Lydia-Joi is a senior lead at Health Commons currently leading our High Priority Communities initiative, a multi-year, multi-million-dollar community mobilization strategy for equitable access to COVID-19 supports – and now COVID recovery supports – in 17 communities across Ontario.

Lydia-Joi Marshall is a health equity champion who derives her expertise from extensive research, lived experience and community advocacy. Her work is firmly rooted in community-based participatory research – a skilled facilitator with extensive experience in qualitative analysis of the narratives behind the data and statistics.

Lydia-Joi holds a MSc. in human genetics from Howard University in Washington DC, where her work focused on early childhood cognitive development and supporting communities most marginalized by social determinants with clinically accurate information about their health and addressing barriers to affordable preventative healthcare.  In Ontario, she worked for several years to advance equitable access organ and tissue donation, supporting families to navigate the emotional and technical aspects of the process, and working with leadership to address the large disparities in organ distribution and health outcomes particularly in Black and South Asian populations. She has multiple publications, both peer-reviewed and in mainstream and community-rooted media and has spoken on a variety of platforms including TedX.

Lydia-Joi has led multiple strategies to improve accountability and address oppressive systems in healthcare through her work with the [as the chair of?] Toronto-based not-for-profit the Black Health Alliance. She is an active contributor to and member of the national anti-racism Directorate of the Federal Canadian Institution for Health Research (CIHR) and has led several workshops to address anti-Black racism in research including through the Canadian Association of Research Ethics Board (CAREB).