CFHJ in Action: Climate Justice Workshops

ONE DC Black Workers & Wellness Center

2500 Martin Luther King Junior Avenue Southeast, 20020, Washington, DC, United States

Communicate For Health Justice (CFHJ)

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Our HistoryAfter visiting one health communication blog after another, Chelsea Dade grew weary of the repetition of viewpoints that traditional healthcare communications content presented. Cost, quality, and safety should be the core fundamentals of healthcare, but there are other important factors, like racial inequities, economic instability, stigma, lack of trust, and bias, that impact these healthcare tenets. These factors are consistently missing from the larger healthcare discussion. She created Communicate For Health Justice, or CFHJ for short, in December 2018 with the hope of helping any committed organization to communicate with health equity in mind, as it's the just thing to do.The ProblemHealth communication is a powerful tool, but it often falls short when it comes to equity and social justice. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed an impending critical failure in public health communication: the inability to effectively reach Black, BIPOC, and marginalized communities. Throughout the pandemic, these communities were often ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed. This communication gap resulted in misinformation, lower vaccination rates, and increased mistrust in public health institutions, exacerbating existing health inequities. Though CFHJ was founded in 2018, the pandemic underscored the urgency of becoming a BIack-led business in the health communication space as we witnessed our communities being disproportionately impacted by the health and economic fallout. CFHJ is now dedicated to reversing these trends by empowering communicators to better engage with these communities on the issues that matter to them, rebuild trust, and ensure that information is reflective of experiences.MissionTo aid current and next generations of communicators to equitably create content centered around health justice.VisionReimagine health communication that's socially conscious to be the norm.