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How the Kansas City region can achieve health equity

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To achieve health equity, we must support and build inclusive, powerful, and healthy communities that are characterized by racial equity and economically just systems.

One day in a river near a small community, someone was trapped in the water drowning.

The community quickly took action to save the drowning person. As they pulled the person to shore, they saw another person in the water, and another.

The community set up lifeguards and volunteers to save the many people who were caught in the current fighting for their lives.

Over time, members of the community walked upstream to understand why people kept falling into the river. They found a bridge that was shaky and nearly impossible to cross.

The community worked together to rebuild the bridge and prevent more people from falling into the river.

In Kansas and Missouri, both our urban and rural communities are losing people to our own rushing waters.

Adults and children are drowning in a lack of gainful employment and economic advancement, affordable and safe housing that supports health, and minimal access to things as simple as nutritious food.

That’s why Health Forward is focused on rebuilding bridges and ending health injustices that have plagued our communities for decades.

By design, residential segregation has left majority Black, Hispanic and Latino communities lacking access to a high quality and equitable community health ecosystem.

Medical data shows that structural racism and low income can shorten a person’s lifespan.

At Health Forward, we believe that with your help, we can we can reshape our reality and mold a future where everyone thrives.

Where we are free from the structural racism that feeds disparate health outcomes.

Where everyone, regardless of race or economic status lives a healthy life with access to quality care professionals that respect and value all patients’ religious, ethnic, and cultural beliefs and experiences.

We can better the health of our region if we join together to champion an equitable future that will serve us all. We can build strong community organizations and unite our power to solve our greatest health challenges. We can create a Kansas and Missouri where all people live in equitable and just places.

At Health Forward, we are on a journey upstream to fix the broken bridges in our communities.

Together, we can stop people from drowning in the river of health inequity and achieve inclusive, powerful, and healthy communities.