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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Reclaiming Public Health as a Social Movement with Dr. Jamila M. Porter and Aysha Dominguez Pamukcu
00:15:31
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- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. My name is Chanel Bunger. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with two brilliant leaders. We are joined today by Dr. Jamila Porter and Aisha Pamaku, who join us today to share insights into their backgrounds, their new book that they co authored, Strategic Skills for Public Health Practice, Advancing Equity and Justice, and a bit more. Dr. Porter and Aisha, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [00:25]
B
Thank you to be here.
- [00:27]
A
Perfect. Well, before we get into everything, I'll have you each introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about your background and work in healthcare. Dr. Porter, do you want to get us started out?
- [00:35]
C
Sure. I'm Jamila Porter. I am chief of staff at the de Beaumont foundation, and I am also principal investigator of MAiD for Health Justice. And MAiD is an acronym that stands for Modernized Anti Racist Data Ecosystems. I've worked in public health a very long time now, a couple of decades, working in a variety of areas, including social determinants of health data and transportation, justice policy evaluation, and community power building. And I have been with de Beaumont for almost five years now. Before this, I worked in injury and violence prevention in partnership with nonprofit organizations and state and local health departments. And in addition to the work in philanthropy that I do now and in the nonprofit sector, I also worked in consulting and international development.
- [01:32]
A
Thank you so much, Dr. Porter. Ayesha, hi.
- [01:36]
B
Thanks again for having us. My name is Aisha Pamukou. I'm the director of the Policy Fund at the San Francisco foundation. And there I work on government community partnerships, on passing equitable housing policies and other policies that improve economic equity in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm also the founder of Movement Praxis. And my origin story, which Jamil and I both talk about in the book How We Came to Public Health, is I'm a human rights and civil rights lawyer who found her way into public health, and there's been no turning back from there. So happy to be here.
- [02:18]
A
Perfect. Thank you both for those introductions. And now getting into it a bit, can you both talk about the book that you've co authored?
- [02:25]
C
Absolutely. I'll start and then, Aisha, feel free to maybe if that works, for you, to throw in. So for our book entitled Advancing Equity and Justice, we describe it as a call to reimagine public health as a truly dynamic social movement that is rooted in community leadership in public health and also in healthcare. It's often this sense of a professionalized space with experts that have only clinical practice or expertise, grounded in research and formal institutions, and academia, and that is part of who is within public health practice. But really our roots and our foundations are in social justice. And so this book is about confronting the root causes of health inequities, which are powerful systems that determine how long and how well we live. But the solution that is already part of who we are as a field, which is around community leadership and social justice movements. Through the book, we are challenging practitioners to move beyond some of the ideology we have, around technical fixes, but instead really embracing the moral clarity and sort of collective action that we need to improve health for all. And so this book is a practical guide that helps readers to do this work and includes research, policy, historical context, and systems analysis, but also has insights from movement leaders, community members, and others who've been engaged in this work, as well as really amazing and enlivening illustrations that give additional focus and clarity to the work ahead for public health, but also in a way that brings joy and hope to the way that we believe that we should approach the work.
- [04:33]
B
Amazing. Thanks, Jamila. I would add that the intention of this book is to be visionary, to expand the radical imagination of our field and really embrace our role as a social movement, as Jamila was saying. But it's also practical. How do we do that? How do we think more like a movement? How do we reclaim our social justice roots, especially at a time when both science and our democracy are under attack? And because the stakes are so urgent, we really think this is a book for our times and it gives our field a much needed guide for how do you respond to disinformation? How do we address equity initiatives being rolled back and even the word equity being prohibited in some places? And how do we address the declining trust in our institutions, including our public health institutions, as a threat to our community health and the very foundation of our democracy? So we really hope and anticipate that readers will find some answers and some inspiration in this book.
- [05:45]
A
I love that that's truly important what you guys are doing right now and kind of zooming out just a little bit. Can we talk about some maybe public health trends that you're both keeping an eye on in your roles today, or just Overall healthcare trends? Dr. Porter, I'll start with you again.
- [06:02]
C
Sure. I think that building on what we talk about in the book, the trend around and it's been happening for a long time, but it really hit home this year with the new presidential administration is around the equity and justice initiatives and the use of the term equity and the prohibitions around it. And honestly, the castigation of people who do this work. And I think that is a trend that is continuing. It has intensified. It has, and it continues to be an area of focus for our work, but also for the nation as a whole. And also, I'll note that in the book, we talk about this in vivid detail, very honestly, confronting it no holds barred, and about the essential nature of equity, of justice, of liberation for public health, work, for advancing community health, and how they are inexorably linked. So we can't have one without the other. We can't have improvements in health, no matter what area we're looking at across the social determinants, whether we're talking about economic, health, education, transportation, you name it, we need equity and justice to do that. So in the book, we also talk about how to do the work without saying the words, that the words are only a way that we've used to characterize and sort of a descriptor on the work. But the work itself is about, as Dr. Kamar Jones notes, about valuing all people and populations equally, about recognizing and rectifying historic and contemporary injustices and providing people with resources according to need. So if we're doing those three things, we're doing the work of equity. If we're transforming systems to make them better for everyone, we're doing the work of justice. And I think that that is an underlying undercurrent of what we're seeing around the work people are trying to advance today amid a lot of the limitations and barriers that have been put ahead of them that we openly address in the book.
