Each episode is a dynamic blend of interviews, storytelling, and practical takeaways, showcasing the power of multidisciplinary collaboration to address systemic racism and improve health outcomes. From the methodology behind successful team projects to the nuanced process of engaging communities, we illuminate how shared leadership, restorative practices, and intentional planning can create sustainable, impactful change. Whether you’re seeking inspiration, tools, or evidence to amplify your own efforts, this podcast offers a space to learn, reflect, and act.

What to Expect in Each Episode?

• Engaging conversations with health equity leaders and community partners
• Insightful stories that connect personal experiences with broader data and research
• Practical tools and resources to implement promising practices
• Honest reflections on challenges, lessons learned, and the transformative power of shared leadership

Storytelling for Health Equity

Season 1, Episode 2 | May 5, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee and J. Robin Moon
• Guest: Luis Ortega

Mandy LaBreche  00:04

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You

Krystal Lee  00:23

Hello and welcome to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I’m your host, Krystal Lee, and my co-host today is J. Robin Moon, associate director of research for IRL. Hey Robin! 

In our last episode, we talked about the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program IRL, we talked about how this podcast came about, and our goal of amplifying what we are calling promising practices. Promising practices are activities, procedures or approaches that have shown positive results for us in the context of IRL, and that we think are worth understanding what makes them promising so that you, our listeners, can replicate, adapt, or adopt them in your efforts to achieve health and other kinds of equity. One of these promising practices is storytelling, and today, we are fortunate to have the storytelling guru himself, Luis Ortega as our guest. Luis is a multidisciplinary storyteller, educator, facilitator, Narrative Strategist, and the founder and director at Storytellers for Change. Hi Luis, thanks for joining us.

Luis Ortega  01:50

Hi Krystal. Hi Robin, thank you for inviting me.

Robin Moon  01:54

Luis, we’re so happy to have you with us. Before we ask you to tell us about yourself and your work. Briefly, we invite you to engage with us in one of our IRL promising practices, that is, to check in with each other. One of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is a key to building the kinds of communities that collaborate effectively in work, in the work towards health equity. So at the beginning of most of our meetings at IRL, we do a quick check-in to help us continuously build connections in a personal way, within our team and our beloved community. So here’s our check-in for today, which is something that we’ve done with you. How are you? Physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, also known as “PIES.” It’s a nice acronym, P, I, E, S, I will start. Physically, I am actually in New Mexico this week, driving hours to reach national parks, the land that used to be coexisting with the Native Americans. So I’m a little tired. Physically, intellectually, I am very stimulated, especially with this podcast recording. Emotionally, I’m exhausted with non-stop hammering of all the stuff that’s going on in our country. But spiritually, I am full of hope, and that’s something that I would really like to attribute to our storytelling training and practice that Luis you have helped us with. I’m going to toss it to Krystal.

Krystal Lee  03:36

Thanks, Robin. Physically, I am feeling fine. I’m feeling rested, which is unusual for me, so I’m very grateful for that. Intellectually, I am also feeling stimulated. Part of it is because of my work with IRL. But also, spring is approaching, and I’m planning my garden, yes, planting some things that I’ve never planted before, to include asparagus. I got some asparagus roots yesterday, so I’ve never seen that they look like aliens or like like an octopus or something. So I’m doing my research on how best to promote the growth of the asparagus. Emotionally, I’m a little bit tired. My parents are having some health issues, and, you know, dealing with aging parents can be exhausting, and that’s where I am with that. And spiritually, I just feel calm, which is unusual for me. Usually, I’m an anxious person, but I’ve had to lean into some of the promising practices that I’ve learned in IRL, paying attention to myself, and, you know, taking care of myself, doing some reflection, focusing on the moment instead of trying to fix what’s going to happen tomorrow. So that’s where I stand, and I’m going to toss it to you. Luis,

Luis Ortega  04:47

Thank you, Krystal, and thank you, Robin, for checking in. And I physically feeling strong, but also my body. He is telling me that I should be outside running right now, because usually around this time is when I go for a run. So my body knows. Somatically, it just knows. So after this podcast, I’m gonna go for a run, and I’m looking forward to that. Intellectually as well as emotionally, I am meditating a lot on I just reread a Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler, and I’m spending a lot of time just thinking around how change is the great constant, and that proverbial quote from, from, from those books that everything that you touch changes you, and everything that you know it’s in relationship with you is continuously in flow and change. And I’m emotionally embracing that for more than than a few reasons, including that tomorrow is my birthday, so I’m just thinking about change in that particular way, but also just about our greater social, political landscape, and what it means to engage with that. And spiritually, I would say that I feel very rooted, and I’m feeling very connected to my partner, to my family, to my friends, to the work that I do, and that’s a practice that I’ve been cultivating for some time now, and I’m just grateful to be in that space right now. 

