Leveraging the Critical Race Theory (CRT) & Social Ecological Model (SME) Equity in MOTION program will provide strategic advisory services to Community Based Organizations (CBO) and health related program administrative teams by consulting on all aspects of the impact of long-standing systemic social and health inequities, including some that have been introduced or exacerbated by federal, state, and local policies.

This initiative's target population includes Black community members who live, work, and engage in health programs servicing historically marginalized Black individuals located in Hamilton County, Ohio. Black, in terms of this program refers to people who identify as African American/Black who are descendants of slaves brought to the United States involuntarily and the offspring born in the United States from families that originally came from Africa, regardless of additional ethnicity or race. These individuals may have varying ethnicities but have cultures that are historically rooted in the U.S. slave trade that brought people mostly from West and South Africa (Baugh, 2018; Merriam-Webster, n.d.a). Hamilton County Public Health Child Fatality Review Annual Report highlights that the urban core of Hamilton County (City of Cincinnati) communities in the western part of the County and north of the City of Cincinnati have some of the highest child fatality rates.

The persistence of racial disparities within healthcare is associated with a range of interconnected factors, such as historical, cultural, social, social, and psychological. The continued inequalities in social institutions hinder organizations from properly addressing discrimination experienced by people of color (Thomas, 2018a). Equity in MOTION will leverage the critical race theory, which asserts that historically based and institutional ideology of white supremacy and privilege is sustained by racism ingrained in our society (Obasogie et al., 2017, Volpe et al., 2019). As a result, Equity in MOTION aims to address organization racism that over time functions as a “cloak of invisibility” rendering racialized and racially hierarchical structures racially neutral and rational. Equity in MOTION will primarily focus on advancing Birth Equity (with a special focus on the intersection of breastfeeding, infant mortality, and maternal morbidity) through Advancing health equity through the Acknowledgment & Acceptance of the adverse effects of racism/discrimination (regardless of the method perceived/ implicit/ overt, biases, microaggressions, e.g.) and creating Systems of Change via Community Mobilizing and Movement Building.