- [08:11]
B
Absolutely. And it's incredibly difficult to do work that you can't name. And I think maybe two other aspects of the attacks on equity and justice right now, to put even a finer point on it, are scapegoating of marginalized people. And then also something else we talk about in the book, anticipatory compliance. In terms of scapegoating, we're really seeing a very concerning trend that is endangering of our health as scapegoating public health and the folks who do this work, and scapegoating marginalized populations as a way of shifting blame from very flawed and dangerous systems onto the people who are trying to fix them. We're seeing scapegoating. And we talk in the book about how this is language that suggests that some people are disposable or some people don't deserve good health. When we see attacks and raids on immigrant communities, when we. We see the erasure and attacks on trans and gender expansive People, these are all very concerning trends that I think our field needs to push back on and we need to advance a more inclusive vision of what it looks like. When everyone has a stake in community health, no community is disposable. And if we have equity and justice, everyone can benefit, especially when we bring in people from the margins. But I think the consequence of this environment where folks are being scapegoated and as Jamila said, people are under very real risk, is we're seeing a parallel and concerning trend of anticipatory compliance. So institutions and people that are preemptively weakening their own ability to advance equity and justice or to do public health work in some sort of fear based response and trying to avoid potential political backlash. And I think that's exactly the opposite of what we want to be doing right now, where we want to be rushing towards equity and justice and we want to be embracing our role as public health practitioners in making our communities more inclusive, more safe. And we need to be rejecting the practice of anticipatory compliance and rather looking at how can we be more like a social movement and how can we be expanding the possibilities of health for everybody?
- [10:52]
A
Absolutely. Absolutely. And now as we finish out 2025, we all know that there's a lot of daunting things going on in healthcare. Could we maybe close out our conversation by focusing on a few bright spots? Like what are you seeing in your role today that's getting you excited?
- [11:08]
B
One thing I'm really excited about right now is I think we're on our way to seeing public health really actualize itself as a social movement, in particular, because we're seeing some incredible organizing and power building. We're seeing public health reach out across silos with other partners, with other communities with unlikely suspects, to really build our power so that we can set an agenda and we can move the needle on the issues that we're trying to move. And I think that really lies in some of the organizing and the outreach that we're seeing. And it really lies in some of the expansive visioning that we've been seeing folks do. So, not just being stuck in the current moment of what's happening and what's hurting our communities. And certainly there's a number of those things. But also what is the future we're trying to build and how do we bring folks along? I think we're seeing some really great bright spots in both those places.
- [12:08]
C
I'll add to that that I think we're seeing even amidst the backlash and the, as I should describe the scapegoating of communities and other marginal populations. I think that we're seeing people push back. I think we're, in a way that is both positive and inspirational. We're seeing, amidst efforts to detain and unjustly incarcerate immigrants, we're seeing solidarity across all kinds of identity lines of people who know that this is wrong and have come together to fight against it. And so I think we're seeing folks not only be more in solidarity with each other, but they're also really inspired by the fact that people are not giving up and giving in and that we have folks who are still deeply connected to what social justice really means and to making sure that our country, that our democracy really works for everyone. So I think the brightest spot that I can see is that despite many of the challenges that we faced for a very long time, but in particular over the last calendar year, that folks are still connecting, still energized, and still hopeful for a more just and more truly united nation.
- [13:29]
B
I love that. And Jamila, something that we keep saying until we're blue in the face is that for public health to embrace equity and justice, we really want folks to understand that there's nothing new about this. And this is actually a return to our origins. This is a return to the very start of the field of public health, when we were approaching health as a collective right. We were advocating for government's responsibility for people to have good, safe living and working conditions. And we were really framing health not as something people are individually responsible for, but something that happens because of the different systems we live in. So really want to encourage folks to embrace equity and justice not just as something the moment calls for, but the absolute origins of our field and where we come from.
- [14:21]
C
Exactly. And who we are. It's who we are and who we need to continue to show up and show ourselves to be.
- [14:29]
A
Absolutely. Thank you both. But before I let you go, can you restate the name of the book and where to find them or where listeners can reach out to you if they have questions?
- [14:39]
B
Absolutely. The book is called Advancing Equity and Justice, and we'll be putting out some companion resources shortly, such as a coloring book and additional resources, so we encourage folks to stay tuned. Folks can also buy the book at APHA Press. It's also available on Amazon. We encourage folks to reach out to us. If you have any thoughts about the book or want to engage on the topics, we're available at our respective institutions. I'm at the San Francisco foundation and Movement Praxis and Jamila is at the de Beaumont Foundation.
- [15:15]
C
Perfect.
- [15:16]
A
Thank you so much. Well, Jamila and Aisha, I want to thank you once again for your time today, all the important work that you're doing in healthcare, and, and for joining me on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. Thank you so much.
- [15:26]
B
Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure.