Publications
Growing community-oriented practice through high-quality scientific articles and reports
How Health Departments Can Use Inside-Outside Strategies to Build Partnerships With Community Power-Building Organizations to Achieve Structural Change
ANTHONY B. ITON, PRITPAL S. TAMBER, GINA MASSUDA BARNETT, RACHEL RUBIN, ADAM KADER, CHRISTINA R. WELTER, ELIZABETH FISHER, JENNIFER YBARRA, PAMELA AGUSTIN-ANGUIANO, GREG BONETT, JEANNE AYERS, and MEREDITH MINKLER
February 21, 2026
Health departments can advance health and racial equity by partnering with movements for fairer and more just social arrangements. In this article, we describe the practices needed internally to effectively participate in movements and practices needed externally to become allied in them. See also my blog post on this article.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Furthering The Narrative
Getting Away From Leadership Performance to Leaders Performing: New Ways of Being and Responding to Today’s Public Health Challenges
Renée Branch Canady, Pritpal S Tamber, Anthony Iton
January 2026
In this article, we argue that leadership has become performative — a set of activities to be conducted — and that this is not the same as leading. As a consequence, leaders in public health are struggling to create a version of the profession that’s fit for today’s challenges. Building on conversations with six leaders, we propose what leading looks like. See also my blog post on this article.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Furthering The Narrative
Mission Critical 04: Building a new relationship between people and the state
Ollie Smith, Pritpal S Tamber, Hamida Ali, Grace Wyld
October 2025
This report, produced with the UK think tank, The Future Governance Forum, introduces a three-part framework for creating a new relationship between people and the state. It involves: (1) putting neighbourhoods are at the heart of government efforts to improve outcomes; (2) ensuring communities can effectively wield power, enabled by an ecosystem of support; and (3) making participatory processes the norm. See also my blog post on its launch.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Deeper Democracy
Changing the Story on Health and Racial Equity: Why Public Health Needs an Infrastructure for Building Narrative Power
Lori Dorfman, Sarah E. Gollust, Makani Themba, Pritpal S Tamber, Anthony Iton
August 20, 2025
One form of power that is required for advancing health and racial equity is narrative power. Building this form of power requires the field of public health to strategically work to connect institutions and organizations to align in complementary ways to create, build, and sustain new narratives. We illustrate these ideas using real-world examples. See also my blog post on this article.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Furthering The Narrative
Public Policies, Social Narratives, and Population Health
ATHEENDAR S. VENKATARAMANI, PRITPAL S TAMBER, ANTHONY ITON
July 26, 2025
There is growing evidence that policy-related rhetoric can influence health. In this Perspective for the New England Journal of Medicine, my co-authors and I outline the idea, point to key empirical research, and coin the phrase ‘narrative violence’ in recognition of the harm being suffered by some communities. See also my blog post on this article.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Furthering The Narrative
The ABC of Life Expectancy
ANTHONY ITON
May 19, 2025
Between 2010 and 2020, The California Endowment invested $1.8bn to build the power of 14 low-income communities to improve their health. I helped its former Chief Strategy Officer hone what he’d learnt, which is that it takes both agency (A) and a sense of belonging (B) for communities to enforce America’s social contract (C). See also my blog post on this article.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Furthering The Narrative
Voting Is Critical To The Pursuit Of Health Equity
JEANNE F. AYERS, GNORA MAHS, ANTHONY ITON
AUGUST 23, 2024
I helped the authors structure, draft and review this article in Health Affairs that examined what research and historical analysis tell us about how voting and health are intertwined and some of the ways health professionals have successfully promoted political participation, on a nonpartisan basis, through voting and other activities.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Furthering The Narrative
Community Power: A Primer for the UK’s Labour Party
Pritpal S Tamber
August 2024
This report was written in response to Sir Keir Starmer’s January 2023 speech about communities wanting to ‘take back control’. At the time, as the leader of the Labour Party, he was the leader of the opposition. At the July 4th, 2024, general election he was elected Prime Minister. The report is part of the Deeper Democracy project, was written from a personal perspective and summarises what we (in health) know about community power. The work was supported by Dr Iain McRitchie, businessman and founder of MCR Pathways, a charity that annually matches 10,000 volunteers with young people in care in school.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Deeper Democracy
What SCOTUS’s Affirmative Action Ruling Reveals
Daniel Dawes, Anthony Iton
April 1, 2024
The Supreme Court’s June 29, 2023, ruling that affirmative action in the admissions processes at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina (UNC) revealed how certain ideas run counter to the pursuit of racial equity. I helped the authors describe four of those ideas in this article
Project(s) this publication was part of: Furthering The Narrative
Building Community Power To Dismantle Policy-Based Structural Inequity In Population Health
ANTHONY ITON, ROBERT K ROSS, PRITPAL S TAMBER
December 2022
This Policy Insight article in Health Affairs summarizes the theoretical and empirical research connecting community power and health and includes an illustrative case study from Fresno, CA. It builds on my review of the biomedical evidence linking community agency and health (see below). The article includes an appendix with a new model linking community engagement, health Improvement and community power.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Agency, Belonging & Health
The Bio-Medical Evidence Linking Community Agency and Health
Pritpal S Tamber
December 2020
This report illustrates the link between community agency (power) and health, as reported in the health literature. Its findings are based on 93 primary research articles that were found in eight review articles, most of which were recommended by key informants.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Agency, Belonging & Health
A Practice-Based Framework for Working with Communities
Bridget B Kelly, Margaret Hawthorne, Pritpal S Tamber & Richard De Angelis
November 2019 (Third Version)
Through Wellthcare, the Creating Health Collaborative and my wider research and writing, I gleaned 12 principles for community-oriented practice. To aid their adoption, I co-authored this implementation tool. Collectively, the principles created a framework for how the health sector can work with communities. This is the third version of the framework, the first being published May 2017 and the second March 2018 (which was published was by my nonprofit, Bridging Health & Community, Inc).
