SEX & HEALTH PHOTO STORY
CHANGING OUR OUTCOMES
OU Wellbeing Support Manager Dianna Johnson-Ward discusses her Change Our Outcomes initiative to bring awareness to Black health. BY HELEN WIDMAN | PHOTOS BY PEARL SPURLOCK | DESIGN BY KATE RECTOR
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hen Dianna Johnson-Ward first told her mother that she wanted to work at a college, her mother said, “What are you going to do there?” All Johnson-Ward knew was that she wanted to work in health and education. Now, she has started an initiative to change the outcomes that Black women face in the realm of health every day. She graduated from Ohio Northern University in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in exercise physiology and went back to school in 2018 to pursue her master’s degree in public health at Northern Illinois University. She is currently a wellbeing support manager at Ohio University. “... It was kind of serendipitous, maybe, that I ended up here,” Johnson-Ward says. “It wasn’t my original plan. But this kind of work, the job description, I was like, this is it.” Using her newfound role as a wellbeing support manager, Johnson-Ward decided to dig up a project from her graduate school days: Change Our Outcomes. Originally, the social media project was geared toward increasing awareness of Black women and breast cancer. According to Johnson, Black women are not typically the face of breast cancer awareness, and they don’t receive mammograms as much as other racial groups, despite being more genetically predisposed to it. The Breast Cancer Prevention Partners
website says that African American women, and young women in general, are more likely to present a triple negative subtype of breast cancer, which is also known to be more aggressive. The Change Our Outcomes project had never fully come to light — until now. “So, with working at a university, I was like, ‘This is the perfect age,’” Johnson-Ward says. “We’re building lifestyle habits to really mitigate some of that future predisposition that Black women already have to getting those … chronic diseases and having those negative outcomes.” Re’Aija Grice is a junior at OU studying exercise physiology with a pre-med track. Johnson-Ward has become a mentor for Grice and other students. “… Having another representative African American woman or just multicultural woman just in general is very impactful. I don’t think some people understand that,” Grice says. Johnson-Ward’s supervisor, Ann Brandon, is the associate director for prevention and education and also admires Johnson-Ward. “People just gravitate towards Diana … it’s almost like her energy embraces you and you feel part of something being around her,” Brandon says. To Grice, this initiative is about more than just exercising. Dianna Johnson-Ward hosts the Black Girls Rock Climb event as part of Change Our Outcomes on February 16, 2022, at Ping Recreation Center in Athens, Ohio.
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backdrop | Spring 2022
