Xavier Morales (Ph.D.) is the Executive Director of The Praxis Project. Xavier is a longtime advocate for community-driven initiatives to achieve health equity and environmental justice. Xavier currently serves on the board of the Urban Peace Initiative, and was, until recently, the Chair of City of Berkeley sugar-sweetened beverage tax expert panel, a former Peace Corps volunteer (Hungary), is originally from Sanger, California, studied environmental sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a master’s and doctorate in city and regional planning from Cornell University.

In this podcast, Xavier talks about his work on environmental justice and transitioning this to public health. He talks about equity as a process vs. equity as an outcome. Praxis's mission is to build healthy communities by transforming the power relationships and structures that affect people’s lives and communities. What this means in practice and how to operationalize it. He talks about the need to focus on power, it’s not about more research, more facts, or more data.  Xavier says that is all important, but the biggest struggles we have today are grounded in power inequities.  

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