It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere. I can’t help but see almost everything I do in my advocacy through the lens of health equity.  Whether it’s making decisions about our health and medical care, managing pain, young adults with complex medical issues transitioning from pediatric to adult medicine, men in caregiving, data sharing, patient access to data. Everywhere. I’m defining equity as people having the same opportunity to achieve best physical, mental and spiritual health no matter their social circumstances, biology, genetics, or physical environment. I wanted to take a look at bias, inclusion and equity from outside healthcare. So, I interviewed Ame Sanders and we talked about our own biases, inclusion or lack thereof in our communities, measuring bias, and taking action to reduce inequities.

Ame Sanders and I met at Seth Godin’s Podcasting Fellowship, 350 or so people from around the world learning to be podcasters. Ame caught my eye with her podcast, Equity Warriors, and her company www.stateofinclusion.com. See the show notes for further information. We decided to interview each other. You can hear Ame’s interview of me at the link above. Being a practical person, I look for what works and what we can learn from other people’s experiences.  While Ame doesn’t work in the health care space, she has much to teach us about the state of inclusion in communities.

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Episode notes
PREFER TO READ OR DEAF? Find here
Time-stamped sections
Episode intro. 1

Podcast Intro 01:19. 2

Introducing Ame Sanders 02:09. 2

Realizing health was fragile 03:11. 2

Defining community 05:00. 2

Measuring equity. Where’s the data? 07:01. 3

Knowing better and doing better 10:34. 4

Establish a basis of trust 12:54. 5

How did you get to the State of Inclusion? 16:14. 6

Wave a magic wand and make a change 20:39. 7

Podcasting versus blogging 22:56. 7

It can be a negative space 24:15. 8

Motivating change, a tall order 25:46. 8

Episode conclusion 28:31  9
Clips
Defining Community
I'm open to any definition of community and there are many different ways to define community. It can be social media. It can be the LGBTQ community. It can be people that you identify with. But for the work that I do, largely, the way I define community is either city or county. And I'll give you a reason because my mission for my work is to work with communities to help them become more inclusive. I believe you can change the world one community at a time. and I work with a lot of data. There is a certain level of data that's required to do this work. And it's mostly available at the county level sometimes even not at the county level.
Measuring equity -race
It is a bit of a conundrum because in one hand you don't want to ask people that question because it shouldn't matter, right. We should be able to go through life and never be asked that because race is an artificial construct in any case. It's not a factual thing. It's an artificial construct and in some cases, as you pointed out, it’s how people perceive themselves and how they define themselves.
Knowing better and doing better
There’s a quote from Maya Angelou that says, ‘when you know better do better.’ So each of us, I think the most important thing in this work is that each of us own very responsibly. The need to know better and that includes knowing better about ourselves.  And doing better.
Establishing trust