A Minnesota Doctor Fighting for Health Justice

The waiting room at a community health center looks different from most doctor's offices. Everyone who walks in gets seen: the uninsured, the undocumented, the underserved. For Calla Brown, a primary care provider at the Community-University Health Care Center in Minneapolis, that room is exactly where she wants to be.

Brown’s path to the center brought her all around the world. She served in the Peace Corps in Ecuador, worked as visiting faculty in Malawi, and somewhere in between earned a Master of Human Rights (MHR) from the University of Minnesota. The MHR program is jointly offered by the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the College of Liberal Arts, and provides a grounding in human rights theory and practice. The learning from Brown’s experience in the MHR program extends from the classroom to her career with patients.

"From a clinical standpoint, I use lessons of the degree every single day," Brown says. "It helps me with communicating with patients and makes me use that larger system brain even if I'm sitting with an individual patient."

That larger picture thinking allows Brown to deeply empathize with patients. Brown fights for health justice every day, and her time in the MHR program has been a vital tool for her. She describes the origins of “health justice,” which comes from the perspective that the U.S. has three different health care systems: one for those who have great health insurance, one for those who have some insurance, and one for those who have no insurance. 

"If you have great health insurance, you have access to super high levels of health technology, and if you don't all this stuff is out of reach," she says. "In my mind that is just horrendously unjust."

The Community University Health Care Center breaks through the walls of that system. Federally Qualified Health Centers originated in the 1960s, when a group of physicians returned from South Africa having seen how community-based clinics there served everyone, regardless of income. They tried to replicate it in the U.S., and today more than 1,500 such centers exist across the country. The rule at every one of them is the same: no one gets turned away, regardless of insurance or immigration status.

Brown believes that physicians need to be more active in this fight for a just healthcare system instead of slipping into complacency, not questioning why they may be seeing certain patients while others are shut out.

"One of the things that I'm really passionate about, and I feel like is going to be a lifelong project, is getting more physicians in the U.S. to think about healthcare in this human rights framework," she says. "Our physician colleagues globally, it's part of their training and how they operate on a day-to-day basis. It's exceptional that we don't do that in the U.S.."

That perspective was tested recently during Operation Metro Surge, a federal immigration enforcement operation that swept through the Twin Cities, upending the lives of thousands. Two citizens were killed in its wake: Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Brown’s patients generously shared stories of their daily lives, and so she was able to intimately understand what many of her patients were going through. It would be easy to burn out on that kind of exposure. Brown says her human rights training helps her maintain perspective.

"It's helpful in the sense that, for me, it's allowed me to think that the arc of history is longer than just right now," she says. "People have come together and changed systems that have seemed horrendous and intractable."

She watched that happen in her own neighborhood during the surge, people organizing and pushing back in ways that reminded her why the work matters. That's the part that keeps her going, not any abstract principle but the concrete fact of the community showing up for itself.

Brown gives this advice to students interested in human rights work: "Stay curious. Stay optimistic." She adds one thing she wishes she had done herself. "I wish I spoke more languages. If you can speak a language, you will be better able to get the details of human rights documentation and monitoring; this is super important."

Brown says that the work of health justice has no definitive finish line. But she keeps showing up to the same place anyway, where the door stays open and nobody gets turned away at the desk.