2024
Wendy Ellis DrPH, MPH
Wendy Ellis is an Assistant Professor in Global Health, Inaugural Director of the Institute for Racial, Ethnic and Socioeconomic Equity (Equity Institute) and the Founding Director of the Center for Community Resilience at George Washington University. In just under 20-years, Dr. Ellis has inspired a global 'resilience movement' by developing tools, frameworks and research methods used by cross-sector initiatives to address systemic inequities that contribute to social and health disparities.
In her role as Director of the Equity Institute Dr. Ellis is shaping an infrastructure to support impactful research dedicated to eradicating racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequity. Throughout her career she has been noted for investment in authentic community partnerships to develop and disseminate actionable policy interventions. Most notably her work at the Center for Community Resilience has created two national networks of community-driven initiatives focused on convening across sectors to drive systems change. The Building Community Resilience (BCR) collaborative and Resilience Catalysts networks do this by implementing Dr. Ellis’ BCR process and the Community Resilience framework developed during her doctoral studies at The George Washington University. Ellis’ innovations provide a platform for cross-sector partners to align resources, programs and initiatives with community-based efforts to address adverse childhood experiences and adverse community environments-- or as Ellis has coined it "The Pair of ACEs". The strengths-based approach is aimed at building the infrastructure to disrupt cycles of structural racism, foster equity and promote resilience in communities by improving access to supports and buffers that help individuals 'bounce back' and communities thrive. The BCR process and Community Resilience framework are being used in more than 30 U.S.-based public-private partnerships and has been adopted in government and academic-based initiatives in ten countries across the globe. Dr. Ellis’ Community Resilience framework is featured in a special issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice focused on addressing structural racism as a public health initiative.
In 2021, with startup capital from the Black Star Fund, Ellis co-founded Resilience Innovation Labs to develop the Opportunity Dashboard a data-driven tool designed to help guide strategic investments that will help promote equity in disinvested communities over time. Much like GPS, the Opportunity Dashboard reflects real-time data that allows public and private investors as well as community to select the most effective investment and policy strategies, it uses AI and machine learning to create predictive models that can calculate both economic and social return on investment.
Leveraging her extensive background in communications, in 2022 Dr. Ellis produced a documentary, “America’s Truth: Cincinnati” that follows her team’s innovative approach to centering conversations on structural racism that galvanized a resilience movement to foster equity through systems and policy change. Dr. Ellis holds several leadership positions in public health including Chair of the National Academy of Science’s, Enhancing Community Resilience in the Gulf States Committee, Scientific Advisor to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Prevention and Injury Center and the National Academy’s Culture of Health Advisory Board. A highly sought-after keynote speaker, Dr. Ellis has shared her work in more than 200 conferences, lectures, and workshops since 2019. In 2018 Dr. Ellis was selected as an Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow to support her leadership in developing cross-sector strategies to address childhood trauma, foster equity and build community resilience.
