Advancing Health Equity for All On the Front Lines of Justice in New Orleans

Advancing Health for All: On the Front Lines of Equity and Justice captures stories of lived experience and additional research from 30 experts who presented at the Equity Summit, hosted by Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine and sponsored by RWJF. New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region--with its rich culture and resources, its aching poverty and enduring structural racism, and the intensifying immediacy of a changing climate--offers a window into the interwoven risks that lie before the entire nation. Yet its rich culture and resources also offer a measure of hope, exemplified by the vigorous, equity-oriented work unfolding along so many intersecting pathways. A starting point in any power-building effort is to define community, or more accurately to ask people how they define their own communities--geography, history, ethnicity, religion, and gender identity are potential commonalities that encourage people to stand together. In this volume, we consider many kinds of communities and the relationships within and across them that can seed transformation. Local leadership is key, allowing those most directly affected by inequity to determine their own action agenda, construct the research questions and data-gathering techniques needed to pursue it, and establish indicators and outcomes of success as they seek it. RWJF's commitment is to help communities build the capacity necessary to do that. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Alonzo L. Plough is the chief science officer and vice president of Research-Evaluation-Learning at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Plough has had a distinguished career in public health practice, academia, and philanthropy. His work focuses on improving health and well-being, and achieving health equity. Plough serves as a board member for many health and social welfare organizations. Thomas A. LaVeist is Dean and Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Health Equity at Tulane University, Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He seeks to develop an orienting framework in the development of policy and interventions to address race disparities in health-related outcomes. Specific areas of expertise include: U.S. health and social policy, the role of race in health research, social factors contributing to mortality, longevity and life expectancy, quantitative and demographic analysis and access, and utilization of health services.