Jason Purnell, associate professor at the Brown School at Washington University and director of Health Equity Works, has been a part of the team that’s produced two comprehensive reports on the realities of inequity and the policies that drive inequity in the St. Louis region. And he says that if we want to make the meaningful change needed to eliminate those inequities, we need to embrace a new type of leadership — because the top-down, old-boys’-network approach to leadership that St. Louis is used to is no longer sufficient for the types of problems we face today.