Our Mission & Approach

We envision healthy communities where asthma is reduced and well-managed, and the social and environmental inequities that contribute to the unequal burden of the disease for low-income communities and communities of color are eliminated.

Our mission is to reduce the burden of asthma with a focus on health equity. Emphasizing both prevention and management, we build capacity, create linkages, and mobilize networks to advocate for policy and systems changes targeting the root causes of asthma disparities.

Learn more below and in our Strategic Plan.

We prioritize goals and activities that address asthma disparities, targeting the social and environmental inequities that create them.

-Anne Kelsey Lamb, RAMP Director

The Burden of Asthma

While asthma is a significant public health issue across California – about 1 in 7 people have asthma – there are considerable asthma disparities by income, race, and ethnicity. These disparities result from historic and current policies and systems that create environmental and social inequities related to air quality, land use, transportation, housing, access to care, education, and the experience of racism and poverty. As a result:

Low-income Californians experience more asthma symptoms, use the emergency room more for asthma care, miss more school due to asthma, and are more likely to encounter asthma risk factors.
In California, African-Americans experience the greatest asthma disparities and are 5 times more likely to go to the emergency department for asthma, 4 times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma, and 3 times more likely to die from asthma compared to White Californians.
Latinx Californians are 1.3 times more likely to go to the emergency department for asthma and 1.4 times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma compared to White Californians. Additionally, 2.2 million of the 5.9 million Californians diagnosed with asthma are Latinx.

We prioritize goals and activities that address asthma disparities, targeting the social and environmental inequities that create them. The RAMP Framework for Reducing the Burden of Asthma visually conveys the array of factors impacting asthma prevalence and outcomes from downstream factors, like medication use, to upstream factors, like racism. It also outlines our approaches and core strategies.