Sowing the Seeds of Public Health

by Amy Brugh

During these times of social distancing, I’ve been listening to some songs of my youth. Tears for Fears has been on my mind and in my ears. I’m listening to Sowing the Seeds of Love as I write this, hence the inspiration for this post.

I went to public health school in 1997. All of these years later, I still use the principles of public health in my daily work. I want us to sow the seeds of public health.

My brand of public health is rooted in social justice. It centers a collective good in addition to individual well-being. It follows a process of acknowledging a challenge or opportunity, gathering information, identifying solutions, implementing a plan, and evaluating how it worked. These are the same principles that I’ve applied to my work as a nonprofiteer, planner, and facilitator.

Here are some ideas on how we can use the tenets of public health in our work with organizations and leaders:

Root our work in social justice

When an opportunity or challenge presents itself, consider race, ethnicity, gender, access to wealth, mobility status, immigration status, and more. These factors inform and define our histories and experiences with any opportunity or challenge. Ask and listen carefully to people. Prioritize distribution of wealth and fair access to resources. We can and should advance social justice in all of our work.

Focus our work on a collective good

When we are faced with an opportunity or challenge, we will have the greatest impact by focusing on what will prevent harm in the first place, or what will prevent further harm. We will serve our communities well by focusing first on what will benefit the most people and the most vulnerable people. Prevailing norms in the U.S. compel us to focus our resources and efforts on specific individuals. But if we first focus on the whole, on our communities, then individuals would need less specialized care and our need for emergency services could be drastically reduced.

As always, plan the work and work the plan

Public health is about planning, implementing, and evaluating. We had opportunities to address some of the devastating impacts of this new coronavirus and we missed some of those opportunities due to our misunderstanding and rejection of public health. We can borrow from the wisdom and value of public health principles and apply them to whatever challenges our organizations might be facing and whatever we might be facing as workers.