Leading Change at Berkeley Public Health: Building the Anti-racist Community for Justice and Social Transformative Change

A transformative change grounded in a commitment to antiracism and racial and health equity is underway at the University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley, School of Public Health. Responding to a conflu-ence of national, state, and local circumstances, bold leadership, and a moral and disciplinary imperative to name and address ra-cism as a root cause of health inequities, our community united around a common vision of becoming an antiracist institution. Berkeley Public Health has a long history of efforts supporting di-versity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice. Building upon those efforts, we pursued an institution-wide initiative, one that creates a more equitable and inclusive school of public health that models and supports the development of future public health lead-ers, practitioners, scholars, and educators. Grounded in the prin-ciples of cultural humility, we recognized that our vision was a journey, not a destination. This article describes our efforts from June 2020 through June 2022 in developing and implementing ARC4JSTC (Anti-racist Community for Justice and Social Trans -formative Change), a comprehensive, multiyear antiracist change initiative encompassing faculty and workforce development, stu-dent experience, curriculum and pedagogy, community engage-ment outreach, and business processes. Our work is data informed, grounded in principles of change management, and focused on building internal capacity to promote long-term change. Our dis-cussion of lessons learned and next steps helps to inform our on-going work and antiracist institutional change efforts at other schools and programs of public health.