Mission, Vision, Values, Goals & Strategies

Mission

Our mission is to improve population health, especially for the most vulnerable.

Vision

Health equity and social justice for all.

Values

Health as a Right. We believe in social justice and the basic human right to a healthy life. We strive to reduce or eliminate inequity and injustice that affects the health and dignity of all people, especially those who are most vulnerable. We live a shared commitment to equity among our faculty, students, and staff.
Strength through Diversity. We embrace diversity in our education, research, and service. It’s the right thing to do and the best strategy for successfully engaging and transforming the communities we care about.
Think Forward. We are a school of innovators and we train our students to embrace unconventional thinking. We build a culture that challenges conventional thinking, leverages technology, and builds bridges between basic research, translational research, implementation research, public policy, education, and action.
Impact First. We demonstrate our commitment to maximum population health impact by focusing our research, education, and service efforts in areas with the potential to have a transformative impact on the health of populations locally and globally.

Research Goal & Strategies

Innovating. We strive to innovate solutions to four of the most pressing public health threats of our time: climate change, pandemic threats, chronic diseases, and social inequality. In the coming decade, we aspire to become the innovation hub of the world in public health. Key strategies include:

Invest in Human Capital. We will recruit the best and brightest talents in these four strategic priority areas, and invest in research support to unleash their full potential.
Promote Transdisciplinary Research Collaboration. We will not solve these global health threats by working in our own silos. We will promote transdisciplinary research collaboration through faculty cluster hires and transdisciplinary research and training grants.
Accelerate Translation of Research to Impact. We will bridge the “valley of death” between research and impact by improving dissemination; partnering with community, government, and industry; and scaling the global reach and impact of our Health Innovations Accelerator program.

Education Goal & Strategies

Changemaking. We will prepare the current and future public health workforce to change the world. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that big changes are needed in public health. In the coming decade, we aspire to become the best school in the world for public health changemakers. Key strategies include:

Assure Comprehensive Excellence in Education. We are committed to delivering a world-class education by maintaining our core strengths, addressing gaps and weaknesses, and instituting continuous quality improvement in curriculum and pedagogy.
Teach Changemaking. Changing the world will require more than a world-class education in the core public health sciences. We will strengthen our curriculum to equip our students with the knowledge, tools, and skills they need to affect organizational, systems, community, societal, and global change.
Retool and Upskill the Current Public Health Workforce. We will leverage our top-rated online public health education platform to extend the reach of our education, and retool and upskill current healthcare and public health workforce through our online degree programs and executive education.

Social Impact Goal & Strategies

Arc-bending. Together, we can bend the arc of the moral universe toward health equity and social justice. We believe that universities exist not only for the generation of knowledge and education of students, but the betterment of our community and the world. In the coming decade, we aspire to become the best school of public health in the world for social impact. Key strategies include:

Advance DEIBJ and Anti-Racism. We are committed to becoming a more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist community. We are also committed to working with our local and global communities to dismantle institutionalized racism and all forms of social injustice as a root cause of health inequities in the U.S. and globally.
Strengthen Community Engagement. We will not bend the arc from an ivory tower. Berkeley Public Health was the birthplace of community-based participatory research (CBPR), and we will continue to build genuine partnerships with our local and global communities to advance health equity and social justice.
Build Ecosystem for Social Impact. We will take our social impact to the next level by recruiting additional faculty (professors of practice), academics, and staff; securing additional funding; and addressing academic incentives and disincentives for social impact.