Robin Moon  06:29

Thank you so much, Luis, and happy birthday, early birthday! Let’s get into it! Okay, I want to tell, I want us to tell the story to our audience, how we met. So we met you. Luis, there are always two sides to the story. We will tell our side first. We met you last year as Krystal and I, as co chairs of the IRL annual leadership meeting in october 2024, and we were in search of a storytelling and narrative change workshop leader, we made storytelling the main theme of the entire meeting, as the path to reimagine our world with health equity, the details of which we’re hoping that you will talk about today, and I’m grateful that you mentioned the Octavia Butler, because I’ve also been reading, we’ve been reading emergent strategies by adrianne marie brown and then Grace Lee Boggs quote that I’m thinking in that book, we need to transform ourselves before we transform our community. So we were looking for an expert who could provide a skills-building workshop that is about storytelling, but as a means, not the end goal, to build our beloved community. It turns out that the task was not very easy, and we spoke to many potential organizations, including the big names that we all know. No names mentioned. But it was just not the right fit. And we were like, what was it they were looking for? We knew one thing that we were we were looking for Marshall Ganz, model of a story of self, story of us, story of now, and really it had to be a tool for community building. So when we finally met with you, we just knew at that point that you were the one. That’s the story that we tell about how we met, and that’s the match made in heaven, as we’d like to think. So tell us about your experience with getting connected with us, with IRL, what resonated with you specifically about the work that we’re trying to do here with IRL?

Luis Ortega  08:31

Yeah, certainly I remember a few items that you just highlighted that immediately align with my ethos and how I think about the role of storytelling, not only in forming and shaping beloved community, but also in the context of healing equity work, and just more broadly speaking, transformation work. I would say that there was also a great deal of alignment when I heard that you were engaging with Dr Shawn Ginwright’s work, particularly his book The Four Pivots. And even before that book, I was already correctly influenced by Dr Ginwright’s work around healing centered engagement, which has played a huge role in helping me to integrate an intentional healing framework within my narrative and storytelling work. I remember us having a lot of conversations to your point, Robin, not only about what it means to engage in storytelling as an outcome, as a product, right, a story that you tell. But the importance of creating a holding space where the process through which we craft the stories is intentional, is relational, is inviting us to see ourselves and each other, the process itself, it’s healing. It’s not just telling stories about health equity, but how do we actually find equitable relationship building. How do we find healing within ourselves and each other as we craft those stories? So that conversation was very energizing for me, because I found a lot of alignment in your language and the scholars and practices that were informing your work, which mirror a lot of some of the fine words that inform my work, and I would say, lastly, just with you and Krystal, as we engage in that initial conversation, for me was also important to see that there was a resonance around not just talking about storytelling as a skill, which certainly it is, you can cultivate storytelling as a skill, but what does it mean for us to engage with storytelling as an embodied practice? In other words, how do we honor each other as storytellers? And that, to me, is essential to the systems transformation work that we need to do. And ultimately, I left that initial call feeling energized and hoping, crossing my fingers, that this would work out for us to partner. And it did, and it’s just been truly beautiful to be with you in this journey since then. 

Robin Moon  11:12

Since then, we are so grateful that we found you, we discovered you, and we take all the credit, and I personally have become your disciple, learning and training how to be a collaborative and community-centered storyteller. Tell us, Luis, what connection do you see there is between health equity work, because we’re really talking about health equity in the end now, between health equity work, community-engaged research, and storytelling?

Luis Ortega  11:43

Yeah, certainly. And I’m going to give you a more personal micro answer, and then, I’ll expand, and I’ll talk more from a macro and meta perspective, systematically. I think the first thing that I want to offer is that I fundamentally believe that our well being, as individuals, as a society, as communities, is directly interconnected with the stories that surround us, and by extension, I would say, the stories that live within us. So, to give you a very micro example, I came into this world. I’m from 1987 March, 28 at around 1:30 am and when I came to this world right, almost 38 years ago, I came to this world right in Tenochtitlan, today, known as Mexico City, with a mother who I dearly love and really loves me, with a grandmother and a couple months later, but a year and eight months later, my two younger sisters joined me, and that was my upbringing, right? My mother, my grandmother and my two sisters. Growing up, the stories that I knew were stories that affirmed me. I felt loved, I felt cared for, I felt meaning, I felt connected. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, drawing and learning how to express myself through, as someone a bit more introverted. I found a great deal of expression through the arts. In my sisters, I found not only a sense of friendship, but also responsibility and wonder. In my mom, I found and to this day, I continued to find tremendous guidance and wisdom and a friend. And as I grew up, I began to encounter other stories.

As I began to reckon with my sexuality as someone that’s queer and bisexual, I began to encounter narratives that told me that I was wrong, that I was wrong to the point where I did not actually come out to my family, to my mom, to my sisters, those same people that made me feel so loved and affirmed I did not come out to them until my mid 20s. I began to encounter narratives about my mestizaje, right, or this idea of being mestizo, the explanation, the story that we give to why is it that I speak the way I speak? Why do I speak Spanish and not Nawat? Why is my skin this particular color, right? Why is my hair texture the way it is? I began to encounter narratives also about how I should relate to others or not, and eventually, when I was 14 years old, and I moved to this country, and I had to deal with other racial narratives. I had to deal with immigrant narratives. I had to navigate, and continue to navigate this political landscape as an undocumented immigrant, I kept encountering stories. Now, why do I start with this? Because for me, there’s a tremendous contrast in the type of stories that I encountered as a child that fundamentally allowed me to hold myself and hold others with a profound sense of love and connection and what feels to me as a persistent and ongoing struggle that I’ve had to navigate as I deal with all these other stories that made me feel extremely disconnected from self and from others, and I think from a systemic perspective, and this is where I began to be informed by the work of Dr Shawn Ginwrightt and others. I begin to analyze and understand how these stories, stories that are fundamentally rooted in a belief system that has created a hierarchy of human value, is a tremendous barrier to any effort to actualize equity and health. And health, it’s just not compatible – an ideology that sustains a belief that there is a hierarchy in human value with the idea of achieving health equity. And therefore the challenge is that if we live in a society where racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, right, where we continue to have tremendous hate directed towards immigrants and refugees, particularly those who are black and brown, particularly directed towards people who are suffering because of displacement.

