SPH mini-case statement Do

OPPORTUNITIES FOR DONORS AND CORPORATE PARTNERS

COVID-19: This changes everything Now is the time for real public health leadership.

To translate public health knowledge into meaningful action—to do—is an essential part of the mission of Boston University School of Public Health (SPH). Without action, there can be no progress.

Many of the devastating national and global consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic can be traced to underinvestment in public health infrastructure and in the conditions that make people healthy.

As we advocate for better public health around the world, we draw upon our own strengths: our deep research base, our strong ties to the local community, our expanding global network, and our energetic faculty, students, staff, and alumni.

But we must and will raise our sights. Donor support can help us elevate and extend our action and activism.

Your investment can help in many ways. Current-use (or “spendable”) gifts go to work right away, seeding new community projects, dispatching faculty into the world as speakers and advocates, and helping to meet the day-to-day costs of our many outreach activities. Endowed funds can be used to hire and retain influential thought leaders and also permanently underwrite our most successful initiatives.

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Activist Lab. Knowing how to create a healthier world is not enough; that knowledge has to be turned into practice.

The Activist Lab is a catalyst for SPH to engage in bold new programs, drive policy and system improvements, and inspire public health leadership around the world. The health disparities highlighted by COVID-19 and the continuing presence of institutionalized racism make our commitment to the improved well-being of all populations—especially those less seen and less heard—more critical than ever.

The Activist Lab is a place to think outside the box; collaboration is our guiding principle. With our community and research partners, we launch innovative public health solutions to address everything from climate change and homelessness to water and food insecurity.

For example, working with partners on and off campus, we are developing courses on how structural racism creates health inequities and how public health practitioners can lead in bringing about positive change. And we are exploring ways in which we can work within the criminal justice system, in Massachusetts and across the nation, to return the right to vote to people who are or have been incarcerated.

health can be practiced. Ever more facile with technology, we plan to expand the lab’s reach, partnering on projects from bringing potable water to people in India to helping sex workers in Africa understand their own agency and ensure their safety.

“We can now be much more authentic partners with communities around the globe,” says Andrade. “By connecting easily with researchers, faculty, staff, students, and our community partners, we can focus both upstream, on broad-based preventive strategies, and on projects on the ground.”

Gifts to the Activist Lab can, among other things, provide “Activist Bucks” micro-grants to fund student-led projects, support research and its translation into practice, pay for new technology, or enable field placements for students.

Opportunities to support the Activist Lab include:

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$3 million to endow a professorship focused on translating research into practice

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$1 million to endow a BU Public Health Practice Fund in research translation

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$200,000 to create new Community Building Partnerships across sectors (e.g., innovative and bold public health tools that address public health imperatives such as gun violence, climate change, immigration, health inequities, mental health, and infectious diseases)

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$100,000 to endow a fellow-in-residence position, enabling SPH to host activists and experts who can advance research, scholarship, and practice

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$10,000–$50,000 to fund the field placement of an Activist Fellow, a student working with a nonprofit or government agency on a long-term, systemic public health issue

Building community to share information.

“We are called the Activist Lab and not the Activist Center because we see ourselves as resource guides providing an opportunity for students, faculty, alumni, and staff to come to us and say, ‘This is what keeps me up at night. What can I do about it? How can I activate that in the world?’ ” says Associate Dean of the Practice Craig Andrade (SPH’06,’11), director of the lab.

The pandemic has brought turmoil, but also opportunity.

Today, the Activist Lab has stretched its vision of how public

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$5,000 to fund one student activism micro-grant or community-based learning and immersion project $1,000+ to support Activist Lab trainings and programming to translate research into action

Public Health Post.

It took a pandemic to make the world aware that the concerns of public health do not get enough attention.

Five years ago, we were ahead of the pack when we started the first daily digital magazine devoted to the conditions that drive the health of Americans. Public Health Post (publichealthpost.org) moves ideas and evidence about public health to the front of readers’ minds.

