Hope White is a Cambridge native with a life-long passion for community work.

Having grown up surrounded by a large family and a larger network of friends, Hope always loved being surrounded by people and building important connections. After graduating Northeastern University with a degree in Human Services, Hope made her debut in community health work at the Boston Public Health Commission. Since then, she has dedicated herself to the field of public health, and strives to make a difference for people like her who have faced discrimination and disrespect by the medical system.

“Community health is my home,” she says, “It’s personal for me.”

Hope currently serves as the Director of Community Engagement for the Community Engagement Alliance at Boston Medical Center (BMC). CEAL sits under the umbrella of the Boston Medical Center, and is currently funded by a National Institutes of Health grant for supporting programs that are aiming to address the harmful impacts of COVID across the nation. 

Hope notes how the COVID-19 pandemic has made public health “popular”. This is especially impactful, she says, when it comes to conveying the importance of her work to funders. She explains how the pandemic, and its disproportionate effect on Black and Brown communities, has unveiled a plethora of existing issues to the public eye, including housing injustice, joblessness, low education rates, and disease––issues that she hopes will begin to receive funding and gain priority due to the newfound attention they are receiving. 

Even with all of the attention COVID has received, through her work in the community, Hope regularly experiences reluctance to COVID-related messaging among community residents. Hope shares that she has grown accustomed to being shut down when she is out at community events around the city distributing PPE (masks, hand sanitizer etc.) and providing COVID education. Hope explains that public health can easily feel like a personal issue, and that she has learned to not push the matter on those who are opposed to discussing it:

“Some people think you're preaching, some people think you're judging. And I get it. And so I've just learned to leave it alone. You don't want to talk, we don't have to talk”.

She says she aims to at least send people home with information they can look at in their own time and in the privacy of their own homes, where they might begin to change their mind over time if they’re open to accepting the information they have been given.

Whether it’s COVID or another health issue that Black and Brown communities face, Hope sees her role as a public health professional to be to “educate and change behaviors and change mindsets”. Changing minds is challenging as it requires shifting long-standing behaviors and beliefs that have existed across decades and across generations. 

The key to changing long-standing beliefs, Hope says, is consistency.

“If you want the community to respond to you, you have to be visible.” 

“I just can't go to one health fair. You have to see me around, you have to see me at the store, or maybe at a church service, or maybe at a school service, they have to recognize and relate and say, Oh, that's Hope. You know, that's the COVID lady, that's the vaccine lady. You have to win people over and they have to trust you. And over time, they will open up to you. And at another time, they might do what you suggest, you know, get that physical, get that mammogram, whatever it is, but it's a lot of cultivating and it takes a lot of commitment and dedication.”

Hope’s work with Vital CxNs began through the Vaccine Equity and Youth Activation initiative, a project in which BMC CEAL was a core partner. Through Vital CxNs, Hope has been able to connect to other local organizations and expand CEAL’s partnership network. Hope believes there is always room for more collaboration and more connections within the space, so that community members are able to help themselves by helping each other and foster an environment of mutual benefit and aid.

“Connections are life saving, this type of community work and people work [...] will not survive unless we are connected”. 

Published in August 2022