Flint Public Health Youth Academy: Community Empowering Community Leadership in Public Health Sciences

While residents of Flint face persistent health and socioeconomic disparities, Flint’s residents have been working to rescue, uplift, and empower themselves for decades. The Flint Public Health Youth Academy (FPHYA) has established a transferable model for advancing just social change through leveraging community leadership in science. In this article, we describe the development of FPHYA from Flint’s strong foundation in community based participatory research, where community science has served as a mechanism of fostering collective consciousness. We describe FPHYA’s historical foundation and illustrate its efforts and impacts through three examples of its youth programming over three years of summer camps. Through these examples—a Photovoice exploration of the safety of parks, a Photovoice exploration of potential impacts of an asphalt plant, and a dialogues process around gun violence—it is possible to see the cumulative process of youth generated environmental health knowledge that connects complex and broad local environmental justice concerns. Through community science, FPHYA advances the understanding of shared concerns across urban, rural, racial, and ethnic groups. It is working to advance environmental justice through effecting transformative changes by expanding the expertise of Flint residents to other communities in the state and across the country to work collectively as one unified voice from the perspective of a public health national youth group.