Helm-Murtagh and Erwin Respond

We appreciate Wu and Lin’s clarification and amplification of the public health leadership themes we identified as crucial in our recent article “Building a New Generation of Public Health Leaders Forged in a Public Health Crisis.”¹ Wu and Lin correctly highlight the importance of community engagement in public health leadership, pointing out that active community involvement and empowerment in the actions and decisions designed to improve their health and well-being is critical to the success of such efforts, particularly in marginalized communities.

We could not agree more, and we suggest that our viewpoints are tightly aligned. As we note in the discussion of one of our seven leadership themes, “Forge, Facilitate, and Promote Partnerships,” creating community partnerships is critical to public health practice, especially during a public health crisis. Furthermore, this requires both systems thinking and the discipline to resist the urge to “go it alone.” We reference several case studies in our leadership textbook, Leadership in Practice: Essentials for Public Health and Healthcare Leaders, in which community partnerships were key in COVID-19 mitigation efforts and in getting CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) aid to highly vulnerable communities of color.²

We thank Wu and Lin for providing additional examples of the power of community engagement in the success and sustainability of public health interventions and for providing us with this opportunity to reinforce its criticality as a leadership theme for the next generation of public health leaders.