Alumni News

‘We Need to Center the Lived Experience of BIPOC Communities’

Alum Janine Anzalota, equity and civil rights manager for King County, Washington, develops health equity and social justice initiatives, including an Equity Impact Awareness Tool that has informed the county’s COVID-19 response.

In public policy, change happens faster at the local level, says Janine Anzalota (SSW’04, SPH’06).

For more than 10 years, the School of Public Health alum has led health equity and social justice initiatives in city and county government, from Boston to Seattle. Since completing the MPH program in Health Services Management in 2006 (and the Master of Social Work program in 2004), Anzalota has served in leadership positions at the Boston Public Health Commission, and as the executive director of the Office of Fair Housing and Equity (OFHE) for the City of Boston. In 2018, she moved to the West Coast to become the equity and civil rights manager in the Office of Equity and Social Justice for King County, Washington.

In January, King County became ground zero of the US outbreak of COVID-19. In just two weeks in March, Anzalota led the development of the Equity Impact Awareness Tool when it became apparent that the county was placing COVID-19 quarantine and recovery sites primarily in South King County, where a majority of residents are people of color. The tool served as a guide for county decision makers to understand the potential impact that these sites could have on communities that were already disproportionately burdened by the health and economic effects of the pandemic.

“South King County has the largest concentration of BIPOC [Black and Indigenous People of Color] communities in the county, and these community members were not consulted about the sites,” says Anzalota, who identifies as Latinx and Puerto Rican. “We wanted this tool to provide awareness of where there would be inequitable impact if we concentrate too many quarantine and recovery sites in vulnerable areas, and push our facilities and real estate divisions to find available property in other parts of the county.”

Anzalota collaborated with the BIPOC-owned consulting group Headwater People, other BIPOC residents, and the facilities management and real estate divisions to design the tool to identify higher vulnerability areas using Health Reporting Area data. Not only has the tool provided this insight and shifted the development of quarantine and recovery sites to less vulnerable areas, it has also been utilized by at least six other counties in Washington.

Anzalota also leads King County’s Affinity Groups, which aim to promote workforce equity and advance the county’s equity and social justice goals. “The groups consult with members of leadership on policies and procedures and advocate for issues impacting employees,” she says. “They’ve become a substantial organizing space for employee power and support, especially during the pandemic.”

As the deputy director, and then executive director, of OFHE in Boston from 2013 to 2018, Anzalota supported several fair housing reforms, including reforms to provide more protection to victims of interpersonal violence in housing, and reforms to Massachusetts’ controversial CORI (Criminal Offender Record Information) system. The name-based database maintains records of all criminal court appearances and has made it difficult for certain people, particularly marginalized groups, to obtain basic benefits such as housing, employment, loans, and guardianship.  

“So many people experience discrimination in housing just based on their race, ethnicity language spoken, or criminal violations,” says Anzalota. “I worked to provide greater CORI reform so that non-violent felonies over five years old would not impact a person’s housing opportunity.”

She says the office also saw significant discrimination against families of color with children due to the presence of lead paint, so she collaborated with the local and state health departments to reduce the level at which a child was considered lead-poisoned, and increased the penalties for discrimination in housing against families with children due to the presence of lead paint.

While the City of Boston has “acknowledged where inequities exist” and made advancements in BIPOC representation among City Council members, Anzalota says the city still has work to do on implementing policies that promote racial equity. Seattle, she says, is a more progressive city with established racial equity laws, but better enforcement of those laws is still needed.

“As a majority-white city, there is still a significant history of displacement in Seattle,” she says. “Gentrification continues to push people of color out of the city—and into South King County. It’s the government’s responsibility to protect folks and stop the redlining that continues to happen.”

To move forward, people need to understand that “white supremacy is baked into everything,” she says. “It’s why we always need to look at our laws and policies and ask ‘who is this serving and who is being harmed?’ It’s really challenging for folks to understand that we need to center the lived experience of BIPOC communities by using frames, tools, and analysis that come from those communities.”

“Local government has a lot of power to enact its own laws,” says Anzalota. “As a woman of color, it’s critical that those of us who can get involved at a local level support and organize for candidates of color who believe in a redistribution of resources.”