In the latest episode of Public Consulting Group’s Public Health Connect series, we spoke to the Marin County Health and Human Services (HHS) Equity Team about how they are addressing racial disparities in their community through their racial equity strategy.

Marin County was ranked as the healthiest county in California for 13 years in a row but was also ranked as the most racially disparate county for many of those same years. In 2018, Marin County HHS launched a strategic plan to address health equity, acknowledging the severity of the problem and taking action to address it; however, the ensuing pandemic only exacerbated the issue. As such, the county recruited trusted community members to form Community Response Teams (CRTs) who identified regions of the county most in need and received funding from Marin County HHS to make an impact.

In our conversation, Robyn Barron, MPH, Equity Manager, and Niccore Tyler, MBA, Chief Assistant Director/Chief Strategy Officer, emphasized the need for internal organizational work to overcome barriers and ensure employee accountability and highlighted the importance of community engagement and feedback in developing effective strategies. They emphasized that addressing racial equity requires more than one-off training sessions and shared thoughts on how to manage the topic of equity as an ongoing conversation with continuous learning. Barron also shared helpful resources on frameworks to implement racial equity practices such as the PRESS (Problem Awareness, Root Cause Analysis, Empathy, Strategy, Sacrifice) framework by Robert Livingston.

To learn more about the Marin County project and how PCG can help your agency integrate racial equity into your strategic planning practices, watch the full episode here.

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