health equity

the problem

At BMSG, we believe that all people deserve to live a long and healthy life. Advocates, researchers, and public health champions already know many of the things we need to do to make this a reality. These include ensuring that everyone has access to quality, affordable housing and reliable transportation; creating jobs that offer a living wage and dignity; protecting our environment and creating safe places to play, work, and learn; increasing access to healthy foods; providing every child with access to quality early care and education; preventing violence by addressing its root causes; and understanding the intersecting structural forces of racism, classism, sexism, xenophobia and other forms of oppression that influence who has access to the building blocks for good health and who doesn’t.

While we have a good sense of what is needed to create communities where everyone can be healthy, we rarely see this story in the news. Historically, the mass media have largely ignored the connection between social, economic, and political power and health. Instead, the media have presented health issues mostly in medical terms, with a focus on personal health habits, physician heroics, or technological breakthroughs. Similarly, social and health programs often focus on giving people skills to beat the odds rather than removing the structural barriers to having successful and healthy lives.

the path to success

Though individual behavior plays a role in health, in the long run it makes more sense — and is more just — to change the environments that shape health outcomes. Public health is just one part of a larger movement for equity and justice, but, together with our community partners, we can use data and storytelling to help foster a deeper understanding of what creates health inequities and what we can do about them. When we communicate effectively about health equity, we broaden the support for — and deepen the commitment to — work for justice. Telling our story is one critical piece of a comprehensive approach for equity.

BMSG’s connection

Whether we are working on violence prevention, childhood trauma, or another public health issue, we are committed to bringing an equity lens to our work at BMSG. We help advocates bring their voices to the debates about health and shift power away from the status quo and back to our communities. We do this by helping advocates and community groups develop and fine-tune their strategies so that they can make better use of the media to advance policies that improve the social determinants of health. For example, we are working with health departments to strengthen their capacity to communicate about racial and health equity. We also work with advocates and journalists to improve and increase news coverage of issues related to health equity, and we have developed case studies outlining effective health equity strategies.