The Health Equity Institute at San Francisco State University
The Health Equity Institute seeks to foster innovation and community engagement towards a vision of a truly healthy society. We work from a social justice framework.
Our work is guided by recent advances in social epidemiology and environmental justice, where health and disease are understood as socially and environmentally produced through structural forces of inequality. We seek to understand "upstream" inequities that contribute to eventual health disparities (Hofrichter, 2006).
We encourage theoretically sophisticated and methodologically sound intervention research programs that are aimed to not only reduce co-factors of risk, but also to support and enhance existing sources of resiliency and strength in the most impacted communities.