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.
Zoe Freeman, Paula Waterhouse, Sheena Ramsay, Richard Holmes
2025
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
- Skills: Leadership Development, Policy Advocacy
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
Social accountability relates to the obligation of a health professional school to align education, research, and services with community health priorities. Limited research has examined the role of social accountability in dental education and its potential for addressing oral health inequalities. This narrative review describes current research of relevance to social accountability in dental education and identify gaps in the literature.
Delese Wear, Joseph Zarconi, Julie Aultman, Michelle Chyatte, Arno Kumagai,
2016
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
- Skills: Curriculum Development, Network Building, Political Education
- Audience: Educators, Students/Trainees
In this Perspective, the authors propose that medical school curricula should address such concerns about how it prepares students to care for patients impacted by social inequities and injustices through an explicit pedagogical orientation. The authors detail two specific approaches—antiracist pedagogy and the concept of structural competency—to construct a curriculum oriented toward appropriate care for patients who are victimized by extremely challenging social and economic disadvantages and who present with health concerns that arise from these disadvantages.
Cameron Donald
2019
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
- Skills: Curriculum Development, Political Education
- Audience: Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL) is a national medical student movement that aims to affirm the role of medical professionals in combating racism and racial disparities in medicine. The WC4BL chapter at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has focused its efforts on community engagement, local and national political activism, and medical education reform. As part of the inaugural class studying under the Bridges Curriculum at the UCSF School of Medicine, five UCSF WC4BL members provide perspectives on their first year of medical education, the integration of structural competency into the curriculum, and how their involvement with WC4BL has impacted and enriched their experiences.
2013
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education, Institutional Support for Historically Excluded Groups, Workforce Diversification
- Skills: Leadership Development, Organizing, Political Education
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
In this paper, primary author Shane Snowdon, with assistance from advisory group members, has provided comprehensive recommendations to health professional schools on how to improve their climate for LGBT students, faculty and staf. In her 13 years at UCSF, she was often the only person nationally visiting health professional schools, listening to issues around climate and meeting with LGBT students, faculty and administrators to suggest solutions. hese recommendations distill her expertise from 13 years of work with UCSF and other schools.
Dulce Gonzalez, Taylor Nelson, Brian Smedley
2025
- Advocacy Pillars: Workforce Diversification
- Skills: Leadership Development, Political Education
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
To highlight the potential effects of a less diverse health care workforce, we describe key takeaways from a literature scan on racial and ethnic patient-provider concordance. We also provide an overview of the extent of adults’ preferences for racially concordant health care providers, racial concordance with their usual health care providers, and difficulty finding racially concordant providers, drawing on data from the Urban Institute’s 2022 Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS).
Christina Demopoulos Richie Kohli, Sohini Dhar, Karen Raju
2022
- Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
- Skills: Curriculum Development, Leadership Development
- Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
The objective of this study was to assess the current efforts to move dental school curriculum beyond diversity and inclusion toward an anti-racism approach to racial equity.
Antonette Ajayi, Fatima Rodriguez, Vinicio de Jesus Perez
2021
- Advocacy Pillars: Institutional Support for Historically Excluded Groups, Workforce Diversification
- Skills: Leadership Development
- Audience: Educators, Students/Trainees
This paper offers some strategies to increase URM representation in the medical workforce.
Jonathan Heller, Paul Fleming, Ryan Petteway, Marjory Givens, Keshia Pollack Porter
2023
- Advocacy Pillars: Centering Community Power
- Skills: Organizing
- Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Educators, Government Workers, Researchers, Students/Trainees
Public health needs a power lens: a common, nuanced, and critical understanding of how power works; the potential to mobilize collective power fieldwide; and strategies to shift the balance in power relations to address structural inequity and oppression. We submit that public health must increase its capacity to (1) recognize, (2) analyze, and (3) shift power.
Maren Spolum, William Lopez, Daphne Watkins, Paul Fleming
2022
- Advocacy Pillars: Centering Community Power, Repairing Harm with Community Redress
- Skills: Organizing
- Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Educators, Government Workers, Researchers, Students/Trainees
Police violence is a public health issue in need of public health solutions. Reducing police contact through public health–informed alternative response programs separate from law enforcement agencies is one strategy to reduce police perpetration of physical, emotional, and sexual violence. This article provides a public health rationale and framework for developing and implementing alternative response programs informed by public health principles of care, equity, and prevention.
AAMC Center for Health Justice
2025
- 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
- Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Educators, Government Workers, Researchers, Students/Trainees
Philip M. Alberti, PhD, founding director of the AAMC Center for Health Justice, recently joined the Patient Advocate Foundation’s Advocates in Action podcast. The discussion focused on challenging the false narrative that some communities must lose for others to thrive. Drawing from his recent Milbank Quarterly article Health Equity Benefits All Communities—Including White Ones, Alberti unpacks how language, measurement, storytelling, and belonging can help reframe health equity as a universal good.
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.