This interview, conducted by by Nat Thomson, Simmons MSW Candidate, runs abridged in the February 2025 issue of the Simmons MPH Monthly. Leigh Haynes is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Public Health and Director of the Master of Public Health Program.

Well Leigh, it’s great to talk to you in a more biographical context, versus how we usually talk regarding the goings on of the MPH Program here at Simmons, where I’m your graduate assistant. Maybe we start with your education; I was curious about how your studies and career started out, earning undergraduate degrees from SMU in both Spanish and organization behavior and business policy.

At that point in my life, I thought I would go into international mergers and acquisitions and work on the human resources side of change management. I thought I wanted to be an international corporate executive! But when I graduated from college, the US was in a recession and job prospects were pretty bleak, so I went back to school to study law. After that, having my interest in human resources, I wanted to focus on labor law. Getting exposed to labor law was eye opening, learning about the labor rights movements of the mid and late 1800s and workers' rights gained through the courts. This history made me much more interested in people’s struggles and opened my eyes to the place human rights have in our world today, as it pertains to labor and otherwise.

We’ve talked a little bit in the past about how we both lived in southeast Texas in the ‘80s, although I was just passing through for a few years as a 4th grader, while you were born and raised there. I’d be curious to hear you talk a bit about how that might have influenced your career, your POV, and such.

Well, I was born in Jasper, Texas, which was a very segregated town in a very segregated part of the country. De facto segregation, not the same as Jim Crow. My family and I experienced racism because we were Black. In school I had to work a lot harder than my white counterparts...working against this idea that as a black child, you’re just not as good at things. My parents worked really hard; the people at our church worked really hard; but we had community and were happy. In 1998, our town became nationally known because of a violent and greusome hate crime, the lynching of James Byrd Jr. by a group of white supremacists. This led to significant protesting in our town, which brought both the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers. My mother was involved with the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power activism movement, so she took me to those protests. She took me to the Klan rally, so I could see first hand the hate in the world towards us as Black people. A visceral experience like this allowed me to know first hand the nature of hate that people can receive but also what it means to keep moving and keep working to overcome. Today, this experience plays a central role in my work and advocacy, carrying these stories and the pain of the community with me, along with my own experiences. It’s a perspective I try to bring to my classes. It’s also what the current piece of writing I’m working on currently focuses on. 

Could you talk a bit more about how this manifests itself in your classes and in the program?

Storytelling can really be an important piece of social justice work. So, highlighting stories that convey things like how racism manifests itself beyond mere ideology, whether it’s James Byrd, Jr. or other significant tipping points in combating racist acts, violent or otherwise. In the program, the students go on two immersions, one in Arizona, one in Boston. I think students being able to see and experience firsthand the systems and structures at play goes a long way towards shaping thought processes around the subject matter. With the Boston immersion, I think it’s important to bring to life the history of colonization and oppression central to the region’s past. Which, as a Southerner, feels a little odd for me [laughs] but it’s important history to highlight in service of a broader understanding of current times. 

I would also say that focusing on concrete steps that we can all take is a way that my experiences and point of view manifests in my teaching. Asking, “OK, so now what can we do about this?” Identifying the problem, analyzing it, is important but it’s not where things stop. We need to go further and figure out what powers are at play around the topic. How do we target communications and dialog in service of pressure towards change? Who the impacted communities and what do they desire? Who are our allies in change? Things ending with academic research alone can be a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

Would it be fair to say that this is a different type of approach for an academic, historically speaking?

I would say that’s very fair. I definitely struggle with labeling or describing myself as an academic. I do write articles and papers, but I would not say that that’s my complete end goal. There is an idea of the scholar-activist, and I think that might work better for me [laughs].

You’ve now been with Simmons coming up on nine years now, so I thought it might be good to talk a bit about how you came to Simmons and the like, while we’re on the topic of academia.

I first came to Simmons as adjunct faculty. The previous program director and I were both involved in the People’s Health Movement (PHM), which is a network of health activists who advocate for the right to health So, she hired because of my focus on health, human rights and social justice and the fact that these are foundational to the Simmons MPH. Early on I taught the Health Equity and Social Justice course, which students take in their first term. Later had the opportunity to develop the Health Law & Human Rights course. We felt it was critical for our students to understand public health law in the US as well as how international human rights law and principles play into the development of domestic law and policy.

In 2023, the department saw some changes and departures, leading to my opportunity to teach full time and to also step into this program director role. The great thing about this was that the student body here was really enthusiastic and supportive about me stepping into this role. They even wrote letters of support, which I've held onto, because to receive this type of support from students was really, really special to me. We are now one of the few MPH programs around with a concentration in health equity, and the students were very protective of that. They wanted whoever would lead the program to maintain that focus on health equity and social justice. So, I was flattered of course, it was incredible to see the support. 

I’ve been exposed to this philosophical shift towards being more oriented around social justice and health equity, but I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that shift, just for those of us who only know the “after” and not “the before” if you will?

