I am proud native Washingtonian and have been a resident of Southwest for about 20 years. I was educated in private schools from elementary to high school. After high school, I graduated university with two degrees one in business administration and federal acquisitions and contract management, respectively. My professional work experience was in the financial industry where I spent over 15 years processing financial and investment instruments for clients. After several years of finance work in the corporate world, I decided to share my knowledge, skills, and abilities within underserved communities. This decision led me back to the community I knew so well as a child. For some higher reason, I was led back to the Greenleaf Gardens community. I realize the higher reason was the fulfilling of a mission my mother subliminally transferred to me. My beloved mother displayed so many random acts of kindness to strangers when I was a child that the first time that she did it, I become confused and subtly jealous of the child she purchased a meal for in the Hot Shoppe’s restaurant. My mother worked as an administrator in the District of Columbia Public School system and retired from there after more than three decades.

The general point of Federalist No. 10 was to argue for a republican form of government as opposed to a pure democracy to regulate the harm and excesses of factions, whether majoritarian or not, that threaten political stability and the public good. Madison’s writings more than 230 years ago immediately resonate in light of the January 6th violence on the Capitol and the deepening divide between the two major political parties. This essay will seek to argue that Federalist No. 10 has major public health relevance. Madison’s views on human nature and factionalism can be extended to the public health economy and support principles of Public Health Liberation. The following questions will be explored:
1) How is a Madisonian view of factions and the lengths that they will seek to effectuate self-interests relevant to public health?

2) Is the public health economy sufficiently regulated to safeguard public health and the common good à la Madisonian republicanism?

3) What are the “factions” in the public health economy?

4) What is the role of Public Health Liberation?

Public Health Liberation is excited to share recent news about the Poor People's Campaign with our readers. The organization drew an audience of more than 100,000 attendees in Washington, DC on Juneteenth weekend by calling attention to the urgent health, social, and economic needs of the poor and low-income. Its "National Call For Moral Revival" has few precedents in recent US history. In short, it is a big political tent and liberation safe space for those groups who find themselves economically and socially vulnerable and marginalized. It is simultaneously a public health, pro-labor, civil rights, women's rights, pro-LGBTQ+, and immigrant justice movement. Its 14 policy recommendations are comprehensive - increasing the federal minimum wage, tax reform, universal health care, and other measures. All are aimed at the needs of the poor. The Poor People's Campaign takes up the mantle of the anti-poverty movement that Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders formed a year before Dr. King's assassination in April 1968. After leading a march of striking Memphis sanitation workers, Dr. King was scheduled to lead the Poor People's Campaign in May-June 1968, which proceeded with his widow and others.

PHL Founding Director recently responded on a national listserv on PHL’s response to the 20th anniversary of Institute of Medicine's "Unequal Treatment.”

Achieving Health Equity through all constructive means - This approach to health equity is focused on collective action and applied subject-matter expertise at the local level to attenuate health inequity reproduction, including structural racism. A public health systems engineer, who is socially embedded and cross-trained, works alongside the community to pursue health equity. It can mean: regulatory appeals, lawsuits, engaging with decision-makers about economic policy, drafting or revising proposed legislation, conducting community research, fact-finding to give communities leverage, writing editorials, encouraging public testimony at every opportunity, establishing community groups, expanding our social and political capital to advocate for the community, etc. Many of our institutions are willing to engage in research on communities, but not willing to get involved to attenuate structural violence and racism. Public Health Liberation recognizes both a moral crisis and social call to help.

