The Department of Health and Human Services recently released a national roadmap to address and reduce disparities in health status and health care among racial and ethnic minorities. It also released a national strategy for engaging communities across the country to harness the collective power of collaboration in order to tackle these serious issues.

For eleven years I pleaded with my elderly father to allow a caregiver to help him with my ailing mother, but after 55 years of loving each other he adamantly insisted on taking care of her himself. Every caregiver I hired to help him soon sighed in exasperation, "Jacqueline, I just can't work with your father–his temper is impossible to handle. I don't think he’ll accept help until he's on his knees himself."

The best teachers and schools cannot compensate for poor health, hunger, fear and sadness, violence, bullying or poverty. When students wrestle with these and other social barriers, they are more likely to miss school, do poorly on tests and drop out.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” This statement rings especially true for vulnerable populations in the United States—who, as a group, have long suffered from severe and pervasive disparities in health status and outcomes and faced barriers to quality health care.