Traditionally, public health programs very much tended to be oriented around the medical model or a behavior change approach that would say, for example: the population is dying from lung cancer because of smoking cigarettes, so let’s get people to stop smoking. However, that doesn't factor in, say, certain neighborhoods having higher cigarette advertising density which makes people more suceptible to taking up smoking. Or, as another example, trying to come up with a solution to obesity and the need for cardiovascular activity while ignoring the fact that those in urban settings might not have access to a nice track to walk on, or even have walkable sidewalks...not to mention factors like air quality. Recognition of the need to address these bigger issues shifted the discussions of public health practitioners to be more oriented around social determinants of health. In the 1990s the CDC developed the original 10 Essential Public Health Services. It's shaped like a wheel, and research is in the center. In 2020, though, after some broad consultation with people in public health, there was an update to the model, replacing research with equity as the “core” of public health. This concretely reflected the field's shift from a focus on research to a focus on achieving health equity and changing people’s health for the better. 

On that note, you had mentioned the People’s Health Movement, an organization you have been involved with for a while now. Would you mind explaining a bit of what the organization is all about, how you got involved and such? Previously we spoke with Alan Rossi Silva, another member, which was a great conversation.

I got involved in PHM in 2010 when I did my MPH practicum at their office in Cape Town, South Africa. I was drawn there because of my interest in human rights. I would say they are one of few organizations to take a forceful position on policy and law in the health space. The organization is very much oriented around social change and taking action on social and structural determinants of health in order for everyone to exercise and enjoy their right to health. I’ve been part of organizing efforts in the US and the North America region with Canada and globally too. It’s very much about taking action to push ideas forward so that everyone can have a better life.

What are you working on right now?

One of my big projects is with PHM on topic of financialization in health care. We call it The Mapping Privatization Project, but it focuses on privatization, commercialization, and financialization in health. Prior to starting the project, me and and a colleague from PHM in Canada had been collecting stories about successful resistance to privatization of health services around the world. All over the globe we found stories of people fighting against private companies taking over any aspect of their health care, from India to Canada to Spain. After hearing these stories, we felt like it was important to figure out and understand the forces and players associated with this trend. In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic when we were doing some digging, we saw that some of the hardest hit nursing homes and longterm care facilities were owned by private equity. Huge private equity firms like BlackRock come in and purchase these places as part of a growing portfolio health portfolio and start stripping the facilities–staffing cuts and resource reductions–to increase profitability. On further research, we saw how pervasive this type of financial activity had become. It’s important to know who is making decisions about your health care, beyond just who your doctor is, especially if you want to demand change. For private equity, these are investments, meant to reap profits.

Shifting from providing high quality care to being a source for profits, it sounds like. Pretty different mission statement for an organization.

Yes, exactly. Decisions in hospitals start to be made to suit investors, not patients, as you might expect. The LLC model and a lack of oversight and regulation really allows organizations and individuals to suck money out of hospitals and other care facilities with little in the way of liability for the harm caused, given that it’s dealing with people’s health. One reason for my passion about this topic is the fact that it’s disproportionately impacting rural communities, so much so that rural healthcare is becoming increasingly scarce, due to low profitability. So we see services being centralized in larger cities in order to profit. And this is worldwide, not just in the US.

And all this would make a lot of sense through a business lens, but not through a public health lens.

Correct. And the organizations and individuals who are driving this trend, which impacts the health of many daily, are largely obscured, unknown, anonymous. So one of our goals in the Project is to simplify the really complicated, convoluted chain of ownership and decision-making into something that an everyday person could understand. The idea would be to inform people on who really owns their health and who is involved in the health of their community–who is the company, person or people deciding that they don’t get to have healthcare in their community. There’s all this high level financial stuff going on that’s hard for people to connect to day-in-day-out. With this information in hand, it makes for a more concrete starting place if someone was interested in organizing and getting the ear of elected officials in their community.

Finally, we’re a few weeks into a new administration that is actively against public health, what kind of advice or direction might you put forth at this point, knowing that if we talked in a couple months things will probably look pretty different than where we are at this point?

Like we discussed before, within the field there has been good progress made, like putting equity at the center of public health. We've had many encouraging wins as a field too–thinking of some antiracism and environmental justice measures–but it looks like these will be rolled back, which is very discouraging, demoralizing even. We still have to continue on our path for social justice and health equity. We have to work to improve the population’s health, no matter the administration. However, what I think we’ll need to figure out is, how do we organize amongst ourselves? The new agency heads and the courts are not going to be very sympathetic to most of our demands, so there’s a level of re-strategizing that needs to happen. If we're not organized or have a clear communications plan in place or aren't sure of the actions we need to take on the ground, there’s a chance that we’re just left with a bunch of posts on the internet and that’s it, which isn’t super effective for the change we need. I would say that people call their representatives in Congress to make their voices heard and they should also look locally for communities of support and to organize toward the mass mobilization that will become necessary.

Thanks to Leigh for taking some time out of her work to chat!