We have to breathe through this one. We’ve all spent the past several years living through a cataclysmic public health crisis that will reshape how we collectively think about ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world for decades to come. A myriad of interconnected systems have been stressed. Economies have been frayed and rewired. Community development practitioners have been simultaneously frontline essential workers and yet chronically missing from the conversation. Health policies have been politicized. People have been lost.

It is easy to understand why we might not want to spend time acknowledging, parsing, healing, or repairing from this time. It was all so much to carry, and as with all crises, the weight carried has been much heavier for communities of color – the twin pandemics of COVID-19 emerging, layered on top of the deep-rooted, persistent pandemic of structural racism.

There’s a long-held adage that “when white America catches the cold, Black America ends up with pneumonia.” Particularly in the early days of COVID-19, that saying was borne out in the data. People of color experienced disproportionate exposure to COVID-19 in roles as “essential workers”, higher rates of hospitalization, and higher fatality rates. You could look at 80-year-old redlining maps and safely predict the home address of pandemic impact.

Of course, the health consequences of segregation, disinvestment, and displacement are not limited to a global pandemic. Those same maps demonstrate the weight communities of color shoulder in everything from hypertension to mental health to asthma to length and quality of life itself. These are not the results of individual life decisions; they stem from localized, structural racism in community-level investment. When communities of color live everyday with more dilapidated buildings and less greenspace, for instance, is it any wonder that those same communities’ health outcomes are perennially lagging white counterparts?

In a deeply segregated country, health is entirely entwined with the kinds of neighborhood-level work of community development. A failure to address equitable development is a failure to adequately address social determinants of health. A movement toward anti-racist practice in community development will translate quite literally into more years (and happier and healthier ones) for Americans of color.

So breathe with us. In this issue, we’re sitting with the diagnosis and developing an after-care plan for bringing the intersection of health equity and equitable development to the forefront. We invite you to review our High-Level Findings report to think through all the implications that community development leadership, policy, and finance have for community health. Where can community development practices support health-related sectors, and where can promising health approaches get woven into community development work? What’s the role of collective healing and repair in anti-racist work? What could a future of culturally competent, community-level health investment look like, and what would be the result? We promise, this conversation is good for what ails us. Onward.