Public Health Liberation (PHIL) is a novel five-part approach to public health discourse and action for achieving health equity. Our eponymous non-profit is preparing a peer-reviewed manuscript for publication this year. In the interim, we are seeking to engage and educate our readership while strengthening our base of community supporters. PHL is distinctive from traditional public health in at least three broad ways.
First, we are socially embedded within a community of practice, as kinship, and offer applied skills and interdisciplinary knowledge to help residents confront structural harm. Rather than driven by self-interests or instrumental engagement as with a research grant, collective striving and deep moral conviction direct our work. PHL values shared emancipatory beliefs and collective forms of liberation as a reflection of idealized human development and praxis. At the community level, PHL eschews equity work that reinforces dependency and asymmetrical balances of power or that limits knowledge acquisition, skills-building, and self-advocacy. To illustrate, the ideal scenario for a community garden is that the community has a greater understanding of and skills for crop cultivation, insight into structural factors that led to being a food desert in the first place, and use of the garden for liberation space-making. The singular goal of a community garden to grow and donate food is an incomplete framing. This leads to our second distinction.

Nutritional deficiency and malnutrition are major determinants of health. While 19 mil­lion peo­ple — or 6.2% of the US total pop­u­la­tion — live within a food desert that has lim­it­ed access to fresh produce, there can still be barriers for other Americans who do have access. Limited transportation options, lack of knowledge of community resources, household finances, and inflation-related price increases are common, even in resource-rich environments. This article discusses how resident leaders in one such community exchange resources to educate residents to address yet another barrier - annual enrollment in supplemental nutrition programs.

Public Health Liberation Board member Rhonda Hamilton is a talented and highly recognizable community leader in Washington, DC. She has been an elected neighborhood-level public official for more than a decade and Resident Council President of the Syphax Apartments, a public housing community. She is also an award-winning environmental advocate, soon to be recognized in a Smithsonian Museum exhibit among other women activists. As part of that role, she formed the Near Buzzard Point Resilient Action Committee (NeRAC) in 2018 with community members and academic researchers. When the city council in Washington, DC began to revise its Comprehensive Plan, she led NeRAC’s effort to provide public comment on the harm that communities of color have incurred.

PHL Founding Director uses his online newspaper to advocate for protecting Black women and families in public housing against structural violence in his community of practice in Washington, DC. For at least 20 years, the District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA) has used redevelopment of public housing as a tool to displace families to make way for mixed-income communities that largely cater to high-income households. Since it entered the Moving to Work program, DCHA has served less than 75% of its total constituents since 2001 - a pattern and practice that violates federal law. Rather than use the flexibility as a MTW housing authorize to innovate in affordable housing production, it has engaged in structural violence and racism. The authority serves an overwhelming number of African Americans. The Black women that make up resident councils are deprived of meaningful influence to safeguard their residents’ legal rights and interests.

These materials represent Public Health Liberation praxis in response to real-time challenges facing public housing residents in Washington, DC. The Greenleaf community is threatened with displacement and experiences mental health stress associated with the looming prospect of redevelopment. The women leaders especially bear the brunt of advocacy and engagement with the Housing Authority, which has repeatedly strengthened structural racism through displacement and redevelopment policies. “All this redevelopment is causing me so much stress,” said Patricia Bishop,

Critical Race Theory is not, in fact, a singular theory in the traditional sense of cause and effect. It does not lay out a full set of theoretical components that produce an expected outcome, as is typical in most major public health theories. Although some researchers have essentialized this tradition (e.g. the five tenets of CRT), such distillation does not account for the breadth and depth of CRT. Arguably, this has been more harmful than helpful. CRT has offered a critique of the failings of the liberal state, mounted a vigorous challenge against so-called objective principles in law, drawn attention to systems thinking in educational and public health theory, and facilitated robust dissension among its adherents.

Public Health Liberation has released a guide for creating a liberation safe space for public health equity discourse. It provides a conceptual model for liberation spaces (below). PHL members will take part in opening liberation spaces for diverse participants in their communities of practices during the summer and will share their experiences in a national webinar in July or August. PHL will work with each host to design a space that fits the community’s needs and existing resources.

