Clear accessible policy guidance.

Committed to well-being for all.

Our mission is to strengthen justice, health, and democracy in all communities by forging partnerships among researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders to deliver ethics-based, impactful, and timely solutions to urgent public problems.

Idea

All JHD projects start with a Strategic Impact Idea. These ideas for ethically grounded approaches to urgent public problems can come from anywhere – academics, policy makers, even directly from communities.

Inquiry

The JHD partners from Harvard, Brown, and New America assemble a multidisciplinary team of researchers, practitioners, and community leaders to share insights and explore solutions.

Action

Working in close collaboration, the JHD team generates and tests policy recommendations hand-in-hand with practitioners and communities in need of solutions.

Change

JHD project teams share what they’ve learned through the dissemination of knowledge and resources, creating opportunities for broader impact in other communities looking to generate change.

A Unique Partnership

The Justice, Health & Democracy Impact Initiative is a partnership between the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, New America, and the Brown University School of Public Health. Born out of the necessity to rethink how policy is made and who makes it, we seek to bring the best expertise together with civic and community leaders working to bring change and empower their citizens.

"Securing material well-being, securing salus populi, the happiness and safety of the people, requires securing the social contract for everyone."

"Economic dignity and security is an important component to realizing the ideals of justice, health, and democracy. But to do so means that we have to think about it in a much more expansive way."

"The Justice, Health & Democracy Impact Initiative is a blueprint for translating policy into ethical action, moving from the local to the national and back."

"The structure and the nature of JHD ensures that brilliant, up-and-coming ideas and potential partnerships with the stakeholders don't just end there, but that there is actually follow-through."

Announcing New Research Network on the Governance of Emerging Technologies through Plurality

The Harvard Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics is proud to announce the launch of the Governance of Emerging Technology and Technology Innovations for Next-Generation Governance through Plurality (GETTING-Plurality) research network. This network will bring together researchers and academics of various disciplines across Harvard University to advance the understanding of how to shape, guide, govern, and deploy technological development in support of democracy, collective intelligence, and other public goods.

March 20, 2023

Educating About Enslavement

In a Black History Month interview with WBUR’s OnPoint program JHD Director Danielle Allen discusses how educators should be teaching the history of Black enslavement in America’s classrooms. Joining her in the conversation are Guest Host, Kimberly Atkins Stohr, and David Blight, Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University.

February 23, 2023

New Renovating Democracy Washington Post Series

Danielle Allen, Director of the Justice, Health & Democracy Impact Initiative and the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics has launched a new series in her Washington Post column focused on “Renovating Democracy”. In her first column for 2023, Allen shares the personal origins of her work to combat what she calls “The Great Pulling Apart” that polarizes Americans and threatens the fabric of our democracy, and lays the groundwork for a year-long conversation on renovating governance to meet the challenges of the moment.

February 14, 2023