Summary

The early days of the Biden-Harris administration hold tremendous power to turn the tide towards justice and health. We need bold, immediate, and systems-focused action to address the acute and long-standing health crises impacting our communities, including severe economic inequality, housing insecurity, systems of state violence, and the gutting of public health infrastructure. To move towards collective health, this administration must swiftly and directly heed the demands of communities and organizers most directly impacted by systemic racism and inequity.

Because of systemic racism, it is people of color — especially Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities — who are disproportionately harmed by these intersecting crises, all of which have been further exacerbated by COVID-19 and the global climate crisis. These same communities are also leading the work of naming and building transformative solutions.

Public health officials, institutions, and practitioners can hold the Biden-Harris administration accountable to its commitments to center racial justice and health equity, and push further for visionary solutions to support collective health.

We need to end public health’s collaboration with, complicity in, and silence on systems of harm in both the private and public sectors. When we build public health power, it must be in partnership with organizers and movements — not with carceral, polluting, profit-driven, or other systems of harm.

Building on our Health Equity Policy Platform for COVID-19 Response and Recovery, we’ve compiled this cross-sector policy platform because cultivating health, well-being, and liberation requires immediate upstream action to redress past and ongoing harms. It requires following the leadership—and centering the demands of—those who have been most impacted by systemic violence and injustice. And we know that public health has a critical role to play. From writing OpEds in local and national publications, to leveraging our positional power to create policy change in support of peoples’ demands, we can build with communities and movements across the country towards collective health.

This policy platform consists of demands gathered from community groups, movements, organizers, and public health organizations across the country, that support health equity and justice.

This platform includes policies across the following issue areas, along with ways for public health to take action:

• Economic Security
• Housing Security
• Community Safety
• Public Health Infrastructure