UIC Center for Healthy Work

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ABSTRACT The UIC Center for Healthy Work’s (CHW) aims to identify and promote employment programs, practices, and policies that will improve worker and community health. Our vision is a future of work that promotes inclusive and equitable opportunities for healthy work, and healthy work is recognized as a social and structural determinant of health and a human right, a pathway to advancing systemic change and racial justice, and a significant contributor to workforce well-being. Historical and systemic racism and injustices have led to inequitable job opportunities and job quality for women, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), and immigrants who are disproportionately employed in precarious jobs. The CHW aims to address these inequities through racial justice–centered policy, systems and environmental (PSE) change initiatives to support communities and institutions to build and sustain healthy work. The CHW specific aims are: 1) Conduct research to produce evidence gathered through transdisciplinary and participatory, applied, and racial justice– centered research to explore work as a social and structural determinant of health and identify actions to promote healthy work; 2) Build and strengthen multidirectional collaboration and engagement across eco-social levels to create networks that support healthy work; 3) Develop and expand the reach of PSE change initiatives to build capacity to address precarious work across eco-social levels and geographical locations; and 4) Translate and disseminate evidence to promote policies and practices that support healthy work and worker well-being for all workers, within and outside the workplaces. The CHW includes 1) a Research Core that designs and conducts participatory action research involving multi-disciplinary teams of investigators in collaboration with community and organizational partners, 2) an Outreach Core which aims to facilitate a strategic research translation agenda; to strengthen and expand networks of stakeholders, and to widely disseminate Total Worker Health best-practices through multi-directional partner engagement and capacity- building, and 3) a Planning and Evaluation Core which will provide leadership for the CHW, guided by an internal advisory board and an External Advisory Committee. The CHW addresses precarious employment across all economic sectors and supports the objectives of the Healthy Work Design and Well-Being cross- sector council and advances Strategic Goal 7 in the NIOSH Priority Goals for Extramural Research. Our research core uses Participatory Action Research (PAR) approaches where researchers and partners work together to understand and address a complex topic and focus on social or policy change. This approach is consistent with and advances the goals of r2p.