On the Post, or PHP, we invite important health thinkers— policymakers, journalists, academics, and practitioners—to share their work. PHP helps these experts influence policy on a local, national, and global scale while educating the public from the front lines.

Our editors, working with student PHP fellows, use multiple formats—data visualization of health statistics, traditional long-form journalism, interviews and debates, research summaries, videos, curated content, and more—to tell powerful stories about population health. The issues we tackle run the gamut: from racism and the opportunity gap to gun laws, from prioritizing men in vehicle safety testing to the murder of mothers, from the price of prison to contraception.

We are read in all 50 states and in 150 countries. Eight million social media users engage with our content each year.

Sharing knowledge, with practitioners and the public.

Together, we are helping to drive—and reshape—the national dialogue on public health concerns.

“Our goal is to share with readers a wide range of public health topics that speak to the conditions under which we live, the challenges of different populations across the country, and the range of social, cultural, and economic environments that make us healthy or unhealthy,” says Michael Stein, executive editor of PHP and chair of the Department of Health Law, Policy & Management at SPH. “No other single media site finds and publishes the stories that we do.”

Your gifts can help advance the mission of Public Health Post in many ways, such as by sponsoring fellowships to train the next generation of public health scholars and journalists.

Opportunities to support Public Health Post include:

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$3 million to endow a professorship in public health communication

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$250,000 to support one year of PHP’s operations

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$100,000 to sponsor one class of six PHP fellows

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$50,000 to fund one cohort of three fellows and their travel to major public health conferences

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$10,000 to support the PHP podcast, PHPod

Public Health Conversations.

SPH leads with its ideas.

Our Public Health Conversations bring speakers together to engage in thoughtful dialogue about the pressing issues of public health, from “Antiracism as Health Policy” to “Tackling Climate Change,” from “Women in Science” to “Inclusion in a Digital World.” They are free and open to the global community, designed to inform, stimulate, and encourage groundbreaking discussion. Thousands of participants attend in real time, and many others view the programming after the fact in our archives.

While these events range from intimate gatherings to robust assemblies and take place both in person and online, they have a common purpose: to share, as broadly as possible, the best ideas in public health—then translate those ideas into impact.

Bringing knowledge to the world.

Generating knowledge is critically important, but ideas are nothing without ways to communicate them and people to test them. Our content-based programming is essential—and funds enable us to engage speakers from all over the globe and ensure we have the latest technologies and capacities to host innovative programming. With strong financial support from sponsors, SPH can continue and strengthen its influential Public Health Conversations.

SPH Public Health Conversations offer sponsors an exciting opportunity to reach an influential, highlevel audience. We look forward to partnering with corporations and foundations as we plan and execute these events. Sponsorship opportunities exist at a number of levels, as detailed below.

“I think that it’s a great community forum,” student Walae Hayek (SPH’21) said of a recent seminar, “so that people can

be updated and people can understand exactly what’s going on in terms of what we’re doing as a school and what we’re doing as part of the community.”

Opportunities to support Public Health Conversations include:

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$1 million to endow the entire suite of Public Health Conversations

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$100,000 to endow a new Public Health Conversation lectureship

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$5,000+ to sponsor an existing Public Health Conversation

The mission of SPH is to improve the health and well-being of populations worldwide, particularly the underserved, through excellence and innovation in education, research, and practice.

To ensure that we engage in the issues that advance the public’s health and have an impact on the most compelling public health challenges of our time, we have committed to three imperatives: generating new cross-disciplinary knowledge (think), educating exceptional professionals from diverse backgrounds (teach), and translating our research into cutting-edge practice (do).

Critical to our success is the ability to recruit world-class faculty and students; launch innovative programs that respond to global health needs; and embrace all sectors that have a role in shaping the health of the public. Philanthropic support from alumni, friends, and corporations and foundations enables us to do this—and much more.

We encourage you to learn more about our work and ways to support SPH by contacting: Jacoba van Heugten Assistant Dean of Development jjvh@bu.edu O 617-358-3321