Artificial intelligence (AI) is being rapidly deployed in public health settings, including data surveillance, benefit approvals and denials, physical data centers, and more.

Community organizers and advocates must build powerful networks to preserve healthcare as a community service, not just a vehicle for financial extraction and investor returns.

HBCU medical schools educate nearly 70% of the nation’s Black doctors, playing a critical role in helping the healthcare workforce reflect the communities they serve.

Drawing from compassionate awareness practices, including radical acceptance, speculative imagination, and ancestral intelligence, this session offered an opportunity to unwind, recharge, and reconnect with what you need to move forward with a renewed sense of clarity and purpose.

Building an anti-racist health system requires more than treating everyone the same. It includes identifying and addressing how differences in access, treatment, and life experiences affect health and require tailored care and treatment.

Rest & Renewal honored the ancestral memory, wisdom and intuition rooted in Black midwifery traditions by offering space to unwind and an opportunity to exhale. The session will remind participants that strategies once required for survival can now serve as a blueprint for imagining new systems to sustain life, while cultivating a supportive community for birthing people and their families.

For many people, midwifery and birthing centers are disrupting the status quo by offering more choices and centering autonomy, cultural knowledge and lived experience. What lessons may apply to other types of care—whether diabetes, cancer, cardiology, or overall public health?

DEI efforts continue to face political pushback, legal pressure, shrinking budgets, and changing priorities. But leaders in advocacy and healthcare are navigating this challenging environment and staying motivated, generating ideas, and delivering results that move equity forward.

Millions of people are expected to lose access to healthcare coverage due to new federal Medicaid work requirements, alongside changes to open enrollment—jeopardizing health and equity for all.

Public health works to protect and improve the health of communities through disease prevention, environmental safety, racial equity, and more. The public health system, however, has not always served everyone equally. From early efforts rooted in racism to unethical medical practices and mistreatment of Black people, distrust in public health remains.