Mike White

Mike White joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in February 2016 as a program associate. Through his work in the area of health equity, he strives for a Culture of Health inclusive of perspectives and needs from across sectors and communities. As he puts it: “In order to achieve health equity, we must confront long-standing structural issues that have traditionally led to worse health outcomes for certain populations. We have to reexamine how we collaborate with communities and partners to promote programs, policies, research, and funding streams that reach and involve the most disadvantaged among us.”

Previously, Mike served as a program manager for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, an initiative co-founded by the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association, to reduce childhood obesity prevalence by transformi the environments where young people spend their time. Mike worked with a startup team to develop and pilot the initiative’s Health Out-of-School Time (HOST) component, which he introduced to an initial 20 sites in the D.C. area and that now reaches more than 2.5 million young people around the country.

Mike received his MPH in Population and Family Health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and holds a BA in journalism and photography from Washington and Lee University. While attending Columbia, he completed his practicum at RWJF in the office of the Chief of Staff and spent the second year of his studies as a consultant to the Foundation’s business portfolio. His early-career photojournalism work has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Kentucky Herald-Leader, among other publications, and focused on the community-level impact of federal health policy as it intersects with poverty.

Born and raised in Richmond, Va., Mike currently resides in a converted chocolate factory in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he can be found taking in live music, sunsets over Manhattan, unusual food, and the occasional Broadway show.