
Episode #23
Listening to the No: Alice Ely on What Community-Led Public Health Actually Requires
Alice Ely is one of my favorite people to talk with, and I’ve been wanting to have her on the podcast for a long time. She’s the executive director of the Public Health Council of the Upper Valley, celebrating twenty-five years of the organization she leads. She’s also the person who funded my BIPOC and queer healthcare storytelling work through the Vermont Community Health Equity Partnership a few years back, so this conversation was a real coming-full-circle moment for me. We talk about what it took for the Public Health Council to hold the VTCHEP grant in a way that served the communities it was meant for. We talk about: word-of-mouth outreach through networks the state would never have thought to use; fiscal sponsorship for organizations without institutional infrastructure; money upfront when grantees needed it; and more. We talk about qualitative data being treated as unreliable inside healthcare settings. We talk about what it means when N is too small to report. And we talk about the medicalization of public health, and what happens when community health workers never leave the institutional walls of the systems that employ them. If you’re a funder, a public health leader, a community-led practitioner, or someone trying to change how your traditionally white-led organization shows up in this work, this one is for you. -- Stay Connected Take the Quiz → Discover where your organization most needs storytelling Let's connect on LinkedIn Lean more about how we can work together at https://madisonmurphybarney.com/entangled-health Reach out with questions and inquiries at mbarney@entangledhealth.com

