Our Mission
Health in Partnership transforms the field of public health to center equity and builds collective power with social justice movements.
Organized social justice movements bring about sustainable, long-term change — because social movements can build the power needed to truly transform the political, social, economic, and environmental conditions that shape our material realities.
While public health’s roots are in social justice, we’ve moved away from that history, and become siloed from those movements. HIP builds bridges across our worlds, so that public health’s power — our voice, evidence, and resources — are strategically aligned with and responsive to the social movements leading the fight for a just, equitable, and healthy future.
Our Ecosystem Approach
No single organization alone can overcome the threats our communities are facing. Partnerships and networks are essential for transformative change. HIP’s ecosystem is oriented around a set of core partners who we collaborate with most closely. These people and organizations are our companions in strategy and learning, to whom we are ethically and politically accountable.
HIP’s Core Partners Include
Local community power-building organizations (CPBOs) and national grassroots organizing networks, rooted in and directly organizing impacted communities.
Local community power-building organizations (CPBOs) and national grassroots organizing networks, rooted in and directly organizing impacted communities.
Local community power-building organizations (CPBOs) and national grassroots organizing networks, rooted in and directly organizing impacted communities.
Governmental public health agencies and leaders at the local, state, and – where feasible – federal levels.
Local community power-building organizations (CPBOs) and national grassroots organizing networks, rooted in and directly organizing impacted communities.
Non-governmental public health organizations, including national nonprofits and associations; academic institutions, faculty, and students; philanthropy; and individual practitioners who influence the field.
our values
Structural Transformation
We achieve health equity and racial justice by working collaboratively with social justice movements to transform our environmental, economic, social, and political systems, as well as the structural rules, laws, power hierarchies, and narratives that make transformation durable.
Centering the Heart
We lead with our humanity and the centrality of our relationships, making space to acknowledge how our bodies and hearts feel, to heal from the traumas of living in systems of advantage and oppression, and to build a sense of belonging.
Intersectional Racial Justice
We will all only truly be free when we dismantle White supremacy, anti-Blackness, and other forms of intersecting oppression — so that our racial identity, income, gender, sexual orientation, or ability do not limit our potential to live free, dignified, and joyous lives.
Authentic Democracy
We build community power so that all people can collectively shape the policies and systems that impact our lives.
Ecosystem Partnerships
We build relationships across our core ecosystem partners to coalesce the power needed to achieve our vision.
Emergent Practice
Adaptive and strategic risk-taking are fundamental to transformation. We will always have much to learn, and as conditions change, we change.
Learn more about our work
HIP transforms the field of public health to center equity and builds collective power with social justice movements. Join us in the fight for the public’s health.
Our Roles
Network Weaving
We convene and create opportunities to build trust, strengthen coordination, and enable resource-sharing across our ecosystem.
Organizing and Advocacy
We organize, mobilize, and enable our base of public health practitioners and organizations to take collective action in pursuit of transformative, structural change.
Research and Case-Making
We generate and elevate research and stories that center community experience, advance social justice campaigns, and spur policy change.
Narrative Leadership
We articulate a justice-oriented North Star vision and an analysis of the causes and remedies for persistent inequities. And we enable our partners to use this narrative in their context to shift what’s possible.
Capacity Building
As facilitators and leadership developers, we strengthen the strategic capacity of public health and movement leaders and organizations.
Our Programs
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Our Story
Since 2006, HIP has worked to advance health equity by bringing the power of public health — our knowledge, skills, and resources — into public policy and social justice movements.
Founded as “Human Impact Partners,” HIP propelled the practice of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) in public policy in the US, helping to build a robust field of practitioners capable of evaluating how policy decisions shape community health. Over the past 18 years, we have established ourselves as a trusted partner, valued for our commitment to justice, our practice of building authentic relationships, and our rigorous approach to working across public health and community organizing spaces.
In 2015, after a period of reflection and inquiry with community partners and other allies, HIP made a significant shift to expand our strategies, moving from a project-based approach using HIAs to a social justice movement-based approach. We invested in a new set of strategies — Advocacy, Capacity Building, and Organizing — while continuing to use our research to uncover the health and equity impacts of public policies and practices. We honed in on the ways public health can support community power-building to dismantle systems of oppression, with an explicit focus on dismantling structural racism and unjust power imbalances.
Deep programmatic innovation beginning in 2016 — including our Health Instead of Punishment Program, Leadership Institute, Public Health Awakened, Power-building Partnerships for Health, and our Health Equity Guide — reinforced HIP’s role as a progressive flank within public health, and as a resource for the wider field of practitioners seeking to center equity and justice in their work. Our adoption of an organizational racial justice framework in 2018 explicitly prioritized aligning our internal policy and practices with our values.
By 2022, HIP grew our organizational capacity substantially and formalized three overarching programs: Policy & Organizing, Capacity Building, and Bridging Partnerships & Strategies. We sharpened our analysis, frameworks, and offerings to support deep systems change and collective power-building, and redefined our focus on 4 key issue areas: housing justice, climate justice, economic justice, and community safety.
In 2025, we evolved our original name from Human Impact Partners (HIP) to Health In Partnership (still HIP!) to better reflect the spirit and focus of our current work leveraging relationships and inside-outside strategies across public health and social justice movements to build power for equity and justice.
