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.
We understand health to mean the collective wellbeing of all living beings and the planet, which are inextricably linked and interdependent.
We know that building collective health requires reckoning with the past and current harms of systemic violence, racism, and all forms of oppression. It means centering the experiences, knowledge, and leadership of those who have been most harmed by current structures, and fundamentally transforming power relations to build new systems grounded in racial justice and collective healing.
We envision a public health field rooted in equity and racial justice, acting in partnership with and accountable to social justice movements to shift the unjust power imbalances and systems of oppression that create and uphold inequities. We need a broad and deep public health ecosystem – bridging government, non-governmental public health organizations, and community power-building groups – capable of transforming the material conditions that drive health.
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.
Centering the Heart
We lead with our humanity and the centrality of our relationships, making space to acknowledge how our bodies and hearts feel, and to heal from the traumas of living in systems of advantage and oppression.
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.
Partnerships
It will take many people and organizations working together to achieve our vision. We partner with governments, grassroots organizing, and community power-building groups to build strong relationships and alliances to transform our institutions and systems.
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 approach
Shift and Leverage Power
We aim to shift who holds power and how power is held so that communities who experience inequities have self-determination. We use and leverage our own power, as public health, to fight.
Build and Align With Movements
We build visionary, strategic, and authentic leadership in public health and bring our collective voice, evidence, and resources into strategic alignment with social justice movements fighting for equity and justice.
Advance Structural Solutions
We transform policies, institutions, and narratives across our environmental, economic, social, and political systems. We work with the public health system to prioritize structural change within the sector itself.
Deepen Democracy
We make government more transparent, accountable, and democratic by transforming internal systems, policies, and practices, and by deepening relationships with community organizations that model co-governance and power-sharing.
Embody Liberatory Practices
We create spaces in our organization, work, and partnerships that model collective care, cultivate trust, allow us to feel and heal, and welcome our whole selves.
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.
