Brown Bag Lecture Series
Improving the Public Health Agenda
On June 28, Samantha Graff and Sara Zimmerman of Public Health Law & Policy visited the offices of the Legal Aid Society–Employment Law Center and led a vibrant discussion about how public interest lawyers can join with policy analysts and urban planners to play a key role in the public health arena. The discussion was part of this year’s Elizabeth J. Cabraser Summer Brown Bag Lecture Series.
Public Health & Law Policy (PHLP) works to change norms in how society looks at public health and social justice issues from a population-wide perspective. Starting in the arena of tobacco and smoking, PHLP worked to change social behavior by changing laws and policy—including those that governed where people could smoke and how much people paid in taxes on tobacco products. More recently, they have worked on childhood obesity prevention. The presenters underscored that their goal was to look at obesity as a population-wide issue with broad health improvement solutions, rather than to stigmatize individuals. The prevention of childhood obesity is merely one tactic in what needs to be a system-wide approach in creating a healthy society.
Ms. Graff and Ms. Zimmerman invited the audience to develop ideas about how diverse aspects of society lead to poor nutrition and inactivity, which in turn have led to a societal surge in levels of obesity. These areas include zoning and land use regulations, community access to healthy food, the affect of media on health choices, and socioeconomic disparities. Ms. Zimmerman noted that identifying these structural barriers to healthy lifestyles was the first step in creating solutions in order to improve public health. The second step is to think about what kinds of ordinances are in effect or could be implemented to counter these affects and make it easier for communities to tackle these issues.