For Black History Month 2020, NCSD is honoring pivotal Black public health leaders that have made major contributions to the mission of health equity. We’ll be posting blogs here all month, so stay tuned.

At NCSD, we strive to promote health equity in all of our work. At NCSD, Health Equity is defined by “the study of the various barriers different populations face when accessing health care, and what their root causes are. By examining these root causes–or social determinants of health-NCSD hopes to address them through all of the work it does and ensure that these often-marginalized groups are able to access the care they need.” A key component of health equity is racial equity. Racial equity in action as defined by our members during  the Mobilizing for Racial Equity breakout session at Engage 2019 is, “the elimination of unjust health, social, economic, and political disparities that exist by improving the lives of people who have been marginalized because of their racial and/or ethnic background.”

NCSD is encouraging our field to use a health equity lens to think critically when digesting national STD trends and examining health disparities in your jurisdiction. Below are some resources NCSD compiled to support this work.

Resources on using a racial equity lens:

• • Framing Issues with a Racial Equity Lens
    • https://www.racialequitytools.org/module/framing-issues-with-a-racial-equity-lens
  • Bias Cleanse
    • http://www.lookdifferent.org/what-can-i-do/bias-cleanse
  • Intersectionality
    • From the author herself Kimberlé Crenshaw: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf
  • Using a racial equity lens to assess the impact of a proposed intervention
    • https://www.raceforward.org/practice/tools/racial-equity-impact-assessment-toolkit