Responding to COVID-19’s Equal Threat with Unequal Health and Wealth Outcomes

It’s often said that when the United States gets a cold, communities of color get the flu due to enduring systemic inequities in health and wealth. COVID-19 is affecting everyone in the United States, but the impact on communities of color is excessively high. This uneven impact is both revealing and exacerbating inequalities and disparities across racial and economic lines, as reflected in the disproportionate infection and death rates in communities of color. Structural racism has limited access to good jobs, quality education, healthy housing and neighborhoods, food security, health care services, and other social determinants of health and resulted in financial insecurity and underlying health issues that make communities of color far more vulnerable to the current pandemic.

As these disparate outcomes are unfolding, how are you thinking about strategies for interventions that consider both health and wealth? What are you doing as immediate responses to help the communities most in need, and what are you planning for long-term solutions? How might we radically reshape grantmaking that will lead to systemic changes that improve housing, economic stability, and wealth building to support improved health outcomes for communities of color? Join your peers for an AFN member-to-member conversation exploring these questions.