Undermining Racism: A Road to Promoting Equity in Oral Health

A new article in the Journal of Public Health Dentistry (JPHD) explains how the Oral Health Progress and Equity Network (OPEN) approaches systemic and institutional racism to address oral health inequities. The article is included in JPHD’s special issue about anti-racism in dental public health.

Co-authors, Michael Monopoli, CareQuest Institute’s vice president for grant strategy, and Ifetayo B. Johnson, OPEN’s executive director, write, “Oral health serves as a central focus for the network, but it is the alignment between equity and social justice that ignites and binds the network’s work.”

Through our grantmaking strategy, CareQuest Institute has supported the development of OPEN as a systems change network. The authors write, “OPEN’s response to racism is to treat the word ‘network’ as a verb rather than a noun.”

Read the article in the Journal of Public Health Dentistry (open access)

Read JPHD’s special issue, Anti-Racism in Dental Public Health: Engaging Science, Education, Policy, and Practice

You may also be interested in:

• Webinar: How’s America’s Oral Health? Barriers to Care, Common Problems, and Ongoing Inequity, watch this recorded webinar that features OPEN Network Executive Director Ifetayo Johnson.
• Taking Action on Racism: An Inside Look at a Special Issue, in an interview about the JPHD issue on anti-racism, guest editors Eleanor Fleming, PhD, DDS, MPH, FICD, and Julie Reynolds, DDS, MS, discuss the origins of the publication and its action-oriented goals.
• Advancing Equity Through Oral Health Fund, learn more about how CareQuest Institute drives oral health transformation and supports efforts to dismantle unjust structures through grantmaking.