On the role of community voices in the work of public health.
Public health is concerned, correctly, with putting the community front and center in all we do. This reflects our intent to listen to community priorities and to center the needs of the communities we serve. We cannot fully address these needs if we do not engage with communities, making sure that we bring into the conversation those who are affected by the work of public health. One would be hard pressed to find much disagreement with this statement in public health today. And yet, the practice of engagement with communities can be substantially more complicated than this statement might suggest. Balancing the values, data, and often-evolving science that informs the work of public health can at times lead to uncomfortable conflict between the various considerations that inform the work of public health. Starting from a place of appreciation for, and elevation of, the community engagement that is central to our work, I wanted today to ask some perhaps difficult questions about what we mean by “community” and the extent to which our engagement with communities is sometimes complicated and requires careful thinking about what we do, and why we do it.
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