If you are interested in being a “Space Maker,” email us at info@publichealthliberation.com

Washington, DC experienced the most intense form of gentrification among US cities from 2000-2017. More than 20,000 African Americans were displaced in this period while low income populations were increasingly concentrated in many majority-minority areas

Public Health Liberation has compiled nearly 50 novel and specialty terms in a free thought-provoking guide to elevate public health discourse on accelerating health equity. It synthesizes important concepts within and beyond public health that draw attention to barriers and opportunities within the public health economy. It borrows from praxis philosophy, critical race theory, legal studies, along with theories from a plethora of other disciplines. It is a great tool to jumpstart conversation among communities, researchers, and advocates. It also highlights examples of liberation praxis in real-time challenges in housing justice and data equity and provides historical perspectives that are germane to research ethics and revisionist public health.

Strengthening the community health workforce is vital for accelerating health equity in the United States. It opens pathways to address structural determinants of health such as lack of access, health care costs, and chronic disease management.

Gentrification is defined as “the process of transforming vacant or low-income inner-city areas into economic, recreational, and residential use by middle-and upper-income individuals” [Source]. Some common demographic signs of gentrification are increases in average income and level of education [Source], and Washington D.C. is currently ranked as the 13th most intensely gentrified city in the United States [Source]. According to data from the U.S. Census, since 2010, the city has seen an 11% increase in total population, a 106% increase in people who hold a Bachelor’s degree or higher, and a 41% increase in median household income. How have these demographic changes affected the health and wellness of DC residents?

Illiberation is not a word that appears in a standard English dictionary. It is not an adaptive use of the word “illiberal,” meaning miserly, or relates to the phrase “illiberal democracy.” Illiberation in the context of Public Health Liberation is defined as a state of arrested human development arising from fear that expressing differing opinions to a set of rules, cultural beliefs, norms, practices or against forms of authority will incur unacceptable social or material costs that subvert self-interest. Although it can be extrapolated to other fields, it is discussed here to explain a source of health inequity reproduction within the public health economy. Illiberation is concerned with the diminished expression of self and of people to convey human suffering, to identify its determinants, and to petition for relief. Everyone within the public health economy, including educators, researchers, and health officers, are susceptible to illiberation, though we are most concerned about illiberation among vulnerable or oppressed communities. Illiberation can be broadly understood as obedience to the public health economy which itself is reproducing deep inequity. We previously discussed public health realism - centrality of material self-interests in public health - that would explain the errant paradigm.

Public Health Liberation fully accepts the belief of critical race theorists that structural racism flourishes throughout American society. We have developed a universal equation to further understanding of this principle in public health. A core tenet of our philosophy is that the unfulfilled promise of racial justice more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement compels us to demand greater attention and resources to accelerate racial health equity. First, reproduction of racial violence must be viewed within a capitalist framework because capitalism is the engine of society. American life revolves around capitalism - the private exchange of goods and services driven by divisions of labor and ownership of the means of production. Where there is market failure, then typically government has had to intercede as with housing and food subsidies.

Public Health Liberation Director continued his advocacy for improved community health with a letter, supported by public housing resident leaders, for the nation’s capital to address wide health disparities. The following letter went to city council and various DC-based distribution lists.

The economic and health reality for African Americans in Washington, DC does not live up to the promise of equal protection or racial equality. Yet the political establishment through successive administrations and city councils continues to punt the need for addressing structural racism and racial inequality for at least the last 20 years. Kicking the can down the road is no longer a tenable position. As we illustrate below, the lived experiences of Black DC residents are starkly different from other racial and ethnic groups. The severe health burden due to the social determinants of health remains a lingering injustice more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement. An often quoted mantra from that era, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” is as relevant today as it was then.

An example of Public Health Liberation is the latest issue of Southwest Voice - a community-based, social justice newspaper in Southwest, DC, founded by the Director of Public Health Liberation, Christopher Williams. It discusses the District of Columbia Housing Authority’s failure to deliver on redevelopment plans that would prevent the wholesale displacement of the Greenleaf public housing community. It also includes public statements from Greenleaf resident council leaders. The redevelopment poses to reproduce social and health inequities.

Public Health Research Brief: Reviewing DC CFAR Awards and Equity Terms