We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lynn Cowles a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lynn , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Short story: I pulled my diva card; it turned out I wasn’t diva enough, but I did advocate for a talented colleague who got a better job down the road.

Long story: When I finished school, I worked briefly for an organization as a grant-writer. Our team was small, and we got to know each other quickly. I found workplace and job fulfillment in organized research and team-based writing with a group of people who well knew each other’s strengths and coordinated together to research, write, and manage grant projects.

After just a few months, I learned in conversation that a colleague with identical qualifications to others on our team and who is a person of color was earning less money than her peers, and she was upset about the imbalance. I asked her if we could work together to figure out what was going on with the difference, but she didn’t feel comfortable taking on the issue. I asked her if I could advocate for her, and she said yes.

I went to our supervising manager to advocate for a pay increase for that colleague based on her equal qualifications and good performance and ran into hurdles. It took two weeks to schedule a meeting; my supervisor didn’t have her hiring records when we met; he said he didn’t have the authority to talk about salaries; and so on.

My supervisor said he couldn’t help, so I let him know that I was taking the issue to our human resources department. With an HR rep., I again met delay and opposition. I offered to facilitate a meeting with our team to discuss restructuring our salaries with a focus on pay equity, but the rep. refused the offer and advised me that I was operating outside of my job description. I reminded her that teamwork was most definitely in my job description and advised her that if her office couldn’t justify my colleague’s unequal pay, then I would put in my two weeks’ notice.

I assumed that my background and leadership would inspire the organization to bend and increase my colleague’s pay. Instead, after seven weeks of back-and-forth with my supervisor and HR, the HR director scheduled a meeting with me and said that he couldn’t increase pay for all staff in the organization based on their races or ethnic backgrounds. I made clear that I was demanding pay equity, not pay raises for demographic groups. He responded that he couldn’t increase pay for everyone in the organization based on their race or ethnic background. He was circling, and that was the end of the conversation.

When I put in my two weeks, my supervisor asked me to work from home for the duration and drop my computer by the IT office at the end. I’ve stayed in touch with all of my colleagues from that grants team, and unsurprisingly, all of them left the organization within another year and found jobs in healthier workplaces.

Importantly, I was able to risk my job only because I had savings and another job where I could pick up more work. For a lot of people, that’s impossible. Now, in a supervisory role myself, the ethic of equity continues to guide my work so that employees who can’t afford to put their jobs on the line to build and participate in supportive workplaces don’t ever have to.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

A lot of people who work in public health in the United States are boulder-pushers. We know that the patchwork collection of funding, programs, partnerships, private companies, and offices that connect low- and middle-income people with healthcare that is hopefully affordable and hopefully helpful to them is insufficient. We know that universal health insurance is a right, but we have to work with the patchwork for now because people are trying to be and stay healthy now. We see people fall through the gaps in our patchwork with tragic consequences. We see companies making billions of dollars off of sickness, and we watch administrations continue to deprioritize health literacy and health education so the problem persists. We watch people and communities suffer from medical debt, the lack of affordable preventive care, and hospital closures.

We know the politicians and the company executives know that universal healthcare is the only solution for a healthy population, and we cringe knowing that they don’t want a healthy population. So doctors, nurses, community health workers, medical assistants, and advocates build networks and coalitions to bring health literacy and affordable healthcare to people. We work in clinics and offices and live on grant cycles and donations from neighbors to get patients their blood pressure checks and insulin. We keep on because patients are generally awesome and because we are committed to our comminuties.

I came into community health work through a fellow feminist who also appreciates Doris Lessing and who worked for a program that needed someone to help people fill out applications for Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage during the 2016 Open Enrollment period. I was in graduate school getting a PhD in humanities research being bummed about my lack of contact with humans while I was writing my dissertation. So when she asked me to help low-income musicians fill out applications for a few weeks, I was excited.

That my connection to public health came through feminism, through music, and through community is not surprising. As a set of questions and critical practice, feminism guides investigations into the failures of our patchwork system and provides a framework for a universal system that recognizes and appreciates differences in people and populations. Art and health are equally necessary components of a culture that based on freedom and equality. And friends call each other in when the important projects in which we really believe need more hands.

In the Prosper Health Coverage program at Foundation Comminuties, we’ve grown from helping people fill out ACA applications to being a public health authority in central Texas that helps lead coalitions of public health workers in finding ways to help people navigate our patchwork system, learn about their health and the systems that influence it, and get care.

I started this job in 2015 thinking I would be doing it for a few weeks, and I’m still in it today because it’s brought me to some of the brightest and most committed community leaders in central Texas. I’m also still in it because healthcare is a civil right, and there are few causes like equal access to healthcare that so completely encompass and serve the needs of everybody everywhere.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Team morale is highest when staff feel secure and good in their relationships with their employers, when expectations are clear, and when they understand the relationship between their work and the mission of the organization.

Because employees often give a quarter of their lives to their jobs, employers must be very respectful of the commitments that staff make to their organizations. Acknowledging that commitment regularly and responding to employees’ perspectives and needs are paramount processes for any organization.

Understanding the connections between team members’ day-to-day work and the purpose and execution of organization-wide initiatives or programs helps staff avoid feeling siloed in their work, builds relationships among peer staff and those in different programs, and generates better, more informed work.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Early in my career, advisors and mentors told everybody to speak up. “Make your opinion known and clear, and be sure you’re driving conversations so people know you’re in the room and important” was a common piece of guidance. However, when I started working in teams to complete projects or meet goals, I actively unlearned that lesson by listening to my teammates, making meeting times longer so all could have a chance to speak, and bringing together opinions into networks of priorities and plans to do our work better and be better informed by all staff experiences.

Contact Info:

• Website: ProsperHealthCoverage.org
• Instagram: @cowles5966
• Facebook: @lynncowles
• Linkedin: @lynncowles
• Twitter: @cowles5966

Image Credits
All photos by Jeremiah Jenkins.