Lisa Sullivan Discusses Framing the Future 2030 and the Role of Academic Public Health.

‘This Is Putting Our Mission into Action’
Lisa Sullivan, associate dean for education, discusses the latest Framing the Future initiative, a transformational approach to public health education that aims to help academic public health address 21st-century issues.
This month, the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) officially launched Framing the Future 2030: Education for Public Health (FTF 2030), an initiative designed to help schools navigate the ever-evolving landscape of public health to ensure graduates are well-equipped to address future challenges.
ASPPH President Laura Magaña described FTF 2030 as “a significant transformation” intended to “redefine approaches to teaching, learning, and community engagement in public health.” At the core of FTF 2030 are recently published reports from three expert panels, each charged with addressing a specific area for transformation, with the goal of completely revamping public health education by 2030.

Lisa Sullivan, associate dean for education, chaired the FTF 2030 steering committee leading the initiative, and was the co-chair of the expert panel that created the foundational report, Building Inclusive Excellence through an Anti-racism Lens. This report proposes five key recommendations to “deliver a resilient educational system for public health that advances health equity and well-being for everyone, everywhere.”
The Transformative Approaches to Teaching and Learning report calls for an “educational overhaul to enhance public health engagement and restore trust in higher education.” The Fostering Community Partnerships for a Healthier World report emphasizes the need for academic public health to bolster collaboration with community partners.
This latest initiative builds upon a prior successful effort, Framing the Future: The Second Hundred Years of Public Health, which aimed to modernize public health education for the 21st century by substantially reworking the curriculum to align with current needs. Sullivan and former SPH Dean Robert Meenan were integral members of the expert panel that proposed suggestions on revamping the MPH curriculum, with Meenan serving as panel chair.
Q&A
with Lisa Sullivan, associate dean for education
What are some major differences in Framing the Future 2030 that differentiate it from the previous initiative?
The original effort really provided a lot of very specific recommendations in terms of what students should know and be able to do at each program level. And the recommendations were very prescriptive. But in this effort, we knew we couldn’t provide a cookbook to schools and programs because schools and programs are so different and we’re all operating in very different environments. So we knew we couldn’t produce the same kind of recommendations this time around.
We organized ourselves into three cross-cutting areas—so not around the MPH, DRPH, that kind of thing—but inclusive excellence, transformative approaches to teaching and learning, and then fostering community partnerships. And these all work together, but can apply to, we hope, all degree levels and to schools of different sizes and scopes operating in different political environments. So our organization was different and what we knew we could produce needed to be different.
With that in mind, were there any differences in the way that you approached the issues as opposed to before?
It was a very inclusive process before and it was a very inclusive process again. So in that regard, it was the same. And that’s how ASPPH operates, I think. They want a lot of people to weigh in because they represent all members, so there were a lot of opportunities for people to engage with our process and each of the expert panels had a lot of representation. Each panel had about 20 members. There were quite a few people on these panels and that was intentional to make sure we got different perspectives in all of these reports.
I was the co-chair, along with Wendy Barrington, on the inclusive excellence panel and with our panel in particular, we needed to be very sensitive in terms of recommending things because some schools and programs just can’t do certain things because of where they are.
What are some of the overarching things that you want schools of public health to adopt?
We need students to be trained differently than they were in the past with different kinds of skills. The transformative education report calls for students to be trained for more civic engagement, more advocacy, to be able to communicate across lots of different perspectives respectfully and productively. And so those are the kinds of things where you can’t just say, “Okay, everybody needs to add a course on X.” It’s not going to work that way. I mean, because the way we might train our students might be a little different than students in Florida or Texas.
It took several years, but the ASPPH got buy-in from schools and programs in terms of reforming curricula based on the initial Framing the Future effort, with most formally adopting the recommendations. What do you think the uptake will be with this round of suggestions?
A major factor in the original Framing the Future was that the recommendations were highly specific and CEPH [Council on Education for Public Health] adopted a lot of the ideas. That was the lever then, but this is a little different.
We were very fortunate to have members of CEPH on the expert panels, including Dr. Laura Rasar King, who is the executive director of CEPH. She participated in two of them, and it was very important to have CEPH at the table and weighing in on ideas. CEPH regularly updates the accreditation criteria as part of their accreditation process, which gets reported to the Department of Education. So one way [for adoption] is through accreditation requirements, but what we are hoping is that it’s not all just because of accreditation.
