About Us

What is the Health Justice Collaborative?

The Health Justice Collaborative is a group of community activists, educators, lawyers, and researchers working together to transform the systems that impact communities and individual’s health and wellbeing. The Collaborative works towards creating an environment where individuals and populations attain health equality, where everyone gets what they need to be healthy.

What is Health Justice?

Health justice is “an intersectional movement led by impacted communities, rooted in building people power and disrupting legal regimes, to construct systems that invest in joy, safety, and collective liberation” (Bhatnagar, 2024).

Health justice work “is community-led and seeks to eliminate the poverty, discrimination, and other forms of subordination that have prevented people living in low-income households and communities, Black individuals and members of other racial minority groups, women, disabled people, newcomers to this country, and LGTBQIA+ individuals from accessing resources such as health care, employment, and housing” (Wiley, Yearby, Clark and Mohapatra, 2023).

Our Mission

The Health Justice Collaborative will illuminate the ways that structural discrimination (ageism, ableism, classism, homophobia, racism, and sexism) in the United States limits communities and individuals’ ability to be physically and mentally healthy. The Health Justice Collaborative seeks to encourage, train, and empower community activists, educators, lawyers, and researchers to transform the systems that perpetuate structural discrimination in the United States.

Our Values

  1. Truth, Reconciliation, and Healing
  2. Community-Driven Structural Change
  3. Repairing Harm
  4. Transforming Systems

Other Key Definitions That Inform Our Work

Structural Discrimination is the power used by dominant groups to organize systems that provide life sustaining resources in a manner, which:
  • prioritizes their needs;
  • protects their rights;
  • values their beliefs;
  • helps them thrive and prosper; and
  • sustains their power.
The purpose of structural discrimination is to fulfill the principles of capitalism in the United States and colonialism worldwide (Yearby, 2025).
Equality is when systems provide resources in a manner, which:
  • supports the needs;
  • protects the rights; and
  • values the beliefs of everyone (Yearby, 2025).