We have a challenge, and so much of what we have today systematically and structurally built in the US, certainly, although this is the case in many other places across the world, is systems that are driven by these ideologies and that are embedded within the logic of how these systems operate. So they are working exactly how they should be working. And these narratives are fundamentally also connected to what I think MIT scholar, Otto C., Charmer, correctly diagnoses as the most important challenge that we have to tackle in the 21st century. And that is the challenge of disconnection. And from that perspective, I think there are three big narratives that we need to counter and tackle if we are to address issues of health equity. He characterizes them in the following way. He talks about the challenge of ecological separation, social separation, and spiritual separation, or disconnection. The first one is this idea that we as human beings are separate from nature, right? This is the narrative that tells us that we are here to exploit nature and that that’s just the way it is. The second narrative social separation is this idea that there is a ‘we’ and there is a ‘them’, and this is what scholar John A Powell also refers to as the challenge of othering, right with other people. This is returning to this idea of a hierarchy of human value. And last but not least, this idea of spiritual separation is the idea of, how do I separate myself from myself? So those narratives that tell me I’m wrong, I don’t belong in myself. I’m broken, right? So this is where we can talk about these, this crisis in loneliness, right? That oftentimes gets cited now in all kinds of different articles, we can talk about this complete sense of isolation, of suffering, and even diagnosing trauma or sickness through an individual lens, instead of thinking about the collectivist nature and or systemic nature of why are these symptoms emerging? And if we have, I firmly believe this, if we have any hope in addressing any of these isms, any of these issues of separation. I believe that we need narrative and storytelling to counter these narratives. 

And I’ll offer one more item before, before I close this particular reflection. I think countering these narratives is essential, because we do have to name them and understand them and unpack them. And on the other end, we also need to generate new possibilities. And this is where going back to Dr Ginwright’s work, it’s really important his pivot around going from problem loving, right, or just naming problems, unpacking problems. So this is where my background as a researcher, as an educator, is a bias, right? Because I was taught to analyze problems first and foremost. Even in my early training around storytelling, I was taught to always help your audience understand the problem. That’s fantastic. That is a type of storytelling tactic that we need, and it’s also limiting, because we need other paradigms and other forms of engaging with narrative that invite us to also create new ways of being. So this is where I’ll close by just offering. Lee Ann Bells, an educator and scholar from Columbia University who created something called the storytelling project model. And in it, she names four types of narratives that are part of what I refer to as our narrative ecosystem. She calls our attention to the stock narrative, which is the dominant story. I already spent time unpacking that right now, hierarchy of human value. Concealed stories – What are the stories that are concealed by these dominant ideologies, both stories of trauma and neglect and marginalization, but also stories of joy, of resilience, resistance stories, the stories of people, movements, organizations that have always struggled against and pushed back on the dominant ideology, right? And this is where the countering piece comes into play, right, and countering storytelling comes into play. But then there’s this fourth quadrant, and I think this is where we need to be for us to engage in health equity work. Lee Ann Bell refers to these as the emerging or transforming stories’ space, and this is where we need to focus our attention. I believe not to ignore the consultant resistant stories or to counter and name and unpack the stock, but we need to critically  analyze ourselves and our efforts and our work as organizations and practitioners and researchers and ask ourselves, how much time are we actually spending in the paradigm shift in practice of proposing new possibilities and new ways of being? If we are going to achieve health equity, we need emerging and transforming stories that help us visualize, imagine, and believe in the possibility of health equity.

Krystal Lee  21:44

Luis, as always, every time you speak, I try to take copious notes. 

Robin Moon  21:51

Yeah, I saw you were doing that, Krystal!

Krystal Lee  21:55

That’s exactly right! So I just want to ask a follow-up question as it relates to some of the things that you have said before. I want to, I really want to highlight this for our listeners, one of the things you talked about is the ideologies that are embedded in the logic of how our systems operate and how the systems are operating as intended, right, based on those ideologies upon which they are built. And you talked about the need to have narratives that counter these ideologies in order to change these systems. And then you also mentioned one of the ways to do that is to name, understand, and unpack these narratives, and then beyond that, to create new paradigms that create new ways of being. So I want to ask you to go a little deeper with us, in around those concepts that you have highlighted, and talk to us about what do you see as the role of storytelling in dismantling the systems that are operating as intended, but to change those to promote and perpetuate health equity instead of what we are seeing right now?

