by Nina Yagual for Amplifier Art
“Data isn’t the destination. Its value is helping communities build the evidence, leadership, and collective power needed to influence policy and create lasting change.”
— Jonathan Scaccia, Evaluation and Learning Partner
Lasting health justice doesn’t start with slogans. It starts with a bridge: values and ideas translated into implementation plans that can survive real life—budgets, paperwork, stigma, staffing, data gaps, and power.
A key theme in current SDH (social determinants of health) research is that we’ve spent decades accumulating knowledge while progress on inequities has stayed limited. One reason is that many studies focus more on describing problems than on testing solutions, implementation methods, and policy pathways. Another reason is power: who gets to lead knowledge production, who is meaningfully engaged, and which issues are left in the “shadow” of policymaking.
The takeaway is not to abandon research—it’s to reorient research toward agency and action, including policy and implementation pathways, participatory methods, and attention to structural determinants. So this week’s question is simple but demanding:
What evidence and current developments show how to turn values and ideas into practical, durable, measurable change?
We’ll answer it by looking at implementation and multisolving in action—especially where communities are not treated as “subjects,” but as system designers. And we’ll keep it real about limitations: some evidence is small, some is low-certainty, and many interventions fail when incentives, governance, and sustainability are ignored.
This month in Health Justice
Multisolving means building systems that reduce harm in more than one place at once—through policy, practice, and trust
Multisolving is what happens when you stop treating health as a single pipeline from “care” to “outcomes.” Instead, you look at all the pathways that can either block access or support safety. Here’s what current developments suggest:
Communities are essential health infrastructure. A news report on community-led HIV organizations highlights how service disruption can translate into measurable closures when funding shifts. It describes how disruptions to The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funding led to local partners ending services and closing sites—especially organizations that supported key populations where formal systems often can’t reach people safely. The multisolving lesson: protecting outcomes requires protecting the community organizations that make access possible.
Read the August 2026 Practical Changemaking Newsletter here.
