Born from more than 50 listening sessions with hundreds of people across the country, the new guide lays out tangible solutions to build a healthcare system “designed by us, for us.”
Nationwide — Today, Community Change launched the Powering Health Justice Blueprint, a community-built guide that prescribes concrete ways to improve health outcomes for everyday people — especially Black, brown, and poor people — and to shift power away from corporate, profit-driven interests and into the hands of the communities the health system is supposed to serve.
The Blueprint arrives at a critical moment when the U.S. healthcare system is failing the people it should be making well. Insurance is expensive, hard to access, and challenging to navigate. Many communities lack a local hospital or even a clinic for routine check-ups. Families are crushed under the weight of medical debt that keeps people trapped in poverty. And even when care is accessible and affordable, providers don’t always speak patients’ languages, respect their choices, or believe their symptoms.
The Blueprint focuses on three areas where communities can take action now to improve the healthcare system: birth justice, community-centered care, and health system accountability.
“Our health system is broken by design to make money, not deliver care. If we’re going to transform the system to prioritize wellness over wealth, that change is going to come from the ground,” said Seft Hunter, Director of Health Equity at Community Change. “From focus groups around the country, we heard that people know what they need – but need help on the next steps to take action to demand it. That’s what this Blueprint does.”
For two years, Community Change and its partners convened more than 50 listening sessions across the country with organizers, grassroots groups, and community members to answer two questions: What’s going wrong with our health system? And, how do we actually make people well?
The Blueprint challenges the idea that achieving “universal health care” alone will be enough to fix what is broken. Expanding access is critical, but universal coverage by itself will not repair the inequities, greed, corporate incentives, barriers and injustice embedded throughout the system. The guide instead works to get to the root causes of the country’s most urgent healthcare challenges: Why are healthcare costs so high? Why are Black women dying during childbirth at alarming rates? Why is the system so hard to navigate? Why do so many patients experience discrimination from providers with little to no recourse? And why are so many families pushed into medical debt?
“This Blueprint is for every Black woman who has to fight to be heard at her own doctor’s office. It’s for the mother in Mississippi who has to drive two hours to find a provider who will take her pain seriously. And it’s for every community that’s been told to wait one more year for a system that was never going to show up for them,” said Jennifer Wells, Director of Care at Community Change. “We’re done waiting. We’re showing up for ourselves and demanding more.”
The Blueprint is built as a tool for organizers, advocates, community members, policymakers, funders, and others ready to drive change. At its center are the stories, experiences and solutions shared by the people who helped shape it.
Community Change is rolling out the Blueprint alongside a national tour of The Care Between Us, a three part documentary mini-series produced by Community Change. Each of the three original short films follows the stories of two protagonists from different parts of the country navigating the same broken system. Together, the films center the solutions communities called for during the listening sessions around three key ideas: community-centered care, health system accountability, and birth justice.
The tour kicked off in Apopka, Florida in partnership with Central Florida Jobs with Justice, whose member is featured in the film for her role in their fight to cancel medical debt. The tour continues this fall with a stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in partnership with the Milwaukee Black Grassroots Network for Health Equity and Health Connections, Inc. Additional screening premieres will be announced in cities around the country soon. Each screening will be followed by a community conversation about the state of the healthcare system, the Blueprint’s recommendations, and how attendees can take action locally.
“None of this gets solved overnight, but these are real, tangible places to start,” said Chirag Mehta, Director of Policy and Ideas at Community Change. “And these solutions come from our communities, for our communities. That’s why we know they’ll work.”
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