Community Conversations: Our November 12 Community Conversation was a success! Dr. Cherie LeDoux and Dr. Vida Henderson did a phenomenal job answering questions and explaining options for our community seeking care for Breast Cancer. We were impressed with the number of men who joined our conversation to ask questions about how they could support the women in their lives. You can watch a replay of the conversation here. 

We also discussed how to share these conversations so that visitors can access past conversations. We’re considering how to create an archive or a central location with links to past conversations. 

We’re currently making plans for our next Community Conversation, tentatively, on January 21. Our theme will be Healing/Transformational Resources to Care for Self and Others. It’s easy to take care of everyone but yourself. We would like to provide our community with resources so they can, in the words of a flight attendant, “put the oxygen mask on yourself before helping others.” We are also pondering how we can make this interactive so attendees can experience some of the resources that are available locally. 

The Barbershop Project: The health committee submitted a grant application to The Alaska Humanities Forum to fund the project. The title of the project is Barbershops and Soccer Fields: Stories of Home, Health, and Space by Black and Immigrant Men in Alaska. We would like to reach out to Barbershops and Soccer Fields with questions about what it means to be Black in Alaska and to be a Black immigrant in America. Our goal is to expand the conversation and include as wide a variety of experiences as we can.

The Barbershop Project will conclude with a Story Night Event at the Equity Center in September. More updates to come.

Committee members Rei Shimizu, Amana Mbise, and Nate West attended the 2023 American Public Health Association (APHA) Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. They presented a paper titled: Who receives the care they want? predictors of match between expressed desire for mental health services and care received among black adults.

At the APHA conference, Nate met with Dr. Jeffery Hall from the Office of Health Equity Director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and talked about ABC and the Health Committee.  

New Publication Alert!

Celeste, Thea, Amana, and Rei published a paper in the Journal of Social Work in Health Care based on data from the Black Alaska Health Needs Assessment. You can access the publication here, “Addressing barriers to health care among Black Alaskans: contributions by social work research to an agenda of health equity” 

Safe States: Thea shared about Zinobia Bennefield and the work she did for Safe States related to declarations of Racism as a Public Health Crisis; she interviewed ABC for this report because we were instrumental in getting a resolution passed declaring racism a public health crisis in Alaska in 2021. 

We would like to invite Zinobia to be a panelist for a community conversation or the Betty Davis Summit if we have funds to bring people to Alaska for the event.