Advancing Racial Equity in Health, Housing, and Education

Traumas experienced by youth of color put them at risk for significant mental health problems, which increase their likelihood of social, behavioral, and academic problems and premature termination of schooling.

Key goals in this domain include: identifying improvements to school disciplinary practices, enhancing student emotional, behavioral, and physical health services that promote equitable education and health outcomes across racial and ethnic groups, and enacting policies to ensure these practices are executed with fidelity at scale.

This area will include scholars who explore linkages between experiences with racism and young people’s trauma, as well as trauma informed practices within educational settings as possible solutions.

Place-based interventions and policies are needed to redress racialized housing markets and race-related disparities in environmental hazards, availability of resources, and access to quality schooling.

More work is needed to not only enable residential mobility and attainment, but also solutions that challenge racial discrimination in housing markets, urban development and planning, and in residential choice to increase equity in health, housing stability, and educational opportunity.

This area will include scholars who consider how racialized housing markets and the built environment structure systemic inequities that, in turn, impact the health and educational opportunity of young people. Candidates may have backgrounds in urban planning, sociology, social work, economics, public policy, and African American Studies along with appointments in public health or medicine.

Young people’s experiences in health care and school settings are shaped by how they and others perceive their identities, which include intersecting characteristics of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.

It is critical that we identify how these intersectional identities shape youth needs and perspectives and that we develop developmentally- and culturally-sensitive approaches tailored to promote optimal youth health and learning.

This area will include scholars who examine the educational and health experiences of young people at the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation in school settings, degree programs, and urban contexts.

There is an urgent need to develop and implement equitable practices and policies in health care, housing and residential contexts, and education. Key approaches include: acknowledging the problem of racism as fundamental to the work of all social systems and institutions that serve young people, developing and integrating data systems that identify family, neighborhood, and community strengths, which can be leveraged to mitigate threats to youth health, housing, and education, increasing funding streams and multi-sector efforts to promote equitable youth access to quality health services and education resources, and ensuring these efforts are implemented sustainably in communities.

This area will include scholars in the areas of housing finance, earned income tax credit, policing schools and neighborhoods, environmental waste, school finance, trauma informed practices, and desegregation policy.