Dear Friends of OPHI,

We know that you—especially our BIPOC partners—have statement fatigue and that words aren’t action.

As a public health institute with privilege and a platform, we want you to know where we stand, but we’ll keep it short: Police violence is a public health crisis rooted in racism and white supremacy.

OPHI supports moving the billions of dollars that fund police departments across the country to community organizations that can use that money to create true safety, health, and wellbeing, centering the lives of people of color. This and more has been said earlier and better by our POC-led partner organizations (thank you for this labor), and national organizations as well. We urge you to learn from their work and support them in a meaningful way. 

Some of our community partners doing vital work for the Black community are:

• Portland African American Leadership Forum
• Black Parent Initiative
• Ethiopian and Eritrean Community Resource Center
• UniteOregon

On the national scale, we recommend support for:

• Black Lives Matter
• Movement for Black Lives
• Color for Change
• NAACP

We are a small organization, but we are committed to action. Here are a few ways we are acting right now:

• Continuing to support Black-owned childcare businesses in creating healthy learning environments for Black kids. We’re seeking grant support to expand this project to allow us to do business development work with these entrepreneurs.
• Advancing health equity in Washington County by hiring a workforce of contact tracers who are majority bilingual and bicultural. 
• Engaging in conversations about how public health will advance racial justice. 

We appreciate you and what you bring to this work. As always, you can send us a note at info@ophi.org if you’d like to talk more. 

– OPHI