Our vision is for all people within our region to have access to what they need to lead healthy lives.

Wanda Givens is a member of the leadership team for the Women of Color Health Equity Collective (WOCHEC). WOCHEC offers training and consulting services to address issues of white supremacy, health inequity, and more. As part of her work at WOCHEC, Wanda facilitates a training about cultural humility. "What I love most about facilitating Cultural Humility is not what people learn about each other, but what they learn about themselves. The more we know about how we get to be who we are, the more we can understand and relate to someone else’s journey. There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing someone come to the realization that they are more like others in the room than they are different. Our paths may take different roads, but essentially, we are all on the same journey." Did you know the Race and Health Equity Resource Guide includes a listing of organizations like WOCHEC who can help guide your organization on its anti-racism journey and more!

Jaymie R. Zapata is a Senior Planner - Public Health with the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission. "Though the challenges of achieving racial equity may seem daunting, the past has a lot to teach us about how the systems that define our daily lives came to be. The first step to dismantling systems is to understand them. As a systems-level public health planner, I think it is vital to always be reading and educating myself about the decisions my predecessors made in public health for good or ill, so I can center what is just and challenge what is not. A book that was essential to my understanding of race and Black health in the United States was The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander , without which I do not think I would have been able to understand the continuation of Jim Crow laws into the present day nor their deep impact. At my agency we have established a racial equity reading library in our break room, stocked with many books from the Race and Health Equity Resource Guide . We hope people will take a minute over coffee to unplug, pick up a book, and gain some new insights while they are at it. There’s never a bad moment to learn something new!"