With her finger on the pulse of the public, APHA president Kay Bender knows what the most pressing
problems are facing our public health community. Fresh off of her tour of Affiliates all across the
country she joins us now in studio with more about what she learned. Good morning. Good morning,
it's nice to see you. Well thanks for being here with us today. You just got back from your last
stop in Washington state. Right. Talk a little bit about what you learned from talking with
those who are really at the forefront of the fight of public health. Yeah it's been an awesome year.
I was able to travel to about 15 of APHA's state affiliate annual conferences and another three or
four virtual so it was great to be able to be with them in person and or reconnect. You know
it's really interesting, almost all of them are really seriously dealing with policies and systems
and leadership around health equity and about half of the Affiliates have declared racism as a public
health issue and the others who haven't quite been able to be that bold are still working on
it you know sort of more behind the scenes given the political environment, so there's been sort of
this unified national movement with a commitment to equity and racial equity as well so that
that gives me hope for the future. The other observation is there's been this real excitement
around engaging with students. Oh!. And you know APHA, a third of our membership are students,
we have almost eight thousand student members, and so the state Affiliates all around the
country have just employed really innovative ways to engage students and recognize that that
those are leaders of the future and we'd talk about the students or a third of our membership
but a hundred percent of our future. Oh I love that. Yeah and so it's just been exciting to me
to see the student engagement and the real commitment to listening to students and to getting
their ideas incorporated into practice. Sounds like a great trip all across the country. Now
you've also launched a bunch of new initiatives during your time as president. Can you tell us a
little bit about APHA Your Way? I was fortunate as president-elect to co-chair our Member Unit
Effectiveness and Engagement Project and that led to several recommendations about how we
could re-engage all 25,000 of our members and of course one of those was to replace our old system
for communicating with APHA Lead and we launched it this summer and we have over 200 different
communities and I've been really excited to see our members take advantage of that and really
be able to communicate with each other and and build each other up. And this is an online portal,
kind of online community. It is an online portal and we had an older one that wasn't quite as
robust in terms of supporting cross-sector communication all across APHA and APHA Lead does
that so it's pretty cool and of course another set of recommendations we heard from that member
engagement project was APHA's big and there's so many topics and so many structural units that it's
real easy to feel lost especially when you come to the first meeting and maybe there are 10 or
12,000 people so we started the mentor match program which just launched and they're currently
signing up members so people listen to this hopefully they'll go on APHA's website and look
how to sign up because I had a good mentor back in the 80s when I joined APHA who told me how to
navigate all of the sessions and to get the most out of it and so that's really cool.
And then we have the distinguished leader mentoring program which connects students
and early career professionals with professional public health professionals who've been successful
and been around a while and it's a series of webinars and even you know electronic sort of
one-on-one or small group mentoring where we can talk about it - how do you find the job you want,
how do you really beef up your resume, what kind of experiences do you need to engage
in in order to be successful, so it's really cool. Wonderful,
well congratulations on a successful year and thank you so much for your time today. Thank you.