Collaborative for Anti-Racist Dissemination & Implementation Science
OUR
MISSION
We believe that implementation science is justice- and action-oriented. As such, implementation science has a critical role in actively identifying opportunities and taking action to be explicitly anti-racist throughout our science, institutions and communities.
As a grassroots collective of practitioners, researchers, providers, and community members, we aim to hold ourselves accountable to the principles and practice of anti-racism. This accountability includes our work and footprint as scholars and allies, who are actively engaged in research and practice in the field of implementation science. Our focus is to create a space for reflection and action to actively and collectively dismantle structural racism and its particular manifestation—anti-Black racism. We seek to bring change to our field including research enterprises and other structures of knowledge production, organizations and institutions, as well as collaborations with stakeholders thereby promoting systems-wide dissemination of justice. We are committed to vigorously advocating for the abolition of racism through the multiple capabilities our roles in the field of implementation science afford us.
As a Community of Practice, we are focusing on anti-racism efforts that anchor support for Black peers and scholars in the U.S. context:
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We are uniquely situated to prioritize a focus on the impact of structural racism in our field upon our Black peers in order to unbound capacities for broader contributions to the field and more acutely to the liberation of all people. We imagine the work of this group will inform broader health equity efforts.
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We acknowledge racism and white supremacy is not specific to the U.S, yet rooting our efforts in this way may eventually enable the translation of our efforts to support resistance against racism and white supremacy in global contexts.
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While global struggles against oppression continue, we envision that our efforts here might join racial justice work to dismantle colonialism and imperialism globally.
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Though we begin with these specific boundaries of our work, with concrete and actionable items focused on the lives of our Black peers in the U.S., we maintain that true justice-making work knows no geographical or state-imposed boundaries.
The boundaries of our action items do not define the boundaries of participants in our group and we encourage everyone to join us. It is our philosophy that, in fact, by learning how to leverage our privilege and support for Black peers in the U.S., as borne out even in the historic passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, our successes will create leverage and support alongside all groups facing injustice. We invite you to join us and actively engage in this critical work.
WE ARE A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE
OUR HISTORY
We are a group that initially convened in spring of 2020, in light of the striking racial inequities in COVID-19 experienced by Black Americans and rallied by the clairvoyant call of the Black Lives Matter Movement responding to the racial injustices, violence, and police brutality amplified more recently through the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Armaud Arbery, and George Floyd. We have grown through the collective wisdom and input of over 200 implementation scientists.
OUR VISION
A core goal of implementation science is to facilitate the delivery and scaling of interventions that improve programs, impact systems and yield positive outcomes in health, wellbeing, and human services. We know that racism is a root cause and ever-present threat to the health and wellbeing of Black people, across generations and consequently to all people. Accordingly, our efforts prioritize and focus on the mattering of Black Lives. As such, we center our work on the experiences and voices of Black peers and scholars that are part of the implementation science field or intersecting fields and movements (e.g., medicine, public health, equity). Our goal is to, as a collective, re-imagine implementation science as an anti-racist and equity-focused field of practice, and be allies and agents in supporting and facilitating change in our field.
We recognize that our mission will require ongoing engagement and reflection as a group and as individuals, and we will use a Community of Practice model to structure this engagement and reflection. The questions with which the group began its discovery of opportunities for antiracist praxis and will continue to reflect on as we advance this work include:
- How can we ensure that this group’s response--to call for an antiracist implementation science--is first grounded and centered in the perspectives and priorities of Black peers, scholars, and practitioners?
- How can we, as implementation scientists and practitioners, hold ourselves accountable and make progress towards supporting Black scholars and the interests, needs, and priorities of Black communities through the field?
- Has implementation science properly interrogated our “founding” assumptions as a field to make sure we are crystal clear about how racism has contributed to implementation crises or failures?
- What does it mean to be an antiracist implementation scientist or practitioner?
- What anti-racism efforts, practices, and policies should we prioritize within the field of implementation science?
- What infrastructure would we need to synergize around this work and make progress in these priority areas?
-What ontologies and epistemologies perhaps unconventional to the field would inform and can be translational to this iteration of antiracist praxis?