By Louise Ann Lyon, PhD | October 9, 2018

The mainstream culture in the U.S. values independence. As a nation, we esteem individual actions and view them as paths to success. “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is an admirable trait.

However, that focus is not the full picture. 

By Suzanne Schrag | August 31, 2018

JJ is 11 years old and on the way to school. JJ usually stops at the bodega to buy a candy bar for a snack. But today is different. This week JJ is learning in school about increasing your heart rate through physical activity to stay healthy. So, instead of stopping at the bodega, JJ runs around the block three times. JJ shows up to school a little sweaty but excited and energized.

By Theresa Boschert, JD | June 12, 2018

I’d like to tell you a story about a woman I’ll call Minnie. She’s a single mom with two pre-school aged children. She called my office one day asking for help about her housing situation.

Minnie and her children lived in a second floor apartment in a privately owned low rent housing unit. She was routinely sleeping in her car with her kids because her downstairs neighbor came home from work each day around 6 PM and began smoking. By nine o’clock, her children, one of whom had asthma, were coughing and having problems breathing.

By Marcia Quackenbush, MS, MFT, MCHES | May 8, 2018

LGBTQ students have plenty of reasons to feel like they don’t “fit” in a lot of schools. They are likely to experience pervasive harassment and discrimination, which may be delivered by peers, educators or administrators. Most attend classes that make no reference to their relationships, LGBTQ contributions to society, or the history of the gay and transgender rights movements.

ETR's Health Equity Framework gives us a way to examine issues such as these and be more focused and intentional about the steps we take to address them.

By Vignetta Charles, PhD & Karin Coyle, PhD | April 24, 2018

At ETR, we advance health equity through science-based solutions. We’ve been doing it for 37 years. But it wasn’t until recently that we developed our own framework to explicitly and transparently ground our work in health equity. This more intentional approach to health equity has energized our mission-driven work.

By Xinran Cui Dhaliwal, MPH | March 20, 2018

Health promotion must take a multifaceted approach. It is the only path to success. This is one of my core beliefs.

It’s also something that resonated deeply for me at ETR’s recent All Staff Retreat—my first. When you meet everyone in this organization in one room at one time, you are struck by the fact that ETR staffers work in so many diverse areas of public health research and practice.