President's Message: Choose Community

Ellen Beckjord, PhD, MPH, FSBM, SBM President

On January 7, 2025, Dr. Vivek Murthy published “My Parting Prescription for America.” In his nearly 10 years as Surgeon General, Dr. Murthy spent a lot of time talking to the public and gathering information that led to the insights in his “parting prescription.” I was fortunate to see him speak when he came to UPMC Health Plan in Pittsburgh, where I work. During his visit he spent time at the UPMC Health Plan Neighborhood Center, a space the Health Plan opened in 2023 in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood where anyone can walk in to receive virtual health care, workforce development assistance, food from a food pantry, and other social services with on-site childcare available during the visit.

Dr. Murthy’s parting prescription is for Americans to build and nurture community. He identifies relationships, service, and purpose as necessary components of community, and names love as “the core virtue of community.” Community, Dr. Murthy contends, is a necessary and potent strategy to address the myriad of problems that challenge, for so many, the achievement and maintenance of health and well-being.

Some of the biggest challenges to rebuilding more robust and reliable community are the same challenges that impede the achievement of individual-level health: community, like health, takes time and requires investment. In a societal context that increasingly worships efficiency and profit, things that take time and don’t make money are significantly disadvantaged. This is a core challenge for much of our work in behavioral medicine.

Name me one evidence-based behavioral medicine intervention that doesn’t require time, much less one that generates profit; seriously, email me or find me in San Francisco if you know of one. Finding viable business models for our science is worthy of dedicated discernment (this is one reason why SBM’s 2025 strategic plan has us developing training on healthcare systems, payors, and cost-related outcomes for our work).

The contextual factors that limit time, inequitably, for people to spend on health – from which it follows that there is often not adequate time to create or nurture community – together with the resource investments required for both that often do not have an immediate or easily quantifiable return on investment are the contextual factors that we’re up against, and will remain up against, in our work as behavioral medicine researchers and practitioners. It’s important to challenge ourselves to not experience this as hopeless, but rather, as informative and energizing. Knowing where the roadblocks are is necessary for finding our way, and if you’re reading this, you’re a member of SBM, and we’re not a group known for looking for the easy way.

SBM is a community. It may not be, and likely ought not to be, your only community, but we are a community. Commit to help nurture and grow it. Take the time to build new relationships this year with other members of SBM. Commit to any level of service to SBM, even if it’s just for a few hours over the course of the year. Use the content SBM provides in our journals, Healthy Living articles, webinars, and Annual Meeting to define and/or reinvigorate your sense of purpose. And in doing all these things, allow yourself to be fortified, even comforted, by the inevitable love that will emerge.

In a context that increasingly incentivizes us to sit still and consume, it’s a radical act to make moves and create. That’s the work of health, and the work of community building. I am so proud of the work SBM did this year to establish the new Volunteer Hub. It’s never been easier to make moves and create with this vital community.

I recently became aware of John Gardner, who was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson and wrote and lectured extensively on the topics of leadership and self-renewal. In his book “On Leadership,” he wrote, “There is no need to review here the world-shaking events we have witnessed. Now, as a new administration takes over in Washington, the reappraisal of policy and practice that is being forced upon us by the swift flow of history opens up extraordinary opportunities for creative leaders. Change is in the air. Something is coming to an end; something is beginning. It is a shaping time in our nation and in the world. We have the opportunity for a new cast at history.”

John Gardner published those words 35 years ago, and their undeniable resonance today is a testament to the fact that there will always be difficult and virtuous work to do. When that work feels overwhelming, as it often does, join others in community to do it. It’s been one of the most significant honors of my personal and professional life to have had the opportunity to serve as President of SBM. I’m incredibly excited about Dr. Christine Hunter’s upcoming Presidential term and will be staying engaged to contribute to and benefit from our wonderful community. I hope you will join me.