REPAIR Project

About the REPAIR Project

The REPAIR Project centers Black and African American community voices to name and address harms caused by systemic anti-Black racism in healthcare and biomedical science.

The REPAIR Project recognizes that long-standing racial inequities in health and racist misrepresentations in academic scholarship result from systemic race-based structural violence and seeks to promote curriculum and policy changes to stimulate efforts to rectify and ultimately eliminate these injustices in the local institutions that serve our communities.

REPAIR works toward equitable health experiences by:

• Building authentic partnerships with community
• Listening to lived experiences and collecting oral histories
• Changing policies and practices within healthcare systems
• Centering community voices in planning interventions for repair.

Keep reading for more detailed information.

About the REPAIR (REPAiring Institutional Racism) Project

The REPAIR Project is a multi-institutional anti-racism collaboration with the University of California at San Francisco, The University of Kansas Medical Center, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the University of California at Davis, and the historically oppressed communities surrounding these institutions. The project is organized around one central question: how can academic health centers repair the harms caused by centuries of neglect, exploitation and abuse of people of color in clinical settings, and by racism in the biomedical sciences that has justified this mistreatment by generating and upholding theories of race, racial difference, and racial inferiority?

Our collective goal is to create positive change and improve equitable health experiences for People of Color. What does creating positive change look like?  

• Forming relationships with the communities we serve;
• Hearing community members lived experiences, past, and present harms within the medical system by collecting oral histories;
• Developing solutions of repair through revising current policies and programs; and 
• Creating new opportunities within our medical institutions that will support and serve historically oppressed communities..

REPAIR Project Design

The REPAIR Project is designed to address anti-Black racism and augment Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) voices and presence in science and medicine. This project addresses the persistence of racism in medicine as an educational problem by providing a theoretical framework  for coordinating and implementing social justice and anti-racism curriculum and interventions throughout the university.  

The REPAIR Project recognizes that long-standing racial inequities in health, health care institutions, and academic scholarship result from systemic race-based structural violence and seeks to promote curriculum and policy changes to stimulate efforts to rectify and ultimately eliminate these injustices. In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, legal studies scholar and civil rights activist Derek Bell (1993) reminds us that discussions of injustices experienced by Black Americans continue to distill and serve as a guide for ending racial injustice for other groups. 

Each activity, training, and learning module developed under the REPAIR Project is designed and structured to meet one or more of the four pillars of understanding.  These pillars have been used to guide the development of new research, inform institutional policies and practices, and enhance community engagement.  They are: 

1. The history of the role of biomedicine in perpetuating racism and reinforcing theories of racial difference and racial inferiority.
2. Decolonizing the health sciences from bench to bedside, including deconstructing the use of race as a proxy in medical decision-making.
3. Action: developing strategies to address structural racism and other isms from a socio-ecological perspective.
4. Accountability: Envisioning how the field of biomedicine can repair these harms. 

REPAIR Project in Kansas City 

Local Institution-Wide Initiatives Within the REPAIR Framework: 

We have identified five areas of focus for repair-centered anti-racism efforts here in Kansas City:

1. Institutional Education and Health Equity Trainings
2. Anti-racism Curriculum Development for health professions students and residents 
3. Oral Histories of harm and visions for repair done with community collaboration
4. Health Equity Accountability Dashboards for primary care clinical departments 
5. Collaborations with communities to develop interventions that address structural racism at the community level.