With lawmakers driving decisions around public health challenges including health care access, clean food and water, addiction, and vaccination, advocacy is critical to keeping communities safe, healthy and equitable.
From communicating with elected officials to leading organized policy research to calling for justice on social media, students and faculty at the College of Public Health are advocating for positive change in meaningful ways.
“We do the research, so I think it’s really important for us to go out and be active and fight for what we believe in,” said Shibani Chettri, a PhD student in epidemiology who testified before the Ohio Senate last June as a proponent for declaring racism a public health crisis. “It’s important for us as students, especially, to find our voices.”
Chettri, whose research focuses on racial disparities in maternal health and infant mortality, said she’s naturally become an advocate for the issues uncovered in her work. Her opportunity to testify at the Ohio Statehouse arose as a result of her involvement in the Public Health Graduate Student Association, of which she is vice president, and the Public Health Interest Group at the College of Medicine. When the groups learned the Senate was accepting oral and written testimony for a resolution to declare racism a public health crisis her peers encouraged her to take the lead.
Chettri’s testimony summarized striking disparities like the Black infant mortality rate — a measure of deaths before a first birthday per 1,000 live births — which in Ohio is more than 2.5 times higher than the white infant mortality rate. In February, she spoke further on the issue on an infant mortality panel hosted by Ohio State’s Infectious Diseases Institute.
“The only way to address health inequity … is to eliminate systemic racism through evidence-based policy,” she said at the Statehouse. In December, she testified before Columbus City Council on the importance of adopting policies to prevent police brutality.
For MD/MPH student Madison Martinez, advocacy is about building relationships and finding ways to lift up other people’s voices. The outgoing president of the Public Health Interest Group, Martinez has advocated for issues at the university and beyond — from promoting the placement of menstrual products in both gender restrooms at the College of Public Health to calling for increased diversity among a national academic honors society.
"It’s important to realize how much change you can help elicit as a student,” said Martinez, left. “You don’t have to immediately find your passion when beginning in advocacy. Find peers who are doing work you think is important and get involved in that, then see where your interests evolve.”
Chettri’s pull toward advocacy began one summer while she was a pre-med student shadowing a gynecologic oncologist — an experience that ultimately led her to public health.
“I became aware of how important it is to fight for women’s rights and reproductive rights,” said Chettri, who organized a student panel in November about the 2020 election and its implications for reproductive health. “When you’re a doctor you see one patient at a time. In public health, with your research and with policy advocacy, you can really impact a whole population at a time.”
Chettri is also part of a research collaborative called the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network, which studies how policy changes affect women’s reproductive outcomes in Ohio. The project, co-led by epidemiology professor Alison Norris, helps inform lawmakers with multidisciplinary research on trends in abortion access, infant mortality and more.
Both Martinez and Chettri urged students not to be afraid of getting started.
“It’s easy to feel daunted by advocacy work, but we can’t shy away from it — even when it’s polarizing or political,” Chettri said. “It’s important for us to be active for our communities.”
