Healthy living is our goal

Whether you’re an advocate working to end oppression or a public health practitioner working to reduce rates of teen pregnancy, there is often a shared desired effect: safe, stable, healthy lives, equitable resource access, community cohesion, and socially just environments.

To the extent that people’s identities and experiences are interconnected and whole so too must our solutions to social and public health problems be interconnected and whole.

Despite the shared or overlapping outcomes, our work across movements often remains separate and distinct. The varied strategies and approaches used, as well as different funding streams, infrastructure, language and theory, often create a silo effect and artificial separations. And yet, communities don’t experience issue fragmentation in the same way that our movements do. This means that effectively addressing health and wellness must not only take into account the complexity of a community, but it must also recognize the complexity and systemic nature of our work.

Many of the risk factors contributing to poor social and health outcomes – substance abuse, sexual and intimate partner violence, mental health issues, sexually transmitted infections, asthma, obesity, etc. – are overlapping. Combining our shared goal of achieving healthy living with these overlapping risk factors provides us with the groundwork from which a unified vision for change can take hold. If we move from fragmented fields operating in silos to a complex, interconnected movement, we will have exponentially greater impact.