PRIORITY AREAS
Where We Build Power
There is no shortage of ideas for health equity. What communities need is organized power to win the care they deserve. Over two years, we spoke with hundreds of people about our healthcare system, hosting over 50 listening sessions with groups nationwide to determine: What’s going on? And how can we actually make people well?
What we found was a deep need to shift power away from corporate, profit-driven interests and put it back into communities’ hands. Three priority areas emerged as places where communities were ready to build power and where we could win tangible changes: Community-Centered Care, Birth Justice, and Health System Accountability & Healthcare Financialization.
PRIORITY AREAS
1. Community Centered Care
Care works when providers are neighbors who truly know us—sharing our language, our culture, and our reality. Yet too many decisions about health care are made by corporate suits who have never talked to patients and only see care as a profit-making. This priority focuses on giving communities control over how resources are used, where clinics are needed, and what kind of programming to invest in. Community members should sit on governance boards for hospitals, insurance, and other entities that determine wellness and health for communities.
PRIORITY AREAS
2. Birth Justice
Every person giving birth should have equal potential to have a safe pregnancy and delivery, regardless of their zip code, what they look like, or how much money they make. Yet, Black women are still three times more likely to die during childbirth than their white counterparts. This priority fights to remove legislative barriers to midwife and doula care, expand insurance coverage to include these services, and increase the number of Black and brown birth workers across the nation. It demands training for healthcare providers against racial and gender bias, with systems to hold providers accountable for discrimination and negligence.
Most importantly, it puts Black and brown women at the forefront of these changes—using their expertise to inform policy decisions, including them in hospital and health system governance entities, and funding their initiatives to bring birth justice to their communities
PRIORITY AREAS
3. Health System Accountability & Healthcare Financialization
An accountable healthcare system measures success by how many people it helped get and stay well, not how much money it made when people got sick. But corporate suits see dollar signs when they look at our medical system, jacking up prices, making our system harder to navigate, and shielding bad actors from consequences.
Private equity acquires hospitals and clinics specifically to cut costs and extract profit, then abandon communities and people in need. Insurance companies deny care first, then burden patients with the appeal process because they know folks are too tired and overwhelmed to fight back. Pharmaceutical companies know people need their drugs to survive, so they charge a sky-high price tag because it’s either take your medication or die. This priority fights to get corporate interests out of healthcare and make sure communities are calling the shots when it comes to care.
