Alumni News

‘To Live Is to Have Freedom of Choice’

Alum Jennifer Masdea, Race to Justice evaluator for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, leads trainings, workshops, program evaluations, and more for the initiative that aims to advance racial equity and social justice.

“Systems of inequity are created by us, so they can be undone by us,” says School of Public Health alum Jennifer Masdea (SPH’16). As the Race to Justice program evaluator at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), Masdea strives to achieve this goal each and every day.

Launched in 2016, Race to Justice is the NYC agency’s organizational change initiative for advancing racial equity and social justice. The multi-faceted and largely internal reform effort aims to help DOHMH’s more than 6,000 staff members learn what they can do to close racial health gaps and improve health outcomes for all of the city’s residents.

Masdea joined the small team in 2017, after completing the MPH program in maternal and child health. She wears many hats, leading a host of internal training and educational programming, and also provides policy feedback, data analysis, program evaluations, and consulting and advocacy support to staff members on equity issues. She also provides strategic support to the city’s ongoing and rapidly evolving emergency response to COVID-19, to ensure that health and racial equity are at the center of policies and procedures aimed at mitigating the short and long-term impacts of the pandemic.

“The Health Department has been around for hundreds of years, so there are a lot of inequities that are deeply ingrained, and many of our systems are designed to withstand change,” says Masdea. “As a field, public health also contributes to inequities in policies and practices when we think about the unconscious biases and privileges we hold and deploy, so we all play a role in this effort. If we can’t model equity within our walls, how are we going to model equity in our communities?”

The Race to Justice framework, adopted from the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), encompasses three broad strategies: normalize, organize, and operationalize.

The “normalize” element of the initiative focuses on building a shared understanding of what race and racism mean. “We wanted to shift the focus from thinking about interpersonal racism, to a broader focus on racism at the institutional and structural levels—racism in its invisible and most powerful forms,” Masdea says.

In this effort, the team offers a series of trainings and workshops to educate and create awareness among staff about racial issues and challenges. Masdea was one of the founding facilitators of the Race to Justice Core Workshop, which aims to normalize conversations about race and racism, and build a shared analysis of racial equity across the department.

The “organize” element of the Race to Justice program aims to build a solid infrastructure for racial equity by engaging staff and developing their leadership to promote equity within their own divisions at the Health Department. Masdea manages an All-Staff Survey to examine equity-related changes in staff culture and practice, and designs and implements evaluation projects to inform future learning and development strategies.

“The organizing piece is the most complicated, but in a way, it is also the most beneficial,” says Masdea. “We can’t do this work alone. We’re not going to solve racism in a seven-hour workshop. What we can do is help staff members understand that the eradication of health inequities can only be achieved when everyone – not just those most impacted by structural racism – owns the burden of transforming the Health Department into an anti-racist organization. Shared accountability is the cornerstone of racial equity work.”

Incorporating staff input, participation, and feedback is an essential factor of the Race to Justice initiative, says Masdea. Not only are they members of the communities that they serve, but the majority of DOHMH staff are also people of color, many of whom experience the exact inequities that the department is committed to extinguishing.

“Our staff are living and breathing these inequities, and they have a wealth of knowledge and information,” Masdea says. “To live as a person of color is to be traumatized on a daily basis. For many people, this is their life’s work.”

 The “operationalize” piece of the initiative convenes staff and senior leadership together into four work groups that translate these visions and goals into equitable policies and practices. Divided into categories of finance and budgets, community engagement, communications, and workforce equity and inclusion, the groups are another opportunity to integrate valuable ideas and perspectives from staff members on internal and external policy and operational changes.

“While the vast majority of our staff are people of color, the representation amongst senior leadership is not representative of the entire staff population,” says Masdea. “Staff members are predominantly doing more community-facing work, such as city regulation enforcement, including food inspection and pest control, so they’re receiving lower pay and more likely to work in inequitable conditions.” The working groups have guided DOHMH to develop unbiased language around racism, to avoid patronizing engagement with communities, and frame data to effectively communicate challenges among historically marginalized groups.

“Change in government is slow, but there are a lot of amazing, brilliant people who are really doing things differently,” Masdea says. “I see our impact every day and I’ve seen so many staff transform into equity champions.”

Masdea says her work is driven by a desire to create better conditions for the agency’s staff and for her community.

“As a Black woman, this is my survival,” she says. “As much as there is talent and wealth and beauty in my community, there is a lot of inequity, people are dying disproportionately, and that is unjust. To live is to have freedom of choice, and so many people do not have that option.”

“This work is arduous, but I get up and do it every day because everyone should have the same opportunities to obtain not just the highest level of health, but the highest quality of life,” she says. “The two are intrinsically linked.”