Project(s) this publication was part of: A Practice-Based Framework for Working with Communities
Beyond Systems Vision
Elizabeth Slade, Gail Findlay, James Murray, Jess Cordingly, Jonathan Stead, Mike Wilson, Nick Gardham & Pritpal S Tamber
May 2019
A brief vision document on how statutory systems in the UK need to change to better work with the communities they serve.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Beyond Systems
Increasing the Uptake of Power Building for Health
Pritpal S Tamber & Lori Peterson
December 2018
In partnership with Collaborative Consulting, I explored: how well public health understands the importance of community power to health; what is preventing the profession from embracing power-building as a health strategy; and what opportunities in the current landscape might make that embracing more likely. The work included a detailed analysis of how change has happened in public health, including the role of narrative.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Increasing the Uptake of Power Building for Health, Bridging Health & Community, Inc.
Communities Creating Health
Edited by Pritpal S. Tamber, Bridget B. Kelly, Leigh Carroll and Jenifer Morgan
April 2018 (Second Edition)
Building on a meeting hosted by the Institute of Medicine in August 2014, this collection of essays began as a series on Stanford Social Innovation Review. In 2015, I published the series as an eBook with a Foreword by Sir Harry Burns, the former Chief Medical Officer of Scotland. The eBook was re-issued in April 2018 under the name of my former nonprofit, Bridging Health & Community, Inc.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Communities Creating Health
Bringing Purpose to Community Engagement
Bridget B Kelly & Pritpal S Tamber
March 2018
This was the 2018 annual report of my former nonprofit, Bridging Health & Community Inc. I co-founded the nonprofit to grow the field of community-oriented practice and the report reflects on our efforts, including our national symposium, recruiting pilot sites to apply the 12 principles for community-oriented work, and engaging philanthropy.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Bridging Health & Community, Inc.
It Is Time to Place an Explicit Focus on Agency
PRITPAL S TAMBER
NOVEMBER 2017
Grantmakers in Health asked me how my work influences philanthropy. In this ‘View From The Field’, I describe how health care’s biomedical lens limits what’s possible in population health, value-based health and social determinants of health strategies, list the 12 principles for community-oriented work (as described in the report below), and how it all points to agency.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Bridging Health & Community, Inc.
Symposium Program: Community Agency & Health
Various
May 2017
This is the program of our May 2017 symposium, Community Agency & Health, that was held by my nonprofit, Bridging Health & Community Inc. It showcases the work and perspectives of numerous community groups and illustrates how the health sector needs to change to better respond to communities.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Community Agency & Health, Bridging Health & Community, Inc.
Fostering Agency to Improve Health
Pritpal S Tamber & Bridget B Kelly
March 2017
Building on my many projects, especially the Creating Health Collaborative, this report presented 12 principles to community-oriented work. It is an update on the 11 principles that were presented in 2016 (see below).
Project(s) this publication was part of: Bridging Health & Community, Inc., The Creating Health Collaborative
Eleven Principles for Creating Health
Pritpal S Tamber
April 2016
This is the report of the July 2015 meeting of the Creating Health Collaborative. The meeting was called: ‘Creating Health: Refining The Principles To Catalyze Practice’. It pulled together community-oriented innovators thinking about health ‘beyond the lens of health care’.
Project(s) this publication was part of: The Creating Health Collaborative
Being Well by Believing We Can
Pritpal S Tamber & Elizabeth Slade
March 2016
In this work, we examined the experiential and empirical evidence linking agency and health and made the case for an approach to population health centered on building the agency of people and communities. We blended what we learnt into a critique of the foundation’s idea of approaching community health through the lens of well-being and agency (rather than bio-medical measures).
Project(s) this publication was part of: Being Well by Believing We Can
Community, Movements, and Spread: It’s the Process That Matters
PRITPAL S TAMBER
DECEMBER 2014
Informed by the work of the community-oriented innovators in the Creating Health Collaborative, I was asked to write this Perspective for the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement of the Institute of Medicine on the need to focus on life satisfaction rather than just health.
Project(s) this publication was part of: The Creating Health Collaborative
The Creating Health Collaborative
Pritpal S Tamber
November 2014
A report on the Creating Health Collaborative’s first meeting in July 2014. The meeting brought together community-oriented innovators that wanted to describe their work, share their struggles, and explore solutions.
Project(s) this publication was part of: The Creating Health Collaborative
The Wellthcare Manifesto
PRITPAL S TAMBER, KERRY BYRNE, KINGSHUK DAS, LEIGH CARROL, LISA SHUFRO, LORENZO ROCCO, MANEESH JUNEJA, NAOMI ADELSON, RUPERT DUNBAR-REES, SALLY OKUN, SCOTT LIEBMAN
February 2014
This manifesto was a flag in the sand, an attempt to carve out a new narrative. I, together with 10 others in and around the TEDMED community, described why we needed to understand health beyond health care.
Project(s) this publication was part of: Wellthcare
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