How Have You Been Able to Use PHIG Funding?

So for San Mateo County Public Health, we are an indirect recipient of PHIG via the state of California’s public health department. And the biggest breakthrough, and why it’s important to us is because it has allowed us to create sustainability of equity infrastructure by ensuring that we have workforce.

Public Health Policy and Planning within San Mateo County Health has identified equity as an overarching and cross-cutting strategy as part of our strategic plan. Along with that, the county itself has made a commitment to equity, as well as county health. And in order to sustain the amazing work that a lot of our workforce has been doing on top of their day jobs, it was critical to us that we make sure that someone actually has “equity” in their job title. So we hired on an equity program coordinator who started maybe about 5 or 6 months ago.

This is, I think, where it’s really beautiful that PHIG comes in to provide sustainable funding to make sure that this work of equity is not just in the immediate grant cycle, right, one year or two years, but what it has allowed us to do with our equity program coordinator is to set that person up to become a permanent staff member that is going to make sure that equity is sustained and embedded into the work we do as public health and county health at San Mateo County.

Why Is Equity Important?

To me, the words public health and equity are equivalent. They mean the same thing, because at the end of the day, our goal is to make sure that all the people that we serve, as stewards of their tax dollars, that we are reflecting back to them what they have asked of us, essentially. And one of the ways that we have done that is by developing an equity plan that is led by our public health workforce.

How are You Tapping Into “Radical Imagination?”

I think equity practitioners, it’s important to operationalize equity as a core commitment, but it’s also important that we practice equity in our day-to-day interactions with our workforce so that we can show up as our best selves for our communities as well. And so one of the ways that, as the facilitator for our Equity Plan workgroup, I’ve been trying to do that is by imbuing some radical imagination.

One of the activities I can tell you about is: we designed an activity that we’re calling equity tarot cards. So with the work group, I wanted them to think about equity in the workplace, but also thinking about equity and what that means for how we show up in the world, and what it means for the world that we want to build.

And so I actually had them think about some prompt questions, like, “What’s an image that comes to you [when you link about equity]?” And then a tarot card usually has a word. So what’s a word that’s tied to what that image is? And then we took turns sharing, like, read your tarot card, right? And what does it tell us about the future of equity within our public health department?

What’s Next?

My dream about what’s next is that we continue to show up.