Addressing Inequity Through Public Health, Community Development, Arts, and Culture: Confluence of Fields and the Opportunity to Reframe, Retool, and Repair

Abstract

As the public health field deepens its focus on social and environmental determinants of health and, as that field expands its attention to finding allied interests in the community development field, a critical opportunity to better understand the power of arts and culture in pursuit of shared goals has emerged. This is an extraordinary time in which the confluence of public health, community development, and the arts can lead to transformational ways of working, resulting in changes in industry standards in all three fields and most importantly, more healthy, just, and equitable communities. Drawing from 30 years of work to better understand the roles of arts and cultural activity in historically marginalized communities, this article presents reasons for and ways in which these fields can and should be allied. Specifically, it calls attention to gaps in community development and planning that have resulted in the fields’ lack of attention to historic and present harm in the form of often racialized dehumanization. It also draws attention to the role of the arts in the critical collective work of reframing community concerns and conditions, retooling or finding new more effective ways of working toward repair—the redress of historic and current harm experienced in low-income and historically marginalized communities. The essay lifts up the possibility of transformational work and also presents important barriers that must be overcome by stakeholders from all three fields.