Community Engagement: The Missing Link in Public Health Leadership

Helm-Murtagh and Erwin provide a timely and insightful examination of the leadership capabilities required to navigate the challenges exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and astutely identify the importance of such key skills as effective communication, strategic thinking, and the ability to forge partnerships.¹ However, the authors fall short in emphasizing the core position of community engagement in public health leadership, thus missing an important opportunity to underscore the necessity of actively involving and empowering communities in the decision-making processes that shape their health and well-being.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on marginalized communities was disproportionate, with Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous populations experiencing higher rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths than their White counterparts.² These disparities are rooted in long-standing structural inequities, including limited access to medical resources, housing shortages, and economic fragility.³ In this context, public health leaders urgently need to elevate community engagement to a strategic priority and recognize it as a key lever to alleviate health inequalities. For example, the Detroit Community–Academic City Research Center has demonstrated the powerful effectiveness of community-based participatory research in overcoming health inequalities. By engaging community members as equal partners in research and intervention design, it has successfully implemented culturally tailored interventions that have improved health outcomes and built community capacity.⁴

What’s more, community engagement is the cornerstone of building trust and ensuring the sustainability of public health interventions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, community health workers were a bridge between public health agencies and marginalized communities. The experience of Chicago, Illinois, shows that community health workers were instrumental in providing culturally and linguistically appropriate education, implementing contact tracing, and connecting families to social services.⁵ With community members’ deep trust, community health workers successfully mitigated the impact of the epidemic on vulnerable groups, highlighting the importance of equipping public health leaders with the skills to effectively engage and partner with communities. However, the authors failed to adequately explore how public health leadership training can be reimagined to prioritize community engagement as a core competency. Facing the future, how can we ensure that leaders are prepared to build authentic, reciprocal relationships with the communities they serve?

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