Luis Ortega  23:07

Yeah, certainly. And I can again start with a personal example, and then I can offer some thoughts, insights around how these could manifest at a macro or meta level. I recall a few years ago now, I participated in a storytelling program, and I was passed by one of the lead mentors, facilitator for the session, asked the question, what does it mean to feel whole, to feel well, and to be in a just relationship with yourself and others? That was the entire purpose of this particular program. And mind you, at this point, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on those questions without necessarily phrasing them in that particular way. But what I can tell you is that what emerged for me and what was reaffirmed, because I feel like I had already articulated this, yet I realized in a profoundly, deeply way that I would have to continue to practice this, is that my external systems work requires internal systems work.

In other words, if I’m going to seek to change any of these narratives, right, any of these isms and phobias externally, through my narrative change strategy, through my storytelling, I have to do the work of shifting those narratives internally as well. And I’m not going to get into the nuance right now of thinking through, Is this a chicken or egg situation? Which one goes first? We need to do both things. We need to move in a flow between working externally and internally, and the external world will support our internal work, and most certainly, the internal world will support the external work. The one thing that I will say though, is that too often, what I see organizations and systems do is completely externalize this work. So I would say about 90% of the time, and this is just me on the spot reflecting on this, about 90% of the time when I’m engaging with large systems, that is the ask: help us figure this out externally. They are eager, ready, and willing to tell the story externally, but there are tons of barriers and hesitation to do any of the internal work. And I asked them critically, what happens when the external narrative is in dissonance with internal narrative – misalignment? There’s no wholeness, there’s no wellness, there’s no just relationship. So this is where transactional storytelling happens. This is where the speaker gets a standing ovation, right? And maybe brings in the dollars, right? And the funding also perpetuates harm and also perpetuates inequity and also right, perpetuates these practices that are extremely, extremely harmful to our long-term work of building relationships, building trust, building solidarity, building community.

So there has to be an alignment there that think we continue to struggle with these questions that allow me to, and by the way which I don’t have answers to any of them, I have an ongoing process of me seeking wholeness, of me seeking wellness, of me seeking just relationship with myself. I think we need to think of those questions collectively as well. What does it mean for us to think of ourselves as part of a whole? What does it mean for us to be well, not just individually, but a society? And that’s not how our systems think. That’s not how our healthcare system was designed to work. We are not diagnosing, although I would say there’s definitely research. I don’t want to say that there’s no there’s complete absence of dialogue around this. I’m just my critique is towards how our system, our healthcare system, works, right and by default, many other systems, our education system works. We see individual students. We create individual students. We are not thinking about the quality of a learning community, although too often that is where precisely some of the issues that we need to tackle, access in the collective and we need to think about, what does it mean for us to have justice to ourselves, to each other. Stories that allow us to pursue, not, you know, complete answers. Because I think that I don’t believe in absolute answers. I believe in the process of us seeking what it means to do this all seeking stories that move us in that direction, is the type of narrative work that would allow us to reimagine what these new ways of being right, new structures, new ways of relating to each other, new systems can help us achieve health equity.

Robin Moon  28:05

Oh, that’s so great. Thank you. Luis, speaking of tension between inside and outside, when discussing systems change, there’s another kind of tension, the tension between system change versus local change, like a local community change. So in recent years, we have heard about the need for structural change, and in particular, IRL has been pursuing structural racism, dismantling structural racism, and for investing in that, which wasn’t really the case, say, like 20 years ago. So there is progress towards health equity in that sense. But there is this still, this tension, the structural change is hard. It takes a long time while our local communities need help here and now. So it’s like a long-term, short term, like the tension between, in terms of temporality we need “evidence,” “rigorous science,” ROI, or a return on investment”, scalability, etc, to ensure the structure change that we pursue is worth the investment. But then do we really? And that’s an age-old question that social epidemiologists struggle with. So I wanted to ask you, how do we balance these two ends of the spectrum, long-term, system change and short-term and more localized community change, and possibly the role of storytelling? I think you already got into talking about it in terms of outcomes versus the process of this work.

