The theme of the 37th Annual Health Sciences MLK Lecture builds on King’s vision by examining the intersections of food justice, housing justice, and public health. The health sciences are well positioned to address these issues because we bring together expertise in clinical care, research, education, policy, and community engagement. Health professionals can identify and respond to the immediate health consequences of food and housing insecurity—but treating those consequences is not enough. Lasting progress requires addressing the systems that produce unequal conditions in the first place.
The U-M School of Public Health is excited to lead this year’s planning as we recognize the especially important role for our field in our ability to look beyond individual treatment to population health, prevention, and structural change. Housing and food insecurity cut across the five domains of the social determinants of health identified in Healthy People 2030: economic stability; education access and quality; health care access and quality; neighborhood and built environment; and social and community context. Public health can reveal how these conditions are distributed, document their health effects, elevate community knowledge, evaluate interventions, and advance policies that make healthy choices genuinely accessible to everyone.
King’s words thus offer both a warning and a call to action. The contemporary challenge is not merely to help individuals navigate unjust systems, but to transform the policies and institutions that determine who has access to safe housing, nourishing food, and the conditions needed to thrive. For the health sciences—and for public health in particular—this means treating food and housing justice not as issues adjacent to health, but as central to the work of achieving health equity.