Centering inclusion: Exploring and embracing the margins, the centers, the borders, and everything in between in an MPH health education program

The capacity to train public health practitioners, researchers, and advocates to embrace diversity and promote inclusion as core commitments for eliminating health disparities requires organizational focus, courage, and steadfast adherence to guiding stars. This presentation will share the experience of an MPH community health education program that has consciously and carefully maintained these commitments for over 20 years. Policy commitments include deliberate outreach and selection of increasingly diverse cohorts. Organizational commitments include a diversity statement, annual sexual diversity training, and participation in the Health Disparities Service-Learning Collaborative. Curricular commitments include a long-standing course on multicultural communication based on cultural humility, reflective and integrative writing across the program to examine and interrogate the experiences of privilege, profession, and lived experience, and creative writing that explores and celebrates life lessons in diversity, difference, and inclusion. Beginning the program with individual mission statements, students graduate with shared commitments to practice derived from their time together, their diversity, and their unique commonwealth. This presentation will trace the development and maturation of an explicit commitment to diversity, inclusion, and local relevance in a public university MPH program. We will also discuss the tensions invoked when committed to a program that centers diversity and inclusion in the context of full accreditation criteria and enrollment-driven mandates. Our origins, use, and influence of own guiding stars will be shared, including the power of the margins, the freedom and energy of the border, “the fierce urgency of now”, and that which is not given away is lost.