Luis Ortega  29:40

Yeah, certainly. And I think I’ll start by saying that I welcome the tension as long as the tension is guiding us towards healing and solidarity with each other as we navigate the challenges ahead. I think the tension will allow us to be good relatives to each other. I think a lot about the seven generation principle from indigenous teachings that tells us that as we make decisions, we need to be thinking about the impact of our decisions seven generations ahead, and on the other end, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what decisions were made seven generations ago that impact how I’m showing up in the world today. And I think about Mexica and my Nawa ancestors, and what they faced and what they went through  – the process of colonization, through the process of resisting and persisting through that process and how that struggle is still alive today, but also that resilience and that wisdom and those teachings are still there today. And it gives me both a sense of humility and also responsibility to think about the longer arc of just history, and this is where the tension of the change that takes time and the change that’s possible within the now. And again, if we embrace it and it allows us to be in closer relationship with each other and to have greater discernment In how do we take care of each other, our ancestors as well as our future generations? Then, I’m all for struggling with that tension. However, what I do have to name, and I think it’s in the subtext of the question, I think, is that too often, the source of these tensions that your naming, Robin, from my perspective, they are the product of dominant ideology and narrative, like a sense of urgency, scalability, “success,” “best practices” and knowledge. Who holds knowledge? Who holds valid knowledge? How is this probable? What is the return on investment, and who gets to set the terms of that particular agenda, and that tension I’m not here for it. It Is the dissonance that I was naming earlier, right? It does not facilitate trust, it does not facilitate relationships, it does not facilitate healing. It does not facilitate a way for us to cultivate introspection and see ourselves in a way that allows us to engage in the transformation work that is required. So I don’t understand how processes that are inherently inequitable and completely decoupled from the community can in any way lead us to equitable outcomes; it just makes no sense to me. So we need different stories and narratives that reshape that logic for us. And this is not to say that we cannot talk about accountability. Or that we cannot talk about how we engage in research. We absolutely can have those conversations, and even for having a conversation of, how do we redefine what rigorous research is, if and only if, in that process, we’re centering community, wisdom, equity, healing, justice as part of our definition of what it means to be rigorous and who is accountable to that type of rigor. So I think from that perspective, I’ll come back to Dr Shawn Ginwright, honestly, how do we answer that question of, how do we balance this work? Dr Shawn Ginwright oversaw some pretty good ideas, right? Those four pivots going from from lens to mirror, seeing ourselves right, doing the internal work, being relational and not transactional in the work, pivoting from problem to possibility, moving into flow, instead of just the hustle and the grind of just producing and producing and producing work without us actually engaging in the process of flowing through that work. So to me, holding space for those pivots and for us to understand how we move there is how we deal with that tension in a way that allows us to build that solidarity and to facilitate healing.

Robin Moon  34:19

Thank you so much. Luis, you could not have said it better, our intention and aspiration for this podcast to be. My spiritual meter gauge went up by four times! I know that we rattled off a lot of great citations and resources from the very beginning for our listeners, we will definitely list those out in our show notes. But for our listeners, for the time being, Luis, who want to learn how to use storytelling as a tool in their health equity work, and who might not have thought about this before to the extent that we might have so far, where do they start? Are there any books, blogs, websites, podcasts, YouTube, videos, something simple, key resources that you might recommend?

Luis Ortega  35:07

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say Storytelling for Social Justice by Lee Ann Bell to just offer a brief framing around that this particular book will introduce you to the concept that we discussed earlier in the podcast about stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories, emergent, and transforming stories. It’s a slightly different storytelling book, because I think oftentimes when we think about storytelling, we are wanting to think about characters and the plot of a story, setting and model which are we do need to understand what it means to engage with those different elements of narrative, and I think it’s fundamentally important for us, especially in the context of this podcast right like health equity, for us to understand what is the role of power and what is the role of systems in shaping our experience of story. And I think Lee Ann Bell’s work and this particular tool of thinking of this quadrant right of narratives to analyze our narrative ecosystem is crucial to that work. So I definitely recommend that book is a very short read, heavy on theory, but it also has some very practical elements to it. And I even though it has a focus on education, is very applicable to all kinds of different settings, I think to have more of a focus on personal narrative, collective narrative. You mentioned Marshall Ganz work earlier in the podcast as well. And I certainly think that there’s probably no other framework out there that I can think of that offers a best introduction to what it means to engage with storytelling as a practice of leadership and community organizing than Marshall Ganz’ Public Narrative. There’s way too many resources to name them all, but honestly, any Google search that just puts like Marshall guns public narrative like you’ll find so many YouTube videos of Marshall lecturing on the topic. Like, the same lectures that he delivers at the Kennedy School are available freely on online. He just published a new book. There’s tons of toolkits out there, there’s worksheets. There’s just so many, so much out there that’s accessible for those who just want to read an article and kind of get started to those that want to take a deep dive. Absolutely recommend Marshall Ganz work. And then I think lastly, I’ll go back to just the four pivots. I think even though it’s not a book that teaches you how to tell your story. I do think that Dr Shawn Ginwright, writing engages with story in a really good way. So if you want to see an example of what it means to engage in that introspection, Dr Shawn Ginwright role-models for us through his own reflections, through his own mirror work in the book right of how he’s thinking about these pivots in the context of his own life, and how he’s witnessed these in the lives of others that he’s worked with across his career. So I think that’s another wonderful example as well.

Krystal Lee  38:17

Thank you. Thanks. Luis. What I wanted to do was mention that the things that I have learned about narrative and storytelling and the relationship between narrative and systems, I’ve actually learned from you over the last several months, those of us in IRL have been engaging with you through your work with Storytellers for Change, and I would like for you to share with our listeners a little bit about Storytellers for Change, and you know the resources that are available to them there as well. So whatever you’d like to share about your organization for our listeners.

Luis Ortega  38:49

Thank you, Krystal. So absolutely, I think there’s a couple of resources. We have a toolkit that’s available for free that was part of another collaboration that it’s called Crafting Anti-racist Narratives for Community Development, and it’s a toolkit that guides you through the process of unpacking dominant narratives and then intentionally crafting and envisioning emerging and transforming narratives that advance anti racist and equitable healing center work. It has a focus on community development, but the toolkit itself is pretty accessible to be modified to apply to other fields, and that’s freely accessible online. And then we have a handful of different storytelling courses and resources that focus on everything from developing personal narrative to developing organizational narrative to developing and crafting narrative strategies to engaging with the practice of thinking about, how do we center equity and asset-based practices in our storytelling work? There’s a variety of different lenses. With each one of our courses, but all of them are meant to deepen many of the practices and concepts and apply them into our respective fields and areas of work that we’ve been discussing in this podcast.

