H3: Mobilizing Communities for Health Equity: Strategies, Partnerships, and the Role of Community Health Workers

Elaine Hicks, MS/LIS, MPH, MCHES merged three occupations into the work of a public health librarian: nutrition educator, public health educator and librarian. A recent product of this body of knowledge and skills was the creation of the Librarian Reserve Corps, a mash-up of public health emergency preparedness training and library/information science needed to catalog the avalanche of daily scientific publication distributed by the WHO library to the Global Outreak Alert and Response Network.

Kai A. Stewart, PhD, MPH, CHES, is a Lead Health Scientist at the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Dr. Stewart leads the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) team and serves as an advisor in the Division of Population Health. She is responsible for planning, designing, and implementing programs and studies related to SDOH. In her role, she guides scientists and program consultants in various aspects of study design, project management, and evaluation. Additionally, she provides technical consultation to state and local health agencies, as well as other health-related organizations, on using SDOH strategies to promote health equity.

Khadijah Ameen, PhD, MPH is Co-Founder and Director of Policy & Research at BLKHLTH, a Black-led national non-profit focused on advancing the wellbeing of Black communities through equity-centered education, advocacy, research, and programs. In her role, she manages the organization’s community health research, antiracism capacity building, and policy advocacy workstreams. She is also a Second Century Initiative Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Health Policy and Behavioral Sciences at Georgia State University School of Public Health and a Doctoral Scholar through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Scholars Program. Her doctoral scholarship is focused on addressing social, structural, and political drivers of poor health outcomes for Black Americans.

Tanya E. Penn, MPH, CPH – Director, SDSU Center for Equitable and Diverse Research. Ms. Penn is the Director of the Center for Equitable and Diverse Research (CEDR) at SDSU and serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the SDSU School of Public Health. As Director of CEDR, she oversees the center’s strategy, operations, fiscal management, and business development functions. Ms. Penn has extensive experience in developing, implementing, and managing community based participatory research projects. Serving as Principal Investigator across countless academic-practice partnerships in her decade-long career at SDSU has given her the experience and passion to advocate for health equity through community empowerment and systemic institutional changes to improve access.