This month, the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice spotlights editorial board member Dr. Christina R. Welter. Dr. Welter is the Director of the Doctorate in Public Health Leadership Program at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Public Health, and a Clinical Associate Professor of Health Policy and Administration. She focuses on systems change, building long-standing partnerships with organizations and communities in ways that bridge practice to research and amplify community strengths and voice in impactful, equity-focused ways. She also co-leads multiple projects, such as the Learning Agenda for Systems Change and is the co-editor and author of Leading Systems Change in Public Health: A Field Guide for Practitioners.
We recently spoke briefly about some of her passions and work, including what systems change and bridging research to practice are, how they work together in her career, and the importance of relationships as a foundational step in public health work.
With 25 years of professional experience in public health and advanced degrees, including both an MPH and DrPH, Dr. Welter has an extensive background to create innovative, evidence-based or evidence-informed approaches and tools for the public health workforce. As a vocal public health advocate, Dr. Welter understands the skillset it takes to be both a strong, leading voice and an engaged audience member.
Bridging Practice to Research as a “Pracademic”
Dr. Welter is a pracademic, meaning her career involves bridging practice with academia – where she believes researching and evaluating our practice partners’ experiences and building evidence in action in participatory and engaged ways provides a tremendous source of what works in the real world and drives evidence-based action. She is involved in the practice aspect of public health through her community partnerships and previous public health practice while teaching, advising, and researching ways to document and improve practice impact. Acting as this bridge between the two areas, Dr. Welter provides the students she instructs a path to understanding the underlying academic rigor, while applying this in practical public health settings and through their own leadership lens.
Dr. Welter practices what she teaches as she serves as strategic and technical partner to national, state, regional, and local governmental and non-governmental partners1,2,3. We discussed how her complex work at the Cook County Health Department is an example of a “natural experiment” as she obtained her DrPH, providing an applied learning environment — CCDPH serves one of the largest, most geocomplex suburban environments in the country with approximately 2.3 million residents in suburban Cook County, with a jurisdiction covering 123 municipalities, 30 townships, and 147 school districts. Finding partnership-based and policy, systems, and environmental change opportunities for the department’s complex problems, paired with the approaches and ways of thinking provided by her DrPH classes, turned Dr. Welter into an expert who trains other public health professionals, leading to her work on research and tools such as the Learning Agenda for Systems Change (LASC).
Welter C, Davis S, Kulik P, Lloyd L, Todd Barrett K, Walter C. Learning Agenda for Systems Change: A Toolkit for Public Health, Partners, and Communities. Public Health Training Center Network & University of Illinois Chicago Policy, Practice and Prevention Research Center; 2025. doi: 10.25417/uic.28700372
The LASC Toolkit 2.0 is an action-oriented, evidence-informed, field-tested process for organizations (as well as their partners and communities) to use transformative learning as a driver for equity-focused systems change.
The LASC Toolkit 2.0 features a five-phase framework and associated resources to help teams and their partners – regardless of current readiness level – develop learning strategies that fully address community health challenges. The Toolkit 2.0 provides the rationale, process, and tools including worksheets and activities and resources to help teams create their own Learning Agenda for Systems Change.
If interested in attending a workshop or learning more about the Learning Agenda for Systems Change, please click the link to be taken to its webpage, or look in the Associated Links section of this blog below.
The Importance of Relationships for Systems Change in Public Health
With the current divisive landscape, it is more important than ever for public health to maintain strong relationships. There still remains opportunity for public health as a field to be innovative, and to restructure and become community-grounded, to be nationally connected while locally driven. This can occur through the relationship-building and building strong systems and structures in collaborative, sustainable ways that Dr. Welter exemplifies through her work. We are told so often in public health “we must do more with less.” Public health needs to create a new narrative – and approaches – where we use systems change leadership to help reconnect to the resources and strengths of our communities.
According to Dr. Welter, practitioners should use both the head and the heart, especially as they build the community that will help sustain their work. Long-term change, such as systems change, takes time. To ensure the success of these endeavors, public health professionals should hold the emotional, relationship-building (heart) aspect of their work to be just as important as the evidence-based, scientific facet (head). It can be difficult to maintain that balance, but when we do, she says, we open up opportunities for new windows of change for big impact. As Donella Meadows says, “… a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”
“Systems change can drive action and drive change bigger and better,” says Dr. Welter. “It just takes a little longer on the front-end sometimes. And focusing on the head — and the heart — not just the head, is vital to this work. How people feel makes a difference in how they show up, and what we can do.”
This, she says, allows trust to build, and through trust we share our perspectives and ideas. We start to build and find small windows of change that help us align toward a shared direction, shared collective action, and ultimately systems change.
Associated Links
- Sign up for a workshop here.
- Investigate the Learning Agenda for Systems Change.
- Interested in a DrPH at UIC? Find out more here.
References
- Welter, C. R., Jarpe-Ratner, E., Seweryn, S., Bonney, T., & Verma, P. (2021). Results From a National Mixed-Methods Study Exploring Community Health Improvement Implementation: An Opportunity to Strengthen Public Health Systems Through Collective Action. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.
- Welter, C., Jarpe-Ratner, E., Bonney, T., et al. (2022). Evaluation Results From the Healthy Work Collaborative: A Cross-Sectoral Capacity Building Partnership to Address Precarious Employment. Health Promotion Practice. doi:10.1177/15248399211069099
- Welter, C., Herrera, Y., Uskali, A. L., Seweryn, S., Call, L., Lasky, S., … & Ezike, N. O. (2021). Assessing Local Public Health Agency Alignment With Public Health 3.0: A Content Analysis of Illinois Community Health Improvement Plans. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.
About the Author
- Karsen DeWeese is an intern at the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.
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