For example, the idea of inclusive excellence is in most every school and program’s mission statement—schools and programs aim to be inclusive in how we operate and aim to train our students to practice that way. One of the things that we articulated as a panel, and I think it’s true, is that inclusive excellence is a process, not an outcome. Different schools, programs, and individuals are at different places in this work. . We see inclusive excellence as foundational and necessary for any transformative educational process, and I hope that people take it the recommendations because it’s the right thing to do. If we actually have everybody at the table and we hear and value different perspectives, only then can we transform the way we teach and learn.
One of the dangers of a process like this is mission creep, where you’re trying to identify a set of problems and then you identify any number of other problems that are spun off of those. Were there any instances where the panel realized it needed to manage expectations and just deal with a defined set of challenges?
Absolutely. It happened in our panel, the inclusive excellence expert panel, because we have faculty, staff, students, and partners, and there are a lot of things to fix around inclusion. There were many times in our panel’s work where we had to say, “All right, wait a second, what can we realistically do?” And I actually feel good about the report that we put out because I think it’s provocative—it’s meant to be—and there’s some text in there that might make people uncomfortable intentionally. We want and need to move the needle. We had many conversations about, “Should we say things this way? Are we going to alienate some people who might be just too uncomfortable and not ready to deal with this?” And it was the feeling of the committee, “No, enough is enough. We’ve got to move this forward.”
I think everybody in public health is committed to inclusive excellence, transformative education, and fostering better and stronger partnerships, but making real change can feel overwhelming at times in initiatives like this, I think, because they are so big and you feel like, “Oh God, can we actually do anything?” But I think we all felt—and as a steering committee and within each panel, and we said this repeatedly—every step counts, every movement moves something, and little steps can add up to big change.
So that was the feeling. We don’t all have to go from here to there immediately, but let’s get everybody at least rowing in the same direction. And it may be slow, but at least we’re going in the same direction.
How do you get from the suggestion phase into the uptake phase, with schools actually implementing this?
At BUSPH, we are planning an all-school retreat around this and will invite all members of our community to come. I will certainly be sharing these recommendations with the education committee because several of the reports—transformative education, for example—really apply to how we teach and what we teach. I want to get this into our education committee, but the other pieces impact all of the work we do—and they’re intended to.
SPH was an early adopter of the changes in the MPH curriculum and plans to be ahead of the curve in adopting many of the new recommendations outlined in the reports. How does that factor into attracting new students?
All of the reports are moving towards the vision, which is equitable, quality education in public health for achieving health equity and well-being for everyone, everywhere. I mean, it’s what we say we’re about, so these are some ways to get there. I hope that students come to our school because of what we’re about, and see that this is putting our mission into action. That’s how I see it.
[For many schools], a lot of the things in here are aspirational and aren’t going to be achieved overnight or even very quickly. But I think there are strategies that we can start working on now that will get us moving in this direction. Our field is constantly changing.
One of the other things that we’re hoping for is that people share what they’re doing. ASPPH is really good about this, at getting people to share and support other member schools and programs, to elevate the whole field. And of course, there’s always competition for admissions and things like that, but I think collectively, we want to elevate our field and we can maybe do that together with this as a framework and people can adopt it as they want or adapt it as appropriate.
As you said, some schools may already have implemented some of these measures and some haven’t. From your perspective, having seen similar initiatives roll out, what do you think the biggest hurdles will be?
Right now, people are tired. I mean, I think everybody feels pretty exhausted. Covid, the political environment, war—it is very heavy. Maybe this can be something aspirational, something good for us to do together. I hope it’s a way to engage people around something positive, but the barriers are always time and energy. But again, it’s meant to be a collaborative process….It’s an “us” thing, not a “me” thing.
What we want to happen is for people to share examples of things that they’re doing to accelerate change. One of the recommendations is that schools and programs share their ideas, that may be beneficial to others. And again, especially around the inclusive excellence work, some schools literally cannot do this. So those of us who can do it must do it.
On June 26, SPH will host the sixth installment of our Teaching Public Health series, which began in 2018, to discuss how academic public health can act on the Framing the Future 2030 recommendations to better prepare the next generation of public health professionals.
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