Yesterday, Health & Medicine’s Executive Director Margie Schaps participated in a kick off meeting for the Health & Human Services Committee of Mayor-Elect Lori Lightfoot’s Transition Team. Several Health & Medicine board members–including Jennifer McGowan-Tomke of NAMI, Suzanne Carlberg-Racich of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, and Elizabeth Salisbury-Afshar, Director of the Center for Multi-System Solutions to the Opioid Epidemic at the American Institutes for Research –were also invited to join the Transition Team to help establish health priorities for the new administration.
For their first meeting, Committee members were given a template to use and asked to write a two-page memo addressing one of the four stated health and human services objectives of the Mayor-Elect. Schaps’s memo (available here) focused on creating an Office of Equity and Social Justice with Cabinet-level status that would have all departments represented and report directly to the Mayor.
“By infusing equity, transparency, accountability, diversity, inclusion, and transformation,” she wrote, “the initiative would ensure that all of these values are “baked into” the policies and operations of our city across departments.”