Integrate Health is a founding member of the Community Health Impact Coalition. We want to share and echo the coalition’s statement in regard to the recent killing of George Floyd that has sparked a movement across the world. Doing so, we affirm our commitment to the action’s outlined below.
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Racism is and has long been a public health emergency. The disproportionate death rates of people of color during COVID-19 and recent string of racist killings – George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many whose names we’ll never know – underscore the degree to which dismantling white supremacy is unequivocally connected to enabling human flourishing. As a Coalition:
First, we repent for not doing more, sooner. In the world of development, the white moderate thrives. Organizations led by black people receive less financial support. Our failure to consistently challenge simplistic and patronizing narratives of pity and philanthropic heroism is an obstacle to justice.
Second, we re-commit to the best parts of our shared work in creating a fairer and more just world:
Include Community Health Workers (CHWs) We re-commit to the norm that decisions about CHWs should not be made without CHWs. We re-commit to standing beside them in their fight for legal recognition and fair pay. Only in a racist system is it okay to coerce large numbers of women of color to work without pay.
Institutionalize universal health care. We re-commit to working in support of governments to build health systems that have a legal obligation to serve all of their people with access to quality health care. Inequalities in resource allocations shape expectations on the value of lives of patients in communities of color and insufficient resource commitments have driven these inequalities. Only in a racist system is it okay for the wealthy to receive top-quality care while others receive no care at all.
Radically collaborate. In the words of civil rights activist Audre Lorde, there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives. Only in a racist system do logos matter more than lives.
Third, we commit to going further, in pragmatic solidarity, and in recognition that Black lives matter:
The leadership teams of the Coalition and most of the organizations within it are disproportionately male and white. We commit to changing our hiring cultures to seek out the women of color who are on the frontlines of most healthcare delivery.
The Coalition has not sufficiently grappled with the foreign gaze. We commit to doing so and working toward rectifying historical imbalances in research agenda-setting, design, and authorship of academic global health publications
The Community Health Impact Coalition
DIMAGI • INTEGRATE HEALTH • LAST MILE HEALTH • LIVING GOODS • LWALA COMMUNITY ALLIANCE • MEDIC MOBILE • MUSO • ONE TO ONE AFRICA • PARTNERS IN HEALTH • PIVOT • POSSIBLE • PRAEKELT • THINKMD • VILLAGEREACH • VITAL PAKISTAN • WUQU’ KAWOQ