Tools to turn your story into action.

Top Key Messages

• Care is not a side job, it’s a system. From childcare to elder care, millions provide essential support every day. Yet our systems still treat care as unpaid labor or private responsibility.
• Every household is impacted. Most people will give or receive care in their lifetime. But access to time, resources, and support is uneven, and the weight falls hardest on women, communities of color, and low-income families.
• Health depends on care. When care is accessible and supported, it improves physical, mental, and economic wellbeing. Investing in care means investing in collective resilience.
  
• To build equity, we must center care. That means valuing caregivers’ time, funding supportive systems, and designing policies that reflect our interdependence not just individual effort.

Calls to Action

• Share your caregiving story to shift the narrative
• Support campaigns for paid family and medical leave
• Download care equity resources for your workplace or community
• Follow and amplify caregiver-led organizations
• Advocate for public investments in childcare, elder care, and paid leave
• Join efforts to reimagine care as essential to health equity

What We’re Facing

• 63 million Americans, nearly 1 in 4 adults, provided ongoing care for an adult or a child with a complex medical condition or a disability in the past year, an increase of 20 million from 2015 to 2025. 
• Access to paid family leave improves infant health, reduces maternal stress, and strengthens family stability. 
• Child care can cost more than $15,000 a year, with prices ranging between 8 - 19.3% of median family income per child, which is well above the Health and Human Services’ recommended 7% of income benchmark for affordable childcare. 
• Almost 1 in 6 home care workers live in poverty, earning an average hourly wage of just $14.50.

Top Key Messages

• Equity is a matter of health, not opinion. When inclusion is removed from schools, healthcare, or workplaces, people suffer, especially those already pushed to the margins.
• The backlash is strategic. Diversity, equity & inclusion programs are being dismantled through legislation, misinformation, and fear, often targeting the very spaces where equity makes the biggest difference.
• Equity works. From improved health outcomes to safer workplaces to better education, inclusive policies make systems stronger for everyone. They create opportunity, open doors, and remove the barriers that hold people back.
• This is not about identity, it’s about infrastructure. A just society depends on equitable systems. That means investing in care, language access, safety and belonging.
  
• Protecting equity means protecting the people who carry it. The leaders doing this work face burnout, harassment and defunding. Their safety and sustainability must be part of the conversation.

Calls to Action

• Speak up for inclusive education and diversity, equity and inclusion protections
• Support leaders and organizations doing equity work in your community
• Push for policies that address bias in healthcare, hiring and housing
• Share stories that challenge erasure and build belonging
• Learn how equity shapes everything from life expectancy to opportunity

What We're Facing

• 76% of people believe race has an impact on people's opportunities to reach their best health.
• Lawmakers in more than 30 states have introduced or passed more than 100 bills to either restrict or regulate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the current legislation.
• Doula care was introduced to address racial disparities in Black maternal health, and it worked. Birthing people of all races who had doula support saw 52% lower odds of C-sections and 57% lower odds of postpartum depression and anxiety. 
• Without professional interpreters, patients with limited English proficiency face longer hospital stays and more readmissions. Interpretation access improves outcomes and brings care closer to equity.

Top Key Messages

• Economic policy is health policy. The tax system determines how much families can afford to eat, where they can live, and whether they can access care. When wealth is concentrated at the top, health outcomes are too.
• Inequity is by design. Tax codes and safety nets often favor wealth preservation over public investment. The rules reward those with inherited wealth and penalize those working to survive.
• Families are being left behind. Many households cannot cover basic needs or emergency expenses, even while working full time. These gaps reflect structural neglect, not personal failure.
• Solutions already exist. Expanding tax credits like the Child Tax Credit has been proven to reduce poverty and improve children’s well-being. Long term, a fairer tax policy can give families more power to build wealth and shape their futures.
• Closing the wealth gap is a health intervention. Generational wealth, fair wages, and accessible tax benefits all contribute to healthier, more stable lives.

