Gaslit by Corporations, Ignited by Community: Reclaiming Public Health - Voices #17
A public health consultant argues that confronting corporate power and investing in community organizing are the missing ingredients for turning public health ideals into systemic change.
We continue our series Voices from the Field: Meeting This Moment in Public Health in which we lift the voices of public health professionals reflecting on the realities we’re facing today - and the lessons learned across the arc of their careers.
Public health consultant Vinu Ilakkuvan calls out the quiet, calculated gaslighting of communities by corporate interests profiting from harm while shifting blame onto individuals. She argues that to fulfill its promise, public health must confront this gaslighting directly and build community power as a counterforce to corporate control.
If you’d like to follow Vinu’s lead and share your own perspective on public health in these times, I’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch!
Gaslit by Corporations, Ignited by Community: Reclaiming Public Health
By Vinu Ilakkuvan, DrPH
Public health was never just a job to me. From the get-go, it has been my calling, my purpose, a moral imperative. I know many of us in this field feel the same way.
We’re not here for the glory. After all, if you successfully prevent something, then…nothing happens. That “nothing” ought to be celebrated, but that’s not really how it works, is it?
And we’re not here for the money. Let’s be real, most of us could be making a lot more if we turned our skills to different industries.
We’re here because we care – about people, about our communities, about our health, and the health of the planet too. And we show up, day after day, because we believe deeply in something bigger than ourselves – in population-level, systems-level, preventive solutions. The kind that don’t come with quick wins, but that require shifting policies, systems, and environments, reshaping the very places where we live, work, and play.
But believing in that kind of change means facing a hard truth: systems don’t change without power. And political power is something that neither public health professionals nor the communities we serve have ever had enough of – especially now.
Lately, like many in the public health workforce, I’ve felt the weight of that power imbalance more heavily. Programs cut. Policy progress reversed. Colleagues laid off. Budgets slashed. I’ve felt disillusioned. But I have come to realize that disillusionment doesn’t mean defeat — it can mark the beginning of clarity: a reckoning with power.
I’ve come to this realization through my work with community health coalitions over the last decade. Despite our best intentions and hardest work, public health professionals and community advocates are often pushed to the margins, able to make only small, incremental changes. When we can’t change the zoning laws that prioritize real estate investors over the housing needs of real people, we try to offer services for people who are homeless. When we can’t shift national policies around paid leave and working hours, we support clients to cobble together a patchwork of inadequate childcare. But it’s not enough, and it’s certainly not sustainable.
And it doesn’t have to be this way.
It’s time for us in public health to grapple more deeply with the idea of power. Power over the stories we tell and those we stifle, the policies we pass and those that are dead on arrival, and the people we prioritize and those we marginalize.
In our current society – especially in the U.S., especially now – financial, political, and narrative power are highly concentrated in the hands of corporate interests.
Yet, even in public health, where we pride ourselves on addressing root causes, corporate influence is often left out of the conversation or only whispered about. Over 15 years in this field, I’ve seen again and again how corporations quietly and strategically engineer harm while blaming everybody else.
People in our communities are told to eat better, exercise more, try harder.
Meanwhile, corporations pollute our neighborhoods, flood our diets with harmful products, underpay our workers, and lobby to keep it all in place. And when people in our community get sick, they tell them it’s their fault.
This corporate harm and gaslighting has reached fever pitch. It’s outrageous and unjust and rarely talked about – even though it’s one of the greatest public health threats of our time.
It’s not just our communities being disempowered — it’s us, too. The public health workforce is being asked to fix massive structural problems with dwindling resources, precarious jobs, and shrinking public trust. We’re asked to work miracles inside systems designed to maintain profit, not wellbeing.
In today’s political, economic, and technological landscape, corporate interests influence the economy, media, and government. Meanwhile, the civic and community infrastructure that could help counter that power has been intentionally dismantled, defunded, and discredited.
So how do we fight back against corporate power? We rebuild community power.
We may be gaslit by corporations, but we are ignited by community.
If we want to advance public health we need to build community power – not as an afterthought but as a central strategy.
