“Health justice is peace of mind. Peace of mind is knowing that your health care isn’t just for your body, but that it’s also for your mind.”
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra

Drawing from his years of experience as an advocate for health equity, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra delivered a keynote address about the meaning of health justice and how the department is working towards an equitable health care system that allows all people to thrive. For Becerra, health justice is peace of mind – the freedom to decide what health care you need, or the knowledge that you won’t go bankrupt from a hospital visit.  

Key quotes and highlights include: 

  • “If we really want to move towards a wellness care system, we have to talk about avoiding the sicknesses, the chronic illnesses, that drive our system to be very inefficient.” Secretary Becerra discussed the Department’s efforts to move towards a wellness care system rather than an illness care system by focusing on preventive care, as well as how needs like housing and food are deeply intertwined with health and wellbeing.   

This is part of a six-part series capturing plenary discussions from Community Catalyst’s 2023 annual convening, Building Power for Health Justice. Our focus on power is a recognition of the need for us to leverage and build power together to create a health system rooted in race equity and health justice, and a society where health is a right for all. 

Urge the Biden administration to take further action on medical debt and expand Essential Health Benefits here and here. 

Learn more about Community Catalyst’s work to address social determents of health here. 

In This Series:

Building Power for Health Justice: A Discussion with Fatima Goss Graves, National Women’s Law Center

Community Catalyst Executive Director Emily Stewart and President & CEO of the National Women’s Law Center Fatima Goss Graves, discuss the relationship between attacks on reproductive freedom and access to gender-affirming care and how, for many, this is being experienced as a crisis of democracy.

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Building Narrative Power to Drive Policy Change

Gena Madow, senior director of communications at Community Catalyst, welcomed four visionaries and movement leaders to the virtual stage to answer the key question: What does narrative power mean to you?

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Nothing for US, Without US: Shifting Power by Centering People Most Impacted by Health Inequities

A powerful session featuring trailblazers at the forefront of health justice. Their lived experiences drive their work to center communities directly impacted by health inequity. These activists and organizers describe how to mobilize communities to create lasting change and how the “story of self” can transform policies and practices.

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Power Moves Throughout the Health Justice Landscape

Afua Atta-Mensah of Community Change leads a discussion with a group of panelists working on a diverse set of issues that probe the nature of power building, inside/outside strategies for change, the need for sustained narrative, organizing and livelihoods in the health justice movement, and more.

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Community Power: Collective Impact for Transformative Change

Community leaders working to mobilize and build power locally and across their state came together in this plenary focused on community-driven health justice strategies. The panelists discussed their work to build leadership, power and autonomy in communities without being extractive

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