A Reckoning with Corporate and Community Power

I’ve spent decades on a public health soapbox. I believe deeply in the frameworks that define our field: changing systems instead of individuals, going “upstream” to prevent problems before they start. I’ve written about them, led workshops on them, and even given a TEDx talk featuring them.

But through my work with community health coalitions over the last decade, I’ve come to realize that these public health frameworks are failing us. They’re true. And they’re failing us.

We work to change systems, yet are rarely able to transform them. When we can’t change zoning laws that prioritize investors over residents, we offer services to the unhoused. When we can’t shift national policies on paid leave, we help parents cobble together inadequate childcare. This is not enough, and it’s certainly not sustainable.

We are treating symptoms because we aren’t going far enough upstream. If we move further upstream, past social and structural determinants, we find something rarely named and discussed explicitly in public health: power.

Powerful corporations manufacture harm. And they manipulate our surroundings to profit themselves at the expense of our well-being.

Right now, public health and the communities we serve do not hold enough financial or political power. We also do not hold enough narrative power (i.e., ”the ability to shift the stories we use to make sense of the world”). Instead, all of this power is wielded by corporate interests that prioritize profit over people. They shape our economy through their sheer financial dominance, often limiting both competition and wages and driving increasing inequality. They shape policies through their lobbyists, PACs, and campaign donations. They shape how issues are framed in the media and how the public thinks about them.

I launched GASLIT (GASLIT by Corporations / IGNITED by Community) to name this reality and illuminate a path forward.

Powerful corporations manufacture harm (from tobacco to ultra-processed food to fossil fuels). And they manipulate our surroundings to profit themselves at the expense of our well-being—from car companies “insidiously shaping” cities to food companies creating our obesity crisis by shaping our food supply and environment.

They cover up the damage they do. Big Tobacco hid evidence about the dangers of smoking cigarettes. Big Pharma lied about how addictive their painkillers were. Big Oil scammed the public into thinking plastic would be recycled. The NFL covered up concussions. Meta hid research about the negative impact of Instagram on teens. The list goes on.

And to add insult to injury, they gaslight us, meaning they distort reality to make us question and doubt their culpability and our own sense of reality. I chose the name GASLIT to cast a spotlight on how corporations gaslight us by framing these systemic harms as individual failures, blaming our “lack of willpower” for the consequences of environments they have meticulously rigged for their own profit. By shifting the blame onto us, they protect their power.  

If we want to realize the promise of public health, we must make breaking corporate power and building community power central to our public health strategy.

And that is the critical piece our public health frameworks are missing. In the public health field, we use these frameworks to help us shift focus from individuals to populations, from treatment to prevention, from temporary fixes to long-term systems changes. But the fact remains, we cannot “intervention” our way out of a rigged system. We must build community power to unrig it. We have much to learn from community organizers and advocates on this front. Here are a few places to start:

1. Cultivate community connection. We cannot organize until we are connected. We must counteract the loneliness epidemic by investing in “group life”: third spaces, mutual aid, and neighborhood design that prioritizes connection, and community coalitions that allow people to solve problems together.

2. Strengthen civic organizing. Our civic muscles have atrophied. We need infrastructure that allows people to hold decision-makers accountable, from local news outlets to strong, sustained local organizing efforts. Look at Pittsburgh United. When a private corporation prioritized profits over the city’s water safety, this longstanding coalition of community, faith, labor, and environmental groups organized and won back public control.

3. Foster narrative change. We must replace narratives that “shame and blame” individuals with those that expose the corporate and political forces shaping our health. Beyond messaging, public health needs an infrastructure for building narrative power by tapping into community partnerships, research and legal advocacy, and meaning-making institutions such as schools, media, and museums. Consider the reduction in cigarette smoking in the U.S. Coalitions of pro-public health entities came together to change the media narrative and public perception around tobacco use, shifting the conversation from one of preserving local economies and individual freedom of choice to one of harmful secondhand smoke and tobacco companies manipulating and misleading the public.

If we want to realize the promise of public health, we must make breaking corporate power and building community power central to our public health strategy. These are the keys to unlocking healthier communities, a healthier planet, and a healthier future for us all.

The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Public Health Post or Boston University School of Public Health.