Strengthening Our Collaborative Approaches for Advancing Equity and Justice

Abstract

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.