Health is a public good, sustained by all of us.

Dr. Gina Z. Weisblat is a social scientist and scholar-practitioner who has spent more than three decades working alongside communities on the social and political determinants of health. She is the founder and CEO of the Citizenship Health Institute and its nonprofit home, CHANGE (Citizenship Health Advancing and Nurturing Global Education).

Her work began in 1990 on the West Side of St. Paul, Minnesota, where she founded Teens Networking Together, a youth-led group that continues more than thirty years later. Since then she has designed, led, and evaluated community-centered systems in city government, universities, medical schools, a health system, and community organizations, securing more than $30 million in external funding.

She created the Health Professions Affinity Community (HPAC), with Dr. Erik Porfeli as co-creator, a student-led model that has engaged more than 10,000 young people across Ohio in community health projects. Today she brings HPAC to Tri-C High Tech Academy students with Strengthening Our Students, serves as Director of Strategic Planning, Innovation and Analytics for the Renounce Denounce Gang Intervention Program, and helps organizations across Greater Cleveland build on the assets they already have.

Dr. Weisblat has taught urban studies, public health, biostatistics, grant writing, and nonprofit advocacy. She has taught future physicians how the social determinants of health shape the lives of the patients they will treat, and trained practicing physicians to recognize their own bias and its impact. She is a National Kresge Young Scholar and a National Sullivan Alliance Innovative Scholar, and received the Best International Paper Award from the Society of Research Administrators International.

Her work has always centered the collective "we." She sees the community as the catalyst for its own success: hearing its voices, sharing what it learns, and understanding that everybody has a story.