Movement & Organizing Library
Birthed out of the For Us All campaign, the Movement & Organizing Library is a living collection of research, tools, stories, and frameworks for health professional students and leaders who are organizing for justice, dignity, and care.
Whether you are designing a course, leading a campaign, or just looking for language to name what you are experiencing, this library is here to support you. We encourage you to take what you need and share what you learn.
Robert Rock et al.
2025
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education, Centering Community Power
- Skills: Curriculum Development, Leadership Development
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
This paper describes how underrepresented in medicine (URiM) residents and faculty led a restructuring of a previously published social medicine residency orientation curriculum in the Bronx, NY.8 The restructure was in response to the curriculum’s centering of perspectives of White academics when discussing the realities of a predominantly non-White patient population. The redesigned course, social medicine immersion month (SMIM), utilized principles of public health critical race praxis (PHCRP) to uplift the narratives of community members.
Robert Rock, Oladimeji Oki, Aaron Burch
2025
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education, Centering Community Power
- Skills: Curriculum Development, Leadership Development
Social Medicine Immersion Month (SMIM) allows first-year residents to examine the perspectives of those with marginalized identities, and a new class of physicians is working to improve the program.
Shannon Perez-Darby, Andrea Ritchie
- Advocacy Pillars: Centering Community Power, Institutional Support for Historically Excluded Groups, Repairing Harm with Community Redress
- Skills: Network Building, Organizing
- Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Students/Trainees
“How do we build shared definitions, values, and practices of safety across neighborhoods and organizations working within a city? How do we weave our small, often relatively new community safety projects — ranging from mutual aid formations, to transformative justice practitioners, to neighborhood defense organizations, to community fridges, to violence interruption and crisis response teams operating at hyper-local levels — into robust, palpable neighborhood and city-wide ecosystems of care that people can feel, trust, and rely on more fully to collectively build greater safety and wellbeing? How do we relate to state institutions and resources as we are doing so? This toolkit offers some resources, responses, and additional questions to consider based on our work and practice spaces.”
Western States Center
2014
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education, Centering Community Power
- Skills: Network Building, Policy Advocacy, Political Education
- Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Students/Trainees
This political education curriculum, originally published by Western States Center in 2014, emerged from a 15-month cohort called We are BRAVE (Building Reproductive Autonomy and Voices for Equity) with three organizations – Mano a Mano Family Center, Asian and Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), and Momentum Alliance – as well as eighteen leaders of color to deepen their analysis, skills, and courageous voices to become public champions of reproductive justice. The toolkit is a series of discussion guides that facilitators and trainers can use to support social justice organizations to build a shared understanding of abortion as one aspect of reproductive and sexual health; explore abortion access through the lens of racial, economic and immigrant justice; and find pathways to action in support of abortion rights.
Brandi Kaye Freeman, Alden Landry, Robert Trevino, David Grande, Judy Shea
2016
- Advocacy Pillars: Workforce Diversification
- Skills: Leadership Development
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
In 2012 and 2013, the authors conducted a qualitative study of undergraduate students participating in the Tour for Diversity in Medicine, a program where minority physicians and dentists visit colleges with large fractions of minority students to encourage careers in the health professions. Focus groups were convened during the visits to examine perceived barriers to pursuing careers in medicine and dentistry and challenges identified through thematic content analysis.
Jovida Ross, Weyam Ghadbian
2020
- Advocacy Pillars: Centering Community Power, Repairing Harm with Community Redress
- Skills: Healing / Reflection / Collective Care, Organizing
- Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Educators, Government Workers, Researchers, Students/Trainees
Conflict is a necessary and inevitable part of living in the world, especially when you’re someone trying to change it. Too often our change work gets stalled or shut down by poorly handled and/or avoided conflicts. We (Jovida Ross and Weyam Ghadbian) wrote the Turning Towards Each Other Conflict Workbook with the hopes of supporting people working towards social justice to build our collective conflict resilience and strengthen relationships, movements, and collective wellbeing.
Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler, Joel Teitelbaum
2016
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
- Skills: Curriculum Development, Policy Advocacy
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
This Perspective focuses on an innovative method of team-based care and the opportunities for its integration into medical education: medical–legal partnership, a health care delivery model that embeds civil legal services into the spectrum of health care services provided to low-income or otherwise vulnerable patients and communities.
Jonathan Shaffer et al.
2025
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
- Skills: Curriculum Development, Leadership Development, Network Building, Organizing, Policy Advocacy, Political Education
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
This paper examines findings from a study of the first two cohorts of a Climate Health Organizing Fellowship – a year-long training program for interdisciplinary teams of health workers in which they launch a real-world organizing campaign to challenge and change a concrete climate health problem that they experience in their clinical setting or community. Rooted in the organizing leadership pedagogy of Marshall Ganz, to date this fellowship produced several campaigns that have successfully changed hospital carbon emission policies, won a municipal electric bus campaign, expanded climate-health medical education curricula in medical schools, and secured new climate health leadership roles within their institutions.
Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay, Vivetha Thambinathan, Elizabeth Anne Kinsella
2024
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
- Skills: Curriculum Development, Leadership Development
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
Since 2020, brought to the forefront by movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More, it has been widely acknowledged that systemic racism contributes to racially differentiated health outcomes. Health professional educators have been called to address such disparities within healthcare, policy, and practice. To tackle structural racism within healthcare, one avenue that has emerged is the creation of medical education interventions within postgraduate residency medical programming. The objective of this scoping review is to examine the current literature on anti-racist educational interventions, that integrate a systemic or structural view of racism, within postgraduate medical education.
Richard Healey, Sandra Hinson
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education, Centering Community Power, Institutional Support for Historically Excluded Groups, Repairing Harm with Community Redress, Workforce Diversification
- Skills: Network Building, Organizing, Political Education
- Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Educators, Government Workers, Researchers, Students/Trainees
This article explains how power operates through three interconnected arenas: direct political decision-making, the institutions and networks that shape what issues even make it onto the agenda, and the deeper cultural narratives that define how people understand the world. The piece invites readers to imagine what it would take to build long-term, cohesive progressive power by strengthening infrastructure, worldview, and collective strategy.
Champion Spotlight
The Social Mission Alliance features Social Mission Champions on our social media accounts and blog. The series highlights the important work done by those who are advancing health equity and addressing the health disparities of the society in which it exists. If you’d like to be considered for a Social Mission Champion feature, complete the form below.