I affiliated with Physicians for Social Responsibility early on, and actually, their major thrust wasn't nearly as much around community health centers, although that was Jack Geiger's thing.
I was really interested in how a health care center could also be a center for the arts and for music, and for bringing together sort of the isolated elements of the community.
Because Ajamu Baraka speaks in the language of his community, and makes no bones about it, he really invites in a whole new demographic of voters who have been locked out? - African-American and black and brown people and indigenous people? - who have felt like this system has no place for them. And he is unapologetic about standing up for the rights of the oppressed people and against colonialism and against imperialism.
I was recruited to sort of be the doc to advocate for communities that were struggling with polluting incinerators, polluting coal plants, toxic waste sites, etc.
I mean, I really loved the mix of personal health and, kind of, community health and justice, and I really saw how they were inseparable.
I became really interested in the community health care movement and community health centers, which Boston was sort of a leading center for.
I was in a community where we were out demonstrating. We were holding vigils against the Vietnam War, in - like, starting in around '67, I think, before it really exploded as a big movement.
I was at Harvard Medical School and there were not a lot of, kind of, community health options, and I wound up at - sort of in Harvard Community Health Center for various reasons.
There are other forms of community-based decision-making, not unlike, you know, our elected bodies, except that the intention here is to exclude pay-to-play players from determining how these decisions are made.
The idea here is for communities to decide how they meet these criteria for becoming sustainable economically, ecologically and socially.Through a community decision-making process. And exactly how that would be configured, you know, remains to be established. The process of community budgeting, participatory budgeting, is one model that's been suggested.