Krystal Lee  40:15

Thanks for sharing Luis, and we encourage our listeners to check out Storytellers for Change, at www.storytellersforchange.com Luis, we know that doing this work and working towards equity and against systems of oppression can take its toll. Right? We’ve mentioned Dr Shawn Ginwright many times in this episode and his book Four Pivots, and one of the quotes that speaks to me is it says that changing things that are broken in our society requires individual and collective healing. And I just wonder, like as a final thought, kind of as a check out question, can you share with our listeners? How do you engage in self-care as you continue to engage in this difficult work.

Luis Ortega  41:06

Yeah, certainly there are a few things, but I’ll be brief. I’ll start with rest and sleep. That’s more and more over the years, I’ve shifted my mindset around what it means to prioritize that, and then that’s also just carried into shifting how I start my days. It’s not with my work email. It’s waking up and taking time to stretch and to read and to slow down and to have a steady, calm heart and spirit as I engage with the world. And of course, as you can probably imagine, my capacity to do that shifts depending on what else is happening in my life. However, I think the biggest takeaway for me has been creating a space for me not to feel like a couple of years ago, the time between me waking up and me being in front of my laptop, reading emails and responding to emails and working. I trained myself a long time ago to think that my best writing, my best work, my best output, is in the morning. So I was always thinking, Oh, as soon as I’m awake, I need to go and do this work, because this is when the quality work’s gonna happen. And that was so intrinsically connected to my sense of value and worth and contribution to justice work as well that I did not realize, like what was that was doing to my subconscious also, and to my sense of worth and to what was happening in my life. And now it’s at least two hours, if not more, sometimes between the time I wake up and the time that I actually move into beginning to do what here we would call, quote, unquote work. But also like realizing right that that rest itself, the purpose of that rest is not so that I can be better at work, although I am, I believe better at my work because I give myself space for rest. The purpose of that rest space is rest, and the joy of rest and the joy that I find in reading science fiction or magical realism or novels or writing or poetry, whatever I’m engaging with, although I’ve given up a lot of what I call, like my work reading during that time, and I’ve loved that. So I find that has given me much-needed space. And I’ll close with this, like, a couple of years ago that was catching up with a friend I was talking about, like, how I didn’t have time for reading, for joy, and my friend sort of laughed and said, What do you mean? Like you like you’re reading all the time, and you make time, like time is a construct, right? It’s sort of going back to this idea of these tensions, right, and just realizing how much of my agency I was giving up in even beholding myself to a statement like that. So I’m not going to say that it’s necessarily easy to just suddenly shift your schedule and rethink and imagine what that looks like. I know this can look very differently for any of us.. I just know for me, it’s been progressively over the last few years, shifting how I spend my time so that I can honor this rest that I know I need and holding on to it, because I’ve also learned that is also very easy to give it away, so I’m still very much here and now, how do I practice this in an ongoing basis? And I started by saying in my check-in, that I feel rooted, and I feel like a big reason why is because of this practice.

Robin Moon  44:40

Transforming oneself before we transform our community, right? And doing this revolutionary work internally first, that is one of the first things we actually sensed, Krystal and I, the humility and the depth and character building that you took on for yourself, and that in and of itself, just distinguishes yourself from others that we have spoken to. So thank you. We and IRL are so grateful that our paths crossed, and we certainly hope that we continue crossing our paths, and we appreciate your time today that you spent with us to record this podcast. Thank you so much. Luis, 

Luis Ortega  45:23

Thank you, Robin. Thank you, Krystal. 

Krystal Lee  45:25

Thank you, Luis, and thank you so much to our listeners. As always, we want this to be a two-way conversation, so we’d love to hear from you. What promising practices have been impactful in your work to achieve health equity? How do you think storytelling can support or play a part in your health equity work? Share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page, where we will also share our show notes and the resources that Luis has highlighted in today’s episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us today, and remember we’re all on this journey together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time. Thank you.

Mandy LaBreche  46:23

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.

Prologue

SEASON 1, EPISODE 1  |  May 5, 2025

Hosted by:  Krystal Lee, J. Robin Moon, Mandy LaBreche, and Cody Cotton

Mandy LaBreche  00:00

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:11

Hello and welcome to promising practices for health equity, the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. Drawing on nearly a decade of experience, we explore innovative and actionable strategies to meaningfully advance health equity. I am your host, Krystal Lee, and I have had the pleasure of serving as a Senior Advisor for IRL since 2021. I am a curriculum development specialist and educator who creates transformative, equitable and just learning experiences so that all students can experience the joys and rigors of learning. I am thrilled to be here with my amazing colleagues and Co-hosts, J. Robin Moon, Mandy LaBreche and Cody Cotton. In each episode, one of our co-hosts will join me to talk with our guests about how they approach their health equity work. This podcast is for public health and social sciences researchers, public health practitioners, educators, students and funders. We’re here to share stories, insights and tools to amplify your efforts to create a healthier, more equitable world. First and foremost, let’s get to know our fabulous team. Robin, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to this work.

