Climate Health Equity Fellowship (CHEF) Applications 2024 Open Now

Application Deadline: December 18, 2023
Fellowship Runs February 2024 – December 2024

In alignment with our commitment to support more equitable opportunities for and to center the voices of marginalized and minoritized communities, the Center of Health Equity at the American Medical Association (the Center) is again sponsoring your organization’s participation in the Medical Society Consortium (Consortium) on Climate & Health’s Climate and Health Equity Fellowship (a program in association with George Mason University).

Overview: The AMA Center for Health Equity will sponsor one Climate and Health Equity Fellow from each minority society (AAIP, GLMA, NCAPIP, NMA, and NHMA) for 2024 at a cost of $10,000 annually. Each association will select one physician in collaboration with the Consortium, to represent it as a CHEF fellow.

Goal: To generate a network of ethnically and racially diverse, knowledgeable, and highly credible health leaders in climate, health, and equity, across the country. This is part of a strategy to diversify climate and health leadership and to advance an equitable clean energy future in areas that are vulnerable to climate crises and have experienced systemic racial and climate injustice.

Fellowship: Organized by the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health (Consortium) the Climate and Health Equity Fellowship (CHEF) housed at George Mason University has been so successful with six NMA fellows in its first year, 12 in 2022, 12 this year, and has capacity for 12 fellows in 2024, offering this training opportunity to physicians from other Consortium member societies.  The Fellows will help their colleagues and policymakers recognize how patients of color and low wealth patients are disproportionately affected by climate change; they will also help your society to identify and recommend equitable climate adaptation solutions for patients as well as policy actions that benefit these same communities.

Fellow Responsibilities

• Be able to engage over 10 full months (February – December) in intensive monthly training and exercises for two half days per month.
• Travel to Washington, DC for an in-person two-day immersive orientation February 10 & 11, 2024.
• Participate in virtual meetings twice monthly for four hours of didactic training on how climate affects health equity and skill building. Skills can include:

o Develop climate and health equity presentations,

o Write op-eds and letters to the editor,

o Develop legislative testimony,

o Engage in media interviews,

o Research and writing of scholarly articles for publication,

o Write resolutions,

o Record self-videos on climate and health equity,

o Community engagement and education.

o Engage in eight to ten hours of additional activities.

Eligibility

Physicians who:

• Are members of and are sponsored by Consortium affiliated medical societies or government agencies
• Have exhibited leadership qualities
• Are willing and able to make the necessary time commitments
• Completed (or last year) medical residency and are early to mid-career doctors – preferred
• Previous experience with communities of color and/or low wealth communities – preferred
• Practice in states where the Consortium has State Network affiliates (CSNA’s) –  preferred

Application