The American Democracy and Health Security Initiative's website, which includes hundreds of stories from pandemic lamplighters and the urgent recommendations that were learned from them, is NOW LIVE.
Governors Asa Hutchinson and Deval Patrick wrote this opinion piece about the effort, published in STAT News.
The launch can be viewed in full here, and the event's original media advisory, posted in advance, follows:
The American Democracy and Health Security Initiative, bringing together the Brown University School of Public Health Pandemic Center, the COVID Collaborative, and the CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security, will release on Wednesday, June 5th, the findings of a groundbreaking, grassroots examination of America’s pandemic “lamplighters,” who innovated and bridged divides to illuminate the path forward in America’s darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Democracy and Health Security Initiative spotlights these state and local lamplighters and harvests their hard-won lessons to ensure the most successful strategies can be sustained or replicated in future crises.
The findings, and urgent recommendations for action, will be the focus of a special forum at 2:00 pm ET on Wednesday, June 5th, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. As America prepares for its next health emergency, the forum will provide specific insights into how state/local leaders can apply lessons learned from COVID. The event will bring together leaders from across the country, including Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, and Christine Gregoire, former governor of Washington State, to discuss urgent opportunities to make the country more resilient against future threats to our health security and democracy, identifying innovative ways to reinvigorate leadership, bipartisanship, and equitable access in the face of America’s next health emergency.
Confirmed Speakers
Asa Hutchinson
Former Governor
State of Arkansas
Christine Gregoire
Chief Executive Officer, Challenge Seattle
Former Governor
State of Washington
Gordon Larsen
Senior Advisor for Federal Affairs for Governor Cox
Former Policy Director for Governor Herbert
State of Utah
Raquel Bono
Retired Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy, Former Director, U.S. Defense Health Agency
Former Director, COVID-19 Health System Response Management
State of Washington
Kody Kinsley
Secretary, North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services
Former Chief Deputy Secretary for Health and Operations Lead for COVID-19 Response
State of North Carolina
Anne Zink
Former Chief Medical Officer, State of Alaska
Former President, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials
Jeffrey Gold
Chancellor, University of Nebraska Medical Center
Incoming President, University of Nebraska System
David Bibo
Former Head of Response and Recovery
U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency
Mitch Daniels (video)
President Emeritus, Purdue University
Former Governor, State of Indiana
Jenny Durkan (video)
Former Mayor, City of Seattle
Chair, Washington State Bar Association Task Force
on Emerging Technologies and the Practice of Law
Tony Gillespie
Vice President of Public Policy
Indiana Minority Health Coalition
Vicki Lowe
Executive Director
American Indian Health Commission
David Stegall
Former Deputy State Superintendent of Innovation and Chief Academic Officer
Department of Public Instruction, State of North Carolina
Background
The American Democracy and Health Security Initiative takes its name from the deeply-rooted belief of its members that American democracy and health security are inextricable: American health security depends on maximizing options to live in a democracy and simultaneously manage health and societal harms from a public health emergency. Likewise, the strength of American democracy depends on citizens’ faith in the nation’s institutions to protect them in a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic afflicted American democracy as a whole. Confronting COVID-19 threatened more than Americans’ physical and mental health: it intensified divisions and mistrust. Faith in governing institutions plummeted; cynicism deepened. Divisions intensified, and faith in democracy fractured.
The story of how America fared under the pandemic is actually two stories—one of struggle and one of innovation. Both are true.
Throughout 2023-2024, the American Democracy and Health Security Initiative interviewed current and former federal, state, and local leaders across the health, business, education, and community service sectors who led through the pandemic, seeking to extract replicable solutions, strategies, and systems to help the nation do better in the future. The initiative focused on a cross-section of states that represented wide geographic and socioeconomic diversity, as well as different political contexts and state and local structures. Each of these states improvised, generating a distinct set of compelling lessons. While other states and localities likely developed similar innovations, the effort was intended to capture, broadly, what was achieved and must be preserved, strengthened, and replicated to achieve American health security.
Their stories revealed a host of practical, actionable steps to advance our health security for the future, from empowering trusted local messengers to building effective 24/7 leadership command; using data to drive decision making; building an equitable response; leveraging the private sector; bridging political divides; and overcoming silos among public health, healthcare systems, education, and business.
In this pivotal moment for our country and the world, these accounts of innovations and of resilient and effective American leadership from individuals who adeptly balanced personal freedoms with communal health measures offer vital lessons for rebuilding trust and charting a hopeful future.
From these findings, the American Democracy and Health Security Initiative will offer a set of urgent recommendations to be announced June 5th.