: This breakout session highlighted critical issues in how medicine is practiced and thought of with regard to racial health equity. It included discussion on the management of chronic diseases among black Americans with an emphasis on oral health, type 2 diabetes, and major depressive disorders, research that focuses on the social implications of new genomic knowledge, particularly in communities of color, and uniting medicine and public health, with the goal of saving and improving quality of human lives.
• Climate Change as a Threat Multiplier: This breakout session explored specific issues exemplifying the threat of climate change as a "threat multiplier" and underscored the relevance of climate change to any conversation focused on advancing health equity.
• Community-Engaged Participatory Action Research (PAR): Rewriting the Script for Equitable Healthcare: This breakout session addressed three key issues: challenges in the health care system that come from devaluing the knowledge of parents who have children with disabilities, how a "Rewrite the Script" process can help create health equity allies to address challenges, and what it means to go from story-telling to story-doing.
• Health & Place: Building a Framework for Health Equity: This breakout session presented on the "built environment" and how this impacts social determinants of health. Panelists highlighted who can be considered partners in this context, noting that built environments require collaboration to shape positive outcomes.
• Promoting Healthcare Equity through the Medicaid Program: This breakout session discussed the role of Medicaid through a lens of health equity.  
• Building Our Skills in Systems-Thinking and Mapping: Learning & Practicing Systems Thinking: This breakout session outlined what constitutes systems-thinking and featured a participatory mapping process with the audience, and a presentation on community-based system dynamics.  
• Communication, Data Visualization, and Storytelling: This breakout session highlighted the importance of the components of communication, data visualization and storytelling being merged together as one in order to effectively message information.  
• New Orleans Jazz as a metaphor for American Life: This closing plenary session used New Orleans jazz as a metaphor for American life, offering both discussion and performance to conclude the Summit.

Interested in other P4HE learnings?  

• Sign up for P4HE’s newsletter for updates on upcoming events, resources, and future learning opportunities.    
• Check out our Learn page for additional insights and tools, including learnings from our quarterly learning journeys.  
• Learn more about the P4HE Collaborative in our Q&A blog.  

Have a resource you would like to share on this topic?  

• Recommend resources for our Resource Library.