Communities across the country are already showing us the way.
In Pittsburgh, residents came together to stop a corporate water takeover, keeping water public, safe, and affordable.
In Missouri, families won earned sick days and fair pay at the ballot box.
In Oregon, farmers and neighbors won protections from factory farms harming local health and economies.
These wins are not isolated. They are part of a growing movement.
We have models. We have momentum. But we need more of us to step into this work.
That is the goal of a new project I’ve launched called GASLIT: Gaslit by Corporations / Ignited by Community, a platform to investigate corporate gaslighting, amplify community resistance, and organize for power.
Within our field – and in partnership with allies across sectors and organizers on the ground – we must build community connection, strengthen civic engagement and organizing, and shift the narrative around what influences our health and how we can reclaim our collective power to shape those systemic forces.
Here are three steps to take today to join this movement:
Sign up for the GASLIT email newsletter. Receive stories of community power, investigations into corporate harm, and real action steps.
Gather your people. Text your neighbors, friends, book club, church group, or basketball team. Find a time to meet in real life – and be intentional about exploring how to strengthen your community together. Before any meaningful organizing or joint action can happen, you have to feel a sense of community and connection.
Show up where decisions are made. Look up your local school board, planning commission or health coalition meeting. Put it on your calendar. Bring a neighbor. You can’t speak up unless you are in the room.
Here’s the thing: If we don’t begin shifting power away from corporate interests and into communities, the promise of public health will remain unrealized.
But if we do – if we fight for connection and collective action, for health equity and public health – we stand a chance of transforming our systems, our communities, and our society.
That’s what inspired me to launch GASLIT. And that’s what keeps me here, in this fight for our health, our planet, and our future.
Vinu Ilakkuvan, DrPH, is Founder and Principal Consultant of PoP Health, a public health practice that partners with community coalitions to drive policy and systems change. She is passionate about addressing the root causes of health shaped by corporate and political forces, and recently launched GASLIT, a project focused on building community power and reducing corporate influence to advance public health and equity.
If you would like to follow Vinu’s example by sharing your perspective on public health right now in our series Voices from the Field: Meeting This Moment in Public Health, please get in touch!
Action steps - a note from Katie
Thank you for reading this newsletter for and about the public health workforce. At this tumultuous time, I’m still really not sure where we go from here. But each time that I publish this newsletter and receive positive feedback from readers, my list of ideas for action steps continues to grow. I will start to compile these suggestions here. As we learn more, let’s keep adding to this list:
Do Vinu’s words above inspire you? Would you also like to share your perspective on public health right now? Or write a love letter to public health? Got something to say to or about the public health workforce? Got big feelings about the RIFs or the RTO or the EOs or the BS? I would love to publish your words here as a step towards advocacy and support. Get in touch.
🆕☀️Thank a public health hero today! It could be a mentor, a colleague who had your back, or just appreciation for the protections we all rely on, like vaccines, clean water, and safe food. The more voices, the more powerful it becomes. Let’s fill this board with thanks and encouragement for our public health heroes. https://thankyoucdc.kudoboard.com/boards/VcgUPZZL
Let’s communicate what public health is and why it matters that so many of us have been forced to leave our jobs. What is your proudest moment in public health? Complete this form to submit your public health story to be used for advocacy.
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I close by emphasising what I said in a previous newsletter:
“At this time of uncertainty for the public health workforce, let’s remember our commitment to science and evidence and data. We know that validating emotions and baggage has a place too, but we need to be able to identify them and distinguish opinion from fact.
Let’s recommit to kindness and mutual support for the public health workforce and beyond. If leaders are trying to sow divisions among us, the best we can do is to respond with empathy, and by strengthening, connecting, and lifting up one another.
Right now, the best I can offer my fellow public health professionals is a place* to gather and reflect and share and vent and organize and ask questions and offer support to one another. We’re going to need that now more than ever.”
*This is a plug for the Public Health Connections Lounge on LinkedIn, where we seek to build community and conversation among public health professionals. Join us.
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