Exploring the spiritual foundations of public health leadership.

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the challenges of public health leadership. Faced with criticism, threats, and even violence, many public health leaders have left the field. A healthier future for the nation may well rest on training aspiring public health leaders to build deeper capacity for perseverance, healing, and resilience. Reflecting the growing experience of a team of public health educators at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard Chan), this article offers recommendations for public health schools to recognize, and incorporate into leadership education, themes of spirituality-ie, the way people seek ultimate meaning and purpose and deep connectedness to something larger than themselves. Doing so can serve as a foundation for the lifelong journey of leadership. Over the past decade, Harvard Chan has incorporated meaning, purpose, and connectedness themes to complement more traditional coursework addressing research and translation. While many established leadership frameworks address the "what" and "how" of career development, the spirituality framework can support aspiring leaders to more fully understand their "why" and its alignment with challenging work. Such a deeply personal topic, traditionally kept private, has been shared and nurtured in Harvard Chan classrooms through a range of pedagogical strategies including personal reflection, one-on- one coaching, experiential learning, case discussions, and candid conversations with public health leaders. By encouraging a values-based foundation for decision-making in crises and difficult leadership moments, such grounding can help aspiring leaders navigate the challenges of public health leadership that inevitably lie ahead.

Establishing Academic Homes for Homelessness: A Call to Action.

Although homelessness ranks as one of society's most pressing and visible health equity challenges, the academic community has not actively addressed its health impacts, root causes, and potential solutions. Few schools and programs of public health even offer a basic course for students. In the COVID-19 pandemic era, academia must demonstrate urgency to address homelessness and educate learners, motivate fledgling researchers, inform policy makers, offer community-engaged and evidence-based studies, and join in the growing national debate about best approaches. At a minimum, every public health student should understand the interdisciplinary challenges of homelessness, its implications for health equity, and opportunities to address the crisis. We call for academia, particularly schools and programs of public health, to engage more fully in national partnerships to care for members of society who are most marginalized, in terms of health and behavioral health outcomes, quality of life, and connectedness.

Training Clinicians to Care for Patients Where They Are.

Homelessness remains a pervasive, long-standing problem in the United States and is poised to increase as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Individuals experiencing homelessness bear a higher burden of complex medical and mental health illnesses and often struggle to obtain quality and timely health care. The United States desperately needs to train a workforce to confront this large and growing crisis, but few health professional schools currently devote curricula to the clinical needs of people experiencing homelessness. This article discusses educational and curricular strategies for health professional students. Understanding the health needs of-and the social influences on the lives of-people experiencing homelessness is crucial for addressing this health equity challenge.