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.

Learn more about the advocacy pillars. 

  • Pillar

  • Advocacy Skills

  • Audience

Pipeline Programs to Improve Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Health Professions: An Inventory of Federal Programs, Assessment of Evaluation Approaches, and Critical Review of the Research Literature

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Bureau of Health Professions, Office of Public Health and Science, Office of Minority Health
2009
  • Advocacy Pillars: Workforce Diversification
  • Skills: Leadership Development
  • Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
This report, performed under contract to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Health Resources and Services Administration and HHS’ Office of Public Health and Science (OPHS), Office of Minority Health (OMH), examines programs focused on intervening in the educational pipeline to enhance opportunities for racial/ethnic minority and disadvantaged students to enter careers in the health professions and health sciences. The report focuses on what is known about these programs, highlighting key issues in the science and art of evaluation, reviewing available evidence from prior evaluation research, and discussing options for conceptualizing and designing future evaluations.

Physician–Patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns

Brad Greenwood, Rachel Hardeman, Laura Huang, Aaron Sojourner
2020
  • Advocacy Pillars: Workforce Diversification
  • Skills: Leadership Development
  • Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
A large body of work highlights disparities in survival rates across Black and White newborns during childbirth. We posit that these differences may be ameliorated by racial concordance between the physician and newborn patient. Findings suggest that when Black newborns are cared for by Black physicians, the mortality penalty they suffer, as compared with White infants, is halved. Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases, and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns. No such concordance effect is found among birthing mothers.

Patient-Physician Racial Concordance Associated With Improved Healthcare Use and Lower Healthcare Expenditures in Minority Populations

Anuradha Jetty et al.
2022
  • Advocacy Pillars: Workforce Diversification
  • Skills: Leadership Development
  • Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
Findings suggest that racial concordance contributes to a more effective therapeutic relationship and improved healthcare. These results emphasize the need for medical education surrounding cultural humility and the importance of diversifying the healthcare workforce.

Patient-Centered Communication, Ratings of Care, and Concordance of Patient and Physician Race

Lisa Cooper et al.
2003
  • Advocacy Pillars: Workforce Diversification
  • Skills: Leadership Development
  • Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
The objective of this study was to compare patient–physician communication in race-concordant and race-discordant visits and examine whether communication behaviors explain differences in patient ratings of satisfaction and participatory decision making.

Outcomes of Antiracist Pedagogy in Health Professions Education: A Scoping Review

Amélie Garneau et al.
2025
  • Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
  • Skills: Curriculum Development, Leadership Development, Political Education
  • Audience: Community Based Organizations, Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
In health professions education, there is a call to rethink pedagogical practices and institutions that often perpetuate racism, colonialism, and other systems of oppression. Researchers have stressed the importance of integrating critical pedagogies, such as antiracist pedagogy, to help learners understand societal and structural factors behind health inequities and recognize power dynamics in health science and healthcare. Various antiracist pedagogical interventions have been designed, but their outcomes remain unclear. Based on Levac et al.’s framework, a scoping review was conducted to map the literature evaluating the outcomes of antiracist pedagogy in health professions education.

Out of the Spiritual Closet: Organizers Transforming the Practice of Social Justice

Taj James, Neelam Pathikonda, Brenda Salgado, Kristen Zimmerman
2010
  • 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: Healing / Reflection / Collective Care, Leadership Development, Organizing
  • Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Educators, Government Workers, Researchers, Students/Trainees
The first in MSC’s series on Transformative Movement Building, this report dives into the individual experiences of social justice leaders as they integrate spiritual, creative, or otherwise transformative practice into their lives and work. The report introduces Transformative Movement Building as an approach and framework, provides a cultural analysis of how the social justice movement is being transformed through intentional practice, and showcases the stories of leaders who have begun their own transformations.

Organizing: People, Power and Change

Marshall Ganz, Leading Change Network
2014
  • 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
  • Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Educators, Government Workers, Researchers, Students/Trainees
The following guide aims to support you in developing your capacity for effective community organizing. Our goal is to provide you with an introduction to organizing and encourage you to explore answers to the following questions: Why am I called to leadership in my community? How will I move others to join me? How will we develop strategy and structure our work together? And how will we achieve our goals?

Organizing for Racial Justice in Medicine and Medical Education: An Ethnographic Study of Medical Trainee Experiences

Seth M. Holmes, Hannah Obasi, Monica Hahn, Dorothy Charles
2025
  • Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
  • Skills: Curriculum Development, Organizing, Political Education
  • Audience: Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
This article investigates the experiences of medical trainee participants in movements for racial justice in medicine and the implications of these experiences in the context of growing attacks on programs and practices for equity in medical education.

Organization Development for Social Change: An Integrated Approach to Community Transformation

Zak Sinclair and Movement Strategy Center
2006
  • 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: Healing / Reflection / Collective Care, Network Building, Organizing, Policy Advocacy
  • Audience: Artists, Community Based Organizations, Educators, Government Workers, Researchers, Students/Trainees
As people working for social change, we currently face serious dilemmas about our organizational ability to grow, change, and stick around long enough to nurture broad social movements. As vehicles for social change, nonprofits are an important building block in a broad-based movement aiming to reinvigorate democracy and achieve real racial and economic justice. Nonprofit leaders committed to movement-building face this central question: How can our organizations both be bold enough to alter the fundamental structural relationships in society, and wise enough to act according to principles of organizational sustainability and community transformation?

On Medical Ideology and the Production of Docile Doctors: The Politics of Care in an Age of Authoritarianism

Eric Reinhart
2025
  • Advocacy Pillars: Anti-Racist and Justice-Oriented Health Education
  • Skills: Curriculum Development, Leadership Development, Network Building, Organizing, Policy Advocacy, Political Education
  • Audience: Educators, Researchers, Students/Trainees
By considering the wide-ranging effects of American medical ideology, its uses of morality, and the depoliticization of health and care it instills, this essay challenges the discourses of “burnout” and “moral injury” as explanations for growing demoralization among U.S. healthcare workers. Against this backdrop, the essay considers American medical training’s relation to systems justification, the production of docile bodies and docile doctors, the suppression of dissent, and the political significance of immanent critique within medicine.

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.