Setting the Scene at Umoja Health Access Point
Walk into Umoja Health Access Point, and you’re surrounded by public health leaders, frontline workers, and community members who all showed up for one reason: to welcome the relaunch of the African American Community Health Equity Council (AACHEC). The atmosphere inside the Umoja HAP site was buzzing, Black, Latiné, and AAPI communities filling one building to talk honestly about the health inequities still shaping daily life in this city.
This wasn’t a gathering built to recite statistics for their own sake. It was a room confronting a documented crisis. The 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment had already laid out the hard truth: across chronic health, housing, and mental health, the gaps facing Black San Franciscans aren’t closing. They’re widening. And it’s happening against the backdrop of looming city budget cuts that threaten community-based care first and hardest.
And yet, once everyone settled in, the energy in the room carried no defeat. It was vibrant, explosive, ready. This was a room preparing to move from survival mode into structural power, the specific kind of energy that shows up right before people stop asking for a seat at the table and start building their own.
Naming the Problem, Building the Answer
Moderating the morning was Tracy L. Ward, who brought a rare dual vantage point to the stage: she represents Kaiser Permanente, a major health system, and co-chairs the San Francisco Health Improvement Partnership (SFHIP), a citywide effort working to make sure the policies shaping our environment and our physical health are actually built around community need. That combination made her the right person to frame the day.
Tracy used her opening to push the room past a familiar trap, treating health disparities as isolated, individual problems instead of what they really are: structural failures that demand systemic cooperation. She challenged health systems, public agencies, and community coalitions alike to get concrete about sharing decision-making power, not just data.
“We cannot improve the health of the entire city if we continue to leave our Black residents behind. True health systems integration means aligning our clinical resources with the lived experiences and direct demands of the communities we serve.”
It landed as a challenge, not a formality, and three panelists picked it up from there, each adding a piece to the same argument.
Shanell Williams, Executive Director of Rafiki Coalition and Chair of AACHEC, grounded it in the here and now. She walked the room through the starkest findings of the 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment, underscoring that San Francisco’s health gaps for Black residents are actively widening, not narrowing. But her focus wasn’t on the numbers alone, it was on what comes next. With the 2026 candidate forums on the horizon, she explained that AACHEC’s relaunch exists to build one unified, community-driven agenda: a tool to extract real, specific commitments from political candidates, and hold them to those commitments once they’re in office.
“Black health in San Francisco is not an afterthought; it is the ultimate metric of whether our public systems are working or failing. We are not just asking for a seat at the table anymore, we are building the table, setting the agenda, and establishing real accountability.”
That line landed like a mission statement for the entire relaunch, and it handed the baton straight to Roberto Vargas, who took the same urgency and pointed it at the machinery behind the scenes. Roberto represents the Chicano/Latino/Indigenous Health Equity Coalition (known to its members as CLI) and works at UCSF, where budget cuts are hitting just as hard as they are across the city. He brought decades of experience shaping public health policy in San Francisco, including work behind the city’s sugary drink tax and the Shape Up SF coalition, and turned the conversation toward the mechanics of translation: how academic institutions and health systems can put their resources and research behind community-defined priorities, instead of the other way around. His point was simple and sharp: data alone doesn’t move anything. Data paired with grassroots organizing is what actually shifts budgets, environments, and policy.
“Policy change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens when we ground rigorous academic research in community-led priorities, and use that collective power to shift municipal budgets and environments.”
Fanny Lam, Executive Director of APA Family Support Services and Co-Chair of the Asian & Pacific Islander (API) Health Parity Coalition, then widened the lens even further. She spoke to how AACHEC’s relaunch fits alongside other ethnic-based coalitions already doing this work regionally — groups like the API Health Parity Coalition and the CLI Health Equity Coalition. Her point was direct: public funding cuts threaten community-based care across every one of these communities, and cross-racial solidarity is the most effective strategy left to secure resources for historically marginalized neighborhoods.
“Our struggles are distinct, but our path to systemic equity is shared. When we build solidarity across Black, Latine, and API health coalitions, we create a unified front that city hall simply cannot ignore.”
By the time she finished, the moderator and three panelists had built something bigger than four individual perspectives. One challenge, carried hand to hand across the stage, had become one coordinated front.
Underneath four different vantage points sat one unmistakable message: no single institution, coalition, or community can win this alone. Tracy’s call for structural cooperation, Shanell’s demand for political accountability, Roberto’s insistence on grounding policy in community priorities, and Fanny’s case for cross-racial solidarity all pointed to the same conclusion: the old model of asking nicely and hoping for scraps is over. What comes next is shared power, one shared agenda, and a shared refusal to let any community be pitted against another while the resources everyone depends on keep shrinking.
The Road Ahead: How to Support AACHEC
Tracy closed the panel with one last question: Why now? Why bring Black, Latino/Indigenous, and API health coalitions together in this specific moment? Each panelist left the room with something different to carry out the door.
Roberto Vargas pointed to relationship as the real foundation: “I’ve been ready, I’ve been wanting this,” he said, but he was quick to credit the elders who slowed him down first. Real coalition work starts small: sharing meals, music, and getting to know each other as people before organizations. “Let’s try a project here, a project there,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
Fanny Lam pointed to timing. The coalitions had been close before COVID pulled everyone apart to focus on recovery. Now, for the first time in years, the city is giving advance warning on budget cuts instead of just making them — and that warning is exactly the window coalitions need to organize before the damage lands. “There are leaders out there,” she said, “who I believe are willing to listen.”
Shanell Williams closed with the appeal of the day. San Francisco’s Black population has fallen to just 5 percent, and she named the moment for what it is:
“This is an inflection point. I want our population to go up. I want Black folks to feel like San Francisco is a place we belong — not just a place where we survive, but a place where we get to have joy.”
But the invitation from the room was already clear. AACHEC is asking organizations, health systems, and everyday community members to step in as lead sponsors, co-sponsors, and strategic partners, not just as donors on the sidelines.
This is the moment to move from watching the fight to joining it.
- Sign up for AACHEC updates
- Join the coalition
- Support the relaunch as a sponsor or partner
Black health in San Francisco has waited long enough. AACHEC isn’t asking anyone to wait anymore, and neither should you.