In Fall 2017, a group of Black public health students studying at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto gathered in response to shared experiences of academic isolation, anti-Black racism and a growing discontentment with public health education. 

The Black Public Health Collective, formerly the Black Public Health Students’ Collective, follows in a long history of Black student organizing within academic institutions in Canada. Echoing the sentiments of other student groups at the University of Toronto, The Collective demands that the institution address and eliminate anti-Black racism, which is deeply embedded within the culture, curriculum and functioning of the university.

The Collective affirms Black existence in Canada, as Black, Black Indigenous, Caribbean and African people, queer, transgender, living with disability, and all other intersections, Black lives matter. The Collective seeks to embody resistance that strives and struggles for true freedom, the freedom to enjoy good health, the freedom to stay, the freedom to move and the freedom to return to possibilities yet imagined.

The Collective is dedicated to justice and freedom of all Black people, those who have passed and those yet to come in Toronto, Turtle Island and globally.