Centering Community in Public Health Initiative
Dear Praxis community,
As many of you know, our focus is on centering community in all that we and our partners do. We believe that those who are most impacted by society’s injustices know what is needed to advance health justice and racial equity, with the support and resources from all of us. Praxis puts our values into praxis through strategies, events, and policies that build community power.
We are excited to announce a new set of offerings from the Praxis Project that are designed to spread the wisdom of community advocates, organizers and partners to other fields, such as public health, philanthropy, and allied professions. Please see below for the release of our Learning Circle brief series, upcoming webinars, and training/technical assistance menu, and share with partners seeking to advance health justice!
Briefs
We are excited to release our 2020 Learning Circle brief series, which summarizes the vast knowledge and wisdom of over 100 community organizers in Praxis’ network. Each of our nine briefs will dive deep into a key issue that connects grassroots community organizers and public health, philanthropy, and allied professions. Collaboration and shared knowledge are assets to advancing health justice and racial equity; we believe these reports will contribute to our mutual understanding of health equity.
Over the next few months, we will be releasing the following briefs in this series:
Community Centered Health Justice and Racial Equity: Organic Efforts Towards Health Equity-Driven Policy and Practice
Measuring the Impact of Building Community Power for Health Justice: What? Why? And How?
Recognizing Healing-Centered Community Practices as a Complement to Trauma-Informed Interventions and Services
The Role of Culture in Basebuilding Community Organizing and Health Justice
Data 4 Social Change
Community Centered Engagement--Organizing Beyond The Ballot Box
The Grammar of Health Equity: The Noun and The Verb
Community Centered Policy--Ensuring Policies Meet Community Priorities, Build Infrastructure, Increase Agency and Dignity for All
We will be kicking off the brief series with Praxis’ core set of principles for how we operate authentically and in partnership with community: The Praxis Principles for Health Justice & Racial Equity. These principles will be released on Wednesday, March 25th during our webinar (see info below), with the remaining briefs to follow. We are thankful for the incredible insight, organizing, and advocacy of our partners who helped support the development of this content.
The Praxis Principles for Health Justice & Racial Equity Webinar
Date/Time: March 25th, 11-12pm PST
Registration: Free
The Praxis Project has organized a set of Principles for Health Justice and Racial Equity to help guide our work in partnership with allies in order to center community interests in the design, promotion, and implementation of policies and initiatives that support justice and equity for everyone. These principles are inspired by the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, a guiding framework, created in 1996 by 40 diverse environmental justice leaders and organizers. Through these principles, we envision a society in which community organizers, affected communities, advocates and policymakers move beyond just addressing inequitable outcomes, to where the systems that lead to inequity are transformed through community-centered initiatives that advance health justice. Read more about the upcoming webinar series.
Trainings
Praxis’ Centering Community in Public Health trainings are designed to equip professionals in public health, philanthropy, and allied fields with knowledge, skills, and tools from grassroots community organizing to achieve health justice and racial equity. Each training offered by the Praxis Project is developed from rich practical experience partnering with a network of 150 base building organizations across the country working across the social determinants of health equity, in addition to Praxis’ organizational knowledge and expertise in social change and public health.
Health and social service organizations are increasingly recognizing the need to address structural factors that impact health, and the need to do so with the direction of community. Join our trainings for concrete guidance and tools to change the status quo, and reimagine how we achieve health equity. For more information on Praxis’ Centering Community in Public Health training content, see the Training Center.