about us: Brief history of BARHII
Founded in 2002, BARHII is a national engine for health equity thought leadership. BARHII sits at the unique intersection of thought leadership and practice, deeply informed by equity leaders in government and community who deal each day with the demands of systems change for equity.
A Home For EquitY Changemakers
For over two decades, equity changemakers in government and community have gravitated to BARHII to test new ideas, share what’s working, and build the political will needed to succeed. Supported by BARHII, they have improved the lives of tens of thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay Area and California. At BARHII, they combined their voices to serve as an essential "health voice" to help pass groundbreaking legislation, including expanded paid sick leave, statewide rent-gouging rules, pandemic-related eviction prohibitions, and climate justice programs.
National Leader in Equity Practice
The nationally recognized BARHII framework for health equity, which reflects the pathway to health equity in our lifetime, is used by thousands of government and community leaders throughout the country to guide their equity transformations. The framework serves as a foundational document in the American Medical Association’s Health Equity strategy, and was the foundation for the formation of the State of California Department of Public Health’s Office of Health Equity, and has shaped the strategic planning of national, state, and local health jurisdictions. In the Bay Area, the framework inspired the launch of health equity policy in planning units across the Bay Area’s governmental public health departments, now a national phenomenon; and BARHII’s framework continues to regularly appear in public health textbooks that train the next generation of health equity practitioners.
Powering the Movement for Health Equity
BARHII is also the place where new ideas for government equity practice are tested and refined. During the pandemic, BARHII led successful efforts to ensure Equity Officers were placed into emergency responses, advanced cash aid for families, kept parks open for families, and provided guidance for local governments in equitable response and rapid recovery.
Our Future
Today, BARHII is powering the movement for health equity in our lifetime by leading efforts to ensure COVID-19 and racial reckoning was a wake-up call to the nation—and that we emerge with a new society that honors, protects, and advances health equity and racial health justice with the urgency it deserves.
The pandemic served as a stress test for our country’s ability to respond with health equity at the core. We saw, what health equity advocates have known, our country has uneven infrastructure to respond to issues of health justice.
