Brian Park, MD, MPH
RELATE Lab Director
Through our relationships, we everyday shape our teams, our systems, and the communities we live in; through our relationships, we can shape the future we want to live in. As a child of immigrant parents, I grew up relatively isolated from relatives, family friends, and community members who shared my family’s cultural practices. It wasn’t until I worked as a community organizer for a statewide campaign to preserve the state’s safety net health insurance program that I blossomed into relationships—that I learned how much I loved supporting others to build trust, identify common values, and work collaboratively on a shared vision for change. And my time as a community organizer made me wonder: what would it look like to pull in what worked so well in community organizing – blending technical strategy with relationship-based change – into health systems? Answering this question started my long journey into Relational Leadership and developing the RELATE Lab, to transform how teams work together within the walls of healthcare, and forging authentic partnerships between health systems and communities outside the walls of healthcare. Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of supporting health teams and multi-sectoral partners to shift their relational strategies, in order to unlearn individualistic, hierarchical, and overly outcomes-oriented ways of teaming, and in its place, learn more collaborative, equitable, and process-driven ways of working together for change. Witnessing health systems operate in a more human-centered, justice-promoting way within and outside of its walls are what keeps me motivated to continue building on this work together.