Health Citizen Pledge

Dear Friends:

The health citizen pledge is an initiative of the Health Care Workers Hosted organization founded by Professor Mark Nichter and colleagues from University of Arizona. It calls on both individuals and organizations to promise to support Covid-19 preventive measures and to hold our institutions accountable for doing so as well.

Click here to find more information about the health citizen pledge.

The link takes you to the pledge that individuals can sign. Prof. Mark Nichter invited me to spread the word within Quaker meetings with a specific request that meetings support the pledge as meetings.

Pima meeting did this at our most recent Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Business with the following minute:

Pima Friends Meeting (Quakers) fully endorse the health citizenship pledge posted at https://hcwhosted.org/health-citizen-pledge/

As a meeting we commit to following the principles and recommendations included in the health citizen pledge.

We will continue to post reputable sources of information about Covid-19 on our community website. We will continue to discern when and how to open up the meeting house

We will continue to respond to queries from Friends regarding Covid-19, testing and vaccination.

We further commit to spreading the word about the health citizen pledge to other Quaker and community groups.

Support from meetings is needed, in addition to support from individuals, because Covid-19 will not be overcome if we rely on individual behavior change. What is needed is shifts in social norms and practices as well as in organizational and government policies. We need to change what is acceptable, expected, or taken for granted behavior in different social settings – mask wearing, hand washing, isolating after an exposure. To counter efforts to politicize and misrepresent preventive practices, we need to exert our collective influence in our communities.

The health citizen pledge invites individuals to commit to the following set of actions:

To access reputable and reliable sources of information;
To take steps to protect ourselves and our communities;
To plan for the eventuality that we are exposed or contract Covid-19;
To support evidence based policies that protect our health care system and its workers.

By offering the support of our meetings and encouraging our members and attenders to sign the pledge, we are contributing to a social movement promoting our civic duty during a pandemic. Such a social movement has potential beyond the pandemic to strengthen our community health care system.

I hope you can help spread the word.

from Priscilla McGrath, Pima Friends Meeting, Tucson, AZ (2/25/2021)