University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) Assistant Professor J’Mag Karbeah was recently invited to continue in the third cohort of the Health Equity Collective, after her invaluable contributions as a member of the collective’s second cohort.

Founded in 2020 with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the collective’s aim is to “build the community, infrastructure, and partnerships to transform the U.S. health system from one that profits on sickness to one that invests in wellness.” To that end, the collective is focused on addressing the structures of white supremacy, capitalism, classism, and patriarchy that it says continue to fuel health disparities in the U.S.

Karbeah’s research — which investigates how structural racism, evidenced by disparate police contact, impacts maternal, infant, and child health outcomes — aligns with the collective’s mission. By leveraging theories and methods from population health science as well as health services, her research seeks to identify the complex and multidimensional ways that racism impacts health.

Karbeah said the goals and diverse composition of the collective drew her to its work. “It’s not all academics. A big strength of the Health Equity Collective is the diversity of people who belong to it — creating a multi-generational, multi-sectoral collection of people building capacity for change.”

“The collective is working to empower emerging and existing leaders to fundamentally rethink how we shape health policy,” Karbeah says. “They’re bringing people together from very different sectors and backgrounds and helping all of us develop skills in a wide variety of areas, from data collection to narrative storytelling, and from organizing to connecting with legislators. Once we’ve identified the problems in our healthcare system, we need to translate them in a way that is concrete and allows people to understand the extent of the problem, and how they might be able to engage with it and help create change.”

Karbeah was a featured speaker at a Health Equity Collective event in 2022 focused on the topic “Data Justice and Data Sovereignty.”

The Health Equity Collective is currently collecting signatures for an online petition to gain support for its movement towards health justice, and it recently released its first video, a powerful narrative highlighting disparities in the US healthcare system called “Let Me Tell You a Story.”