TRAININGS
The Decolonizing Academy
Moving Beyond “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
IHEI is cultivating a decolonizing practice among the public health workforce that encourages the collective learning and application of Indigenous values.
We aim to provide avenues for the leadership and staff within settler institutions to address and heal from the impacts of colonialism where we can work towards eliminating barriers and creating environments that foster Health Justice. To truly achieve this expansive vision, we offer the Decolonizing Academy as a workforce development training aimed at reimagining public health through a decolonizing lens. We focus on enhancing the capacity of professionals at state, county, and local public health institutions, as well as those involved in regional health equity initiatives and community-based health projects.
These efforts are deeply rooted in the principles of Indigenous reciprocity and the spirit of resurgence, ensuring that our practices contribute to a more just public health landscape.
We offer trainings to public health institutions, organizations, leaders, and advocates who want to build a workforce that decolonizes as a driver for Health Justice.
Build Capacity and Activate Decolonial Allyship.
We focus on developing skills and promoting decolonial allyship to ensure that public health workforce and institutions are equipped to support health justice.
The Decolonizing Academy provides tools and learning to:
Engage and Integrate Decolonizing Best Practices.
Our trainings incorporate decolonizing tools, methodologies, and actions.
Interrupt Systemic Racism.
The Decolonizing Academy actively works to disrupt, unsettle, and replace systems and structures that perpetuate systemic racism, including anti-Indigenous and anti-black racism.
Our approach to evaluating the impact of our trainings emphasize a strengths-based methodology, focusing on the transformative potential within systems.
Interested in our Decolonizing Academy trainings?
Our interventions for Health Justice move standard equity practices beyond the conventional DEI model.
This work is inherently relationship-based and collaboration is required to fully interrupt cycles of racism, inequity, and harm resulting from institutionalized settler colonialism frameworks evidenced across the micro and macro levels of public health. Thus, we bring this work forth by engaging a network of epidemiologists, policy advocates, decision-makers, students, and community leaders dedicated to building socially-just institutions of public health.
Why Health Justice?
Indigenous people are intimately connected to the natural and spirit worlds. Thus, we have the medicine to counter the damages of settler colonialism. We safeguard our cultural practices to protect our sovereignty, but offer gifts to help create a world where everyone is safe, cared for, and well. A place where we can replace extractivism, labor, and capitalism with the values that uplift and actualize Indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation.
Empowered through our curriculum.
Represented in our cohorts.
Engaged with our initiatives and sent public health officials to our trainings.
Building Capacity Across Oregon
Our capacity-building efforts support:
Decolonizing health data
Fostering institutional-community reciprocal relationships
Creating conditions/spaces/practices/ecosystems conducive to the adoption of decolonizing practices.
Growing skills to incorporate Indigenous values, decolonial methodologies, and healing-justice approaches into public health practices.