Painting a Healthier Future: What Global and Community Health Means to Me

Global and community health to me is more than an academic interest--it’s a calling rooted deeply in brushes and ladders, paint-splattered clothing, and days spent after school at my grandmother’s house, working to remodel it while she recovered in hospital from Guillain-Barre syndrome. While she had lost the ability to use her hands, to write, to perform basic actions for herself, I was gaining an understanding of how profoundly health is shaped by environment, access, and care beyond the clinic. I began to see that healing was not necessarily entirely clinical; it happens in homes, in families, and in the overarching social structures that step in to help when people fall through the cracks. 

It was during this time that I first began to question how the system works, and, more importantly, who the system is designed to work for. Watching my mother and grandmother attempt to navigate a maze of hospital bureaucracy and expensive options for aftercare, I saw how older adults, especially those who have no one to be a strong advocate for them, are routinely neglected by systems and institutions meant to aid them. At the same time, I was navigating my own experiences within the healthcare system as a young person with a recently developed chronic illness. Too often, I felt my pain was minimized, my symptoms were dismissed, and my voice was overlooked. Unfortunately, these experiences weren’t isolated to those in my family, rather, they exposed a too-common pattern of systemic failure that revealed itself more and more as I looked into it. 

Choosing to major in Global and Community Health wasn’t a difficult decision--rather, it was a natural extension of my lived experiences. Community health, to me, means working to understand how an individual’s circumstances affect their susceptibility to illness and overall health. It’s, rather than just treating it, addressing all of the root causes of health: structural racism, economic injustice, housing insecurity, generational trauma, and more. Community health means caring about whether all members of our community have access to shelter, a warm meal, physical and mental health care, or a support system that picks them up when they relapse. Community health forces us to recognize that our physical health is not simply a reflection of our body, but of the environmental factors around us which make up our circumstances, too. 

Global health expands this commitment outward, past borders. While specific patterns and trends in health may vary across national lines, our core determinants of health--access to clean water, shelter, food, and healthcare--remain universal. And, as a global superpower, we have both the resources and the moral responsibility to respond and engage in global health efforts with compassion and cultural humility. Our response must reflect not only careful expertise but a true and deliberate commitment to equity and justice for all, regardless of where they live. 

My studies, this field of work has taken on a new urgency and meaning as the current administration moves to slash funding for public health infrastructure, community programs, and global health initiatives. Federal grants supporting work in infectious disease prevention have been halted, the FDA, CDC, and NIH have experienced mass layoffs, and funding supporting HIV/AIDS care and prevention locally and globally has been cut. These decisions, advertised to some as abstract budgeting items, have life-and-death consequences for our most vulnerable populations, including the very communities I come from. Weakening these already underfunded systems now, in a time of rising global threats and domestic inequities, is short-sighted, dangerous, and reflects poor regard for the populations we should care for the most. 

Ultimately, to me, studying and understanding Global and Community Health is not just preparation for a career--it’s a conscious act of resistance in a time when public health is under attack. It’s commitment to building and reforming a world where healing, health, and care are not a privilege reserved for our wealthiest, but a right for all. And, it began, for me, with a paintbrush in hand, learning how to make a space more liveable--and healing more possible--for someone I love.