Robin Moon  01:31

Hi, Krystal. Thank you. Hi. I am J. Robin Moon. I am the Associate Director of Research at IRL. I am a transdisciplinary scholar in social epidemiology, a practitioner and entrepreneur for Health Justice and an educator in public health. I joined the IRL in 2020 in the thick of the pandemic, to bring in the expertise of implementing robust scientific research on the ground with real people, letting the rubber meet the road, as we say, bringing together the community leaders and members and academic researchers and creating programming to support these activities. Mandy, I’ll toss it to you. 

Mandy LaBreche  02:12

Thanks Robin. Hi everyone. My name is Mandy LaBreche, and I work as the Associate Director of Operations for the IRL program. I consider myself a day one person, because my first day working for the IRL program was actually the launch day for the inaugural call for applications for Cohort One. All the way back in February 2016 I came into my role as the person in charge of Program Operations, working with a small team, mostly behind the scenes to help make the program come alive. A lot of the early work was focused on recruitment and selection for our annual call for applications. We now have seven cohorts of fellows and teams. Another big part of my role was helping shape the program experience that included things like the curriculum, networking, webinars and in person and virtual and hybrid meetings, I’ve had the enormous privilege of being able to contribute to almost all areas of IRL, and now I’m so excited to be working with Krystal, Robin and Cody on this podcast. Working on IRL has been a really amazing ride for me, both personally and professionally, as a program. We’ve learned so much since day one, and I can’t wait to share about the evolution of the program and how truly inspired we’ve been by the work of IRL fellows and teams. Cody tossing the mic over to you.

Cody Cotton  03:31

Thanks Mandy! Peace, everyone. My name is Cody Cotton, Director of Culture and Human Engagement for the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program. In this role, I focus on fostering an inclusive and collaborative environment that supports our teams of researchers and community partners. By integrating principles of cultural agility and human centered engagement, I aim to enhance our collective efforts towards advancing health equity. Additionally, I serve on IRL Community Action Advisory Board, also known as the CAAB, where I collaborate with fellow members to provide guidance and support to leadership and IRL teams. Our goal is to ensure that research initiatives are deeply rooted in community engagement and effectively address health equity challenges. Krystal, back to you.

Krystal Lee  04:19

Thank you, friends. So the goal of this podcast is to amplify what we are calling promising practices for health equity. Robin, can you help us do some level setting for our listeners? Tell us what is a promising practice and what is health equity.

Robin Moon  04:34

Sure! Promising practice means an activity, procedure, approach, policy or technique that has shown positive results in a given local situation. It is to be distinguished from the best practice, as we say all the time, in that it might not have the kind of statistically significant or robust by the number defined by the. academia and research community for different reasons, for internal and external, but that it is worth understanding what makes it promising and worth replicating, adapting or adopting it elsewhere. Health Equity means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. And note that healthy here means not only an absence of infirmity but thriving to live up to one’s best potential in life. This requires removing structural obstacles to health, such as poverty, discrimination and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs and their pay, quality, education, housing, safe environments, financial credits, so on, and of course, including healthcare, both of these concepts require individuals being in and with the community, not in their own vacuum, and that is where this podcast comes In.

Krystal Lee  05:59

That’s right. Thanks, Robin. Each episode, we’re going to be talking with members of the IRL community about the strategies that they are using to promote and achieve health equity. Mandy, you’re one of the original members of the leadership team. Tell us a little bit about the IRL program. 

Mandy LaBreche  06:18

Yes, happy to. I always like to describe IRL as a hybrid research and leadership development program that supports teams of researchers and community leaders who are focused on community engaged, action oriented and equity focused Health Research. Each year since 2016 we’ve had an annual call for applications for teams of three people, two researchers and one community partner to apply for the program. Each call for applications has had one to two annual research themes that explore various social determinants of health, and more specifically, I’ll just do a quick power jog through each of our themes. So starting with Cohort One, the themes are early childhood and health and housing community development and health. Our cohort two themes are individual and community resilience and youth development and violence prevention. For both of our themes for cohort three, they are focused on rural America, and they are social and economic determinants to promote health in rural America and solutions for better healthcare delivery in rural America. Our cohort, four themes are clinical practice, social services and health and community development and health. Our cohort five themes are community environment and health and Families and Child Health. And then moving on to our cohort six, themes, the focus was structural racism and community health and well being and structural racism and health care. And last but not least, our cohort seven just has one overall theme, and that is structural racism and health. So during the three-year experience, IRL teams conduct a community engaged research project, and they actively participate in curriculum and networking activities to advance their research leadership. Most of IRL programming is done remotely. We consider ourselves a distance learning program, with the exception of two to three in person meetings per year. The IRL program is a 10-year initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and we are currently in our ninth and final year. To date we have seven cohorts in the program. Each cohort is made up of 12 to 15 three person teams and 36 to 45 individuals that we refer to as fellows. And just a few numbers to share, pretty impressive, if I do say so myself, we have a total of 297 fellows in the program, and 99 teams with research projects in 46 states and Puerto Rico.