Calls to Action

• Learn how tax policy shapes access to housing, education, and care
• Support campaigns fighting for fair wages and income supports
• Use and share tools that help families claim earned income and child tax credits
• Challenge narratives that blame poverty on individual behavior
• Follow and amplify voices working to close the racial wealth gap

What We’re Facing

• The tax system places a heavier burden on low-income families and rewards individual wealth over collective well-being. Source: RWJF’s Economic Inclusion for Families System 
• In a typical year, about 19 million children in families who are eligible to receive the full Child Tax Credit (CTC) receive less than the full $2,000-per-child credit. This includes half of the children who are Black or Hispanic and one-quarter of the children who are Asian or White. 
• While 74% of white families can take full advantage of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), only 48% of Black families and 51% of Latinx families can, showing how policies designed to help families can further exacerbate racial income gaps. 
• The typical White family holds 10 times the wealth of the typical Black family and 7 times the wealth of the typical Latinx family.

Top Key Messages

• Healthcare access should not depend on wealth, zip code, or job status. But in the United States, it often does.
• People are falling through the cracks. Even with insurance, families face high deductibles, surprise bills, and coverage gaps that force impossible choices.
• Medicaid saves lives. It improves health outcomes, supports working families, and protects children, elders, and people with disabilities.
• Uninsured communities are not choosing to opt out. They are priced out, shut out, or overwhelmed by systems built to confuse.
• Affording care should not be harder than surviving an illness. Equity means removing cost and complexity as barriers to staying alive.

Calls to Action

• Support Medicaid expansion and oppose policies that cut access to coverage
• Share stories of how coverage gaps impact real lives
• Learn how health care costs are driving economic instability
• Demand transparency and fairness in medical billing
• Help others navigate enrollment and coverage tools

What We’re Facing

• The House has passed legislation that would potentially cut nearly $1 trillion ($880 billion) from Medicaid to pay for tax cuts that mostly benefit wealthy people.
• Medicaid covers about 4 in 10 children, including 8 in 10 children living in poverty and nearly half of children with special healthcare needs.
• Research has repeatedly shown that access to health insurance through Medicaid lowers mortality rates, especially for deaths typically prevented by early diagnosis or medical intervention.
• Even with insurance, high deductibles and surprise bills push families into medical debt. In fact, one in four working-age adults are underinsured, and among them, nearly half carry medical debt.

Top Key Messages

• Structural racism is a public health threat. It shapes who has access to care, who is criminalized, who gets clean air and water, and who is left behind when systems fail.

• Inequities in health, wealth, and opportunity are not accidental. They are the result of laws, policies, and norms designed to advantage some while excluding others.

• Addressing racism requires more than individual change. It takes systems-level repair, community-led solutions, and policies that center equity and accountability.

• Communities know what they need to thrive. Real progress starts by listening to those closest to the impact and resourcing their solutions.
• Accountability saves lives. When institutions are held to the same standards as the people they serve, communities get safer and healthier.
• Strong messages follow a strong structure. They start with shared values to build trust, name the systems that stand in the way and offer a path forward that invites collective action and lasting change. Here are our tested narratives:
  • Racism and the injustices it causes deny opportunity to people of color and Indigenous peoples, and rob them of their physical and mental health. This is structural racism. We can’t make progress toward health equity in America without tackling it, together.
  • We all want to live in a United States where everyone has a fair and just opportunity to reach their best health and wellbeing, no matter their race, ethnicity, or class. 
  • That can happen by making sure everyone gets quality healthcare from doctors who respect them. 
  • But today, not everyone can move up economically and socially. That’s because there are barriers built in front of some of us that create unequal opportunity and threaten freedom and prosperity. 
  • By joining together, we can unite to create a better future for everyone’s children and grandchildren.

Calls to Action

• Share stories that reveal how racism shows up in everyday systems like school, work or healthcare.
• Learn how policies have shaped racial inequities in your city or state over time.
• Uplift local leaders and organizations pushing for systemic change in your community.
• Talk with your network about what structural racism really means and how it impacts health.
• Follow and support campaigns that demand measurable outcomes, not just promises.

What We’re Facing

• 246 local governments across the U.S. have declared racism a public health crisis, signaling a shift toward recognizing structural drivers of poor health outcomes. 
• The U.S. has lost an estimated $16 trillion in GDP since 2000 due to systemic racial inequities, proof that racism is not only unjust but also economically unsustainable. 
• Historically redlined neighborhoods remain significantly under-resourced today, with fewer trees, parks, and green spaces, conditions that drive higher rates of asthma, heat-related illness, and stress. 
• The median white household holds nearly 8 times the wealth of the median Black household, a gap rooted in centuries of policy-driven exclusion from housing, lending, and labor protections.