The Let’s Talk Series is a collection of resources designed to promote discussion and understanding of how key concepts in health equity apply in public health practice. Each resource contains discussion questions to spark dialogue, reflection, and action to address the social determinants of health.
Intersectionality moves us from one dimensional understandings of discrimination and marginalization to the multifaceted roots of injustice. This Let’s Talk defines intersectionality and what it means for public health. It helps readers avoid flattening or whitening intersectionality and instead use it for transformative change.
Defines community engagement for health equity and encourages viewing community members as stakeholders and partners in public health decision-making
Introduces the concept of Whiteness to public health audiences
Positions values as structural drivers of health equity, influencing priorities and action and at the individual, organizational and societal levels
Explores justice as the ethical basis of health equity.
Encourages public health practitioners to act on racism as a key structural determinant of health inequities.
Highlights the importance of advocacy as both a strategy and practice within public health, and describes the different ways advocacy can contribute to addressing the social determinants of health and improving health equity.
Describes how public health works at three levels- downstream, midstream, and upstream – to improve everyone’s chance for good health.
Explores how the language public health practioners and organizations use to describe populations influences how we frame problems and solutions, make decisions, and implement acitivities that seek to reduce inequities between groups.
Offers public health organizations a framework for reflection and action.
Explores the approaches public health organizations use to close the gap between the most and least healthy and reduce inequities all along the socio-economic status gradient.
Describes the concepts of health equity and inequity and how they apply to public health practices.