As we begin a new year, we have been reflecting and looking forward. 2021 was another challenging year for all of us. Yet, we leaned into each other, our community and organizational partners, and our commitment to bridging health equity and racial justice. And in doing so, we were able to accomplish so much.

At the beginning of 2021, we shared our priorities for the year: building capacity for policy advocacy; insisting on and helping to shape an equitable recovery from multiple affronts to public health including the COVID-19 pandemic, the devastating economic crisis, a barrage of racism, and an attack on our democracy, among others; and broadening the boundaries of and strengthening the country’s public health and prevention infrastructure. As we reflect on 2021, we are proud to share accomplishments that cut across these priorities, including:

• Elevating community voice: Many of our projects have been grounded in opportunities to amplify resident, youth, and community voices to lead the changes they desire for their neighborhoods. Bringing people together across a community to learn about issues, share perspectives, and act together is core to changing systems for more equitable outcomes.
• Embedding equity to advance health, safety, and wellbeing: Our 2021 work focused explicitly on advancing health equity and racial justice, both internally and externally. Internally, we continued to build staff capacity, developed our racial justice roadmap with staff input, and engaged our board in discussions about bridging health equity and racial justice. Externally, we have offered strategies to two central questions:1) How do we bake equity into processes and systems from the very beginning? and 2) How do we meaningfully embed equity into existing systems and processes? 
• Championing structures and systems in support of thriving, equitable communities: We focused on the infrastructure and ecosystems that expand the boundaries of traditional public health professionals, honor lived experience as expertise, and engage community leaders while also encouraging more public health professionals to prioritize sharing power, presenting alongside community leaders and practitioners. We did all of this with an eye to equitable recovery and the systems and structures that will support equitable health outcomes moving forward.
• Supporting equity, safety, and accountability in the implementation of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA): Our efforts drew attention to ARPA’s stated equity provisions and the resulting opportunities to advance the equitable recovery priorities of BIPOC communities and grassroots CBOs. We developed guidelines for the inclusion of equity and racial justice in public funding programs, and highlighted how locales have been leveraging their ARPA resources to invest in equity through community safety. We consulted with local health departments to support the effective launch of their ARPA funds through an equity-driven system of recovery and response. We also partnered with fellow advocacy organizations to call for greater transparency from the Department of the Treasury in the public availability of state and local recovery reports to ensure local decision-making processes are open and accessible to input from those most impacted by COVID-19. These cross-cutting accomplishments are possible because of the support of all our funders, and especially those who have invested in our capacity over many years through core operating support. In this Adobe Spark, we are proud to share more specific accomplishments in advancing equitable health, safety, and wellbeing, and a preview of what we have planned for 2022. As in the past few years, we have organized them by the interrelated strategies in our Strategic Framework:

1. Shape new prevention and health equity solutions and catalyze INNOVATION (inspired by and in partnership with community)
2. Build the PRACTICE of effective prevention
3. Advance POLICY AND SYSTEMS change in support of health, safety, and wellbeing
4. Generate MOMENTUM for comprehensive prevention and health equity

As a public health organization, we know that it matters that we step up in partnership with community members and racial justice advocates who are collectively pursuing transformative solutions designed for equity and justice. And we are so grateful to our many partners—including community members, community-based organizations, government agencies, foundations, and public health and health equity and racial justice organizations—without whom these accomplishments would not have been possible.