Krystal Lee  09:03

Thanks. Mandy, sounds like there’s never a dull moment in the IRL universe, huh? Cody, you are the Director for Culture and Human Engagement. Tell us about where the idea for promising practices came from, and a little about the audience that we have designed this podcast for.

Cody Cotton  09:23

Yes. Thanks, Krystal. Our goal is to build capacity among people who are working towards health equity. I believe that every person has a part to play in this work, but specifically we want to reach people who are looking for innovative approaches and lessons learned from personal experience. This includes researchers, educators, students, community organizations, policy makers and foundations and other funders who are working in the field of public health. I want to note that while we’re talking specifically about the public health space, we also believe that the promising practices that we will highlight throughout this podcast can be applied in any discipline or field. Everyone could take something away from this podcast.

Krystal Lee  10:06

Thanks, Cody, so this will be a time limited podcast series, right? Meaning that it’ll be limited to three seasons. Can you all tell our listeners what they can expect to hear and learn about over the course of each season, Mandy, I’ll go to you first.

Mandy LaBreche  10:25

Over three seasons, members of our IRL community will share their stories, experiences, reflections and lessons learned. Season one examines the development and evolution of the IRL program. In this first season, we’ll hear from our program directors and members of the National Program Center. They’ll share their perspectives and insights from the creation and evolution of the fellowship program, the strategic decisions made along the way, and the value that IRL aimed to bring to the health equity landscape. We’ll then discuss how the promising practices of emergent strategies and restorative justice have contributed to honing our approach to community engaged research.

Robin Moon  11:04

In season two, we’ll hear stories, reflections and lessons learned from IRL fellows who, in their own communities and teams, conducted this community engaged, action oriented, equity focused health research and together reimagine new possibilities for true health equity. We will hear about real and honest challenges that they have experienced and had to overcome that are individual, community oriented and structural, and they will share the promising practices that they have created through it all to bring about true, meaningful health equity.

Cody Cotton  11:44

And finally, in season three, we will dream together. We’ll talk about what the future looks like for health equity, looking beyond our current challenges. We’ll dig deep into the promising practices highlighted by our fellows in season two, and the ones we use as a program, such as restorative practices, asset based storytelling, critical self-reflection and many more.

Mandy LaBreche  12:07

By the end of season three, we hope our listeners will feel inspired to use these and other promising practices to connect with each other, engage with their communities and advocate for the systemic changes needed to ensure health equity for all.

Krystal Lee  12:22

Thanks, y’all. For the benefit of our listeners, it’s probably prudent to take some time to talk about some of the terminology that we will use and some of the beliefs and assumptions that we hold terms like community engaged research, interdisciplinarity, beloved community and health equity. Robin, can you tell us about these terms and what they mean within the context of the conversations that we’ll have throughout this podcast?

Robin Moon  12:52

Yeah, sure. The IRL program is based on five major beliefs and assumptions. Number one, we believe that change can be accomplished through research, specifically community engaged research, which we define as a research approach, where members of the community actively participate as partners throughout the research process, from the beginning to the end, contributing their insights and perspectives to ensure that the research is relevant and beneficial to their needs, rather than just being studied on by researchers. It emphasizes collaboration and mutual benefit between researchers and community members. Number two, the quality of community engaged research is better when it is led by the community and when it is interdisciplinary, which goes beyond integrating knowledge and perspectives from multiple academic disciplines, by actively involving stakeholders outside academia, like community members or practitioners to Create a shared understanding and solution to a complex issue, often transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries. It essentially aims to bridge the gap between academia and real-world applications by including diverse perspectives. Number three, the change we are working and dreaming towards is health equity for all. As mentioned previously, health equity refers to that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. Number four, we also believe that this work is most effective when done in community, and one of the promising practices we have committed to is building a beloved community. A beloved community is a term coined by Josiah Royce, a philosopher and a theologian from the 19th century, but it’s been popularized by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. The Beloved Community is a concept that has inspired social justice work for decades. Dr King believed that the beloved community would be achieved by replacing racism, bigotry and prejudice with an all-inclusive spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood, and that poverty, hunger, homelessness will be eliminated. It is described as a society that is practical, realistic and achievable. Finally, fifth, we believe that if the promising practices we discuss on this podcast are implemented far and wide, that we can achieve health equity.

Krystal Lee  15:42

Thanks, Robin, and I want to thank you all for your incredible insights and thank you to our listeners for starting this journey with us. In our next episode, we will talk with Luis Ortega of Storytellers for Change, about the use of storytelling as a promising practice for creating a just and equitable world by fostering empathy, harvesting collective wisdom and facilitating healing. 

We want this to be a two-way conversation, so we’d love to hear from you, our listeners, what promising practices have been impactful in your work to achieve health equity, what are some key challenges you’ve had to overcome? Share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page, where we will also share our show notes and resources discussed in each episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to promising practices for health equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, thanks for joining us today, and remember, we’re all on this journey together. We’re all learning together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time, keep innovating, keep collaborating and keep pushing for change.

Mandy LaBreche  16:59

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.