Health education & behavior : the official publication of the Society for Public Health Education
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In this Perspective, we build on social justice and emancipatory traditions within the field of health education, and the field's long-standing commitment to building knowledge and shared power to promote health equity, to examine lessons and opportunities for health education emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining patterns that emerged as the pandemic unfolded in Metropolitan Detroit, with disproportionate impacts on African American and low-income communities, we consider conditions that contributed to excess exposure, mortality, and reduced access to critical health protective resources. Using a life course framework, we consider enduring impacts of the pandemic for health equity. Finally, we suggest several strategic actions in three focal areas-environment, occupation, and housing-that can be taken by health educators working in partnership with community members, researchers, and decision makers, using, for example, a community-based participatory research approach, to reduce adverse impacts of COVID-19 and promote long-term equity in health.
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The Principles for Collaborating for Equity and Justice are explicit about addressing social and economic injustice, structural racism, and community organizing to facilitate resident power and ownership. They also focus on structural change, an acknowledgment of complexity, and the need to thoughtfully build on decades of practice and scholarship on collaborating for community change. This special theme issue of Health Education & Behavior includes 10 articles that highlight these principles and provide insight into the complexities, challenges, and rewards of collaborating in ways that are intentional about advancing health equity through inclusive processes and shared goals to address social determinants of health. We provide a brief overview of the articles and identify community organizing and building resident power as possible strategies that should be combined with, complement, or in some cases replace, our more commonplace multisectoral coalitions if we hope to reduce health inequities through community collaboration.
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Flavored tobacco products appeal to youth, and jurisdictions have implemented policy interventions to reduce youth tobacco initiation. This study reviews the process, challenges, and compliance monitoring of a flavored tobacco sales restriction. New York City (NYC) passed a policy restricting the sale of flavored non-cigarette tobacco products in 2009. ⋯ The city implemented the flavored tobacco policy as intended and it withstood legal challenges. NYC integrated enforcement into the city's retailer compliance monitoring infrastructure, and the violation rate is low. Our investigation of NYC's experience with flavored tobacco policy implementation and enforcement can provide policy makers and health professionals with insights relevant to policy implementation, expand understanding of the potential impact of these kinds of policies, and inform compliance monitoring efforts.
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Recent critiques of collective impact have provided a conceptual alternative that emphasizes the necessity of community organizing, and more explicit emphasis on advancing equitable systems and policy changes. This article reports results from a study of a citywide coalition in Chicago, IL that espoused many of these same principles. The coalition focused on justice system reform-systems and policy change that would dismantle punitive policies disproportionately affecting people of color-but also sought to connect these efforts with broader social determinants of health. ⋯ This analysis provides practical insights into the benefits and challenges of implementing deeply participatory processes to address policy and systemic drivers of social determinants of health. Findings show that fully integrating all six principles is challenging, especially when a coalition represents broad constituencies across race, geography, and organizational philosophy. In such diverse settings, considerable time must be spent to build relationships and a strong foundation for sustainable processes.