Flojaune Cofer, the epidemiologist and leading candidate in Sacramento’s mayoral race, will always remember watching her father die from congestive heart failure in 1993. She was 11,  the same age he’d been when he started smoking cigarettes back in the late 1950s, when little was known about the health impacts of tobacco. By the time the Surgeon General issued the first report on the negative effects of smoking, it was too late for Cofer’s dad; he was already hooked. The traumatic experience of seeing her father lose his life from something so preventable stayed lodged inside Cofer, pushing her to get a PhD in epidemiology, pursue a career in transforming public health policy, and eventually get involved in her adopted city’s budgeting process. “I recognize that the policies that we make every day are matters of life and death,” she told Bolts.

Now, these experiences have led Cofer, currently a senior policy director at the organization Public Health Advocates, to seek the top job of California’s capital city. Cofer came in first in the nonpartisan mayoral primary in March, an upset victory for a young, Black, female first-time candidate running against several established politicians. In the general election in November, she is facing off against Kevin McCarty, a former Sacramento city council member who more recently served several terms in the state legislature.

If she wins, Cofer has vowed to do the work of transforming public health policy in Sacramento. “Public health is about maximizing the two things that matter most to humans: the number of years in your life, and the quality of life in your years,” she told Bolts. “And I see that as the major charge of every public-facing institution.”

For Cofer, this means seeing the city as an ecosystem, understanding homelessness, gun violence and other social problems as akin to infectious disease, and zeroing in on preventing their spread rather than simply treating its effects. “It’s one thing to fight a symptom, it’s another thing to eradicate a disease,” said Asantewaa Boykin, a nurse and activist against police violence who has worked with Cofer on community issues.

Read the full article about transforming public health policy by Piper French at Bolts.