OU students share their thoughts about the pressure they face to be productive

PHOTO STORY SEX & HEALTH 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

When 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.

Dianna Johnson-Ward gives a presentation at an Empower Her event about Change Our Outcomes on March 26, 2022 at Baker University Center in Athens, Ohio.

Check out Johnson-Ward's podcast called Our Space on Spotify. The podcast can also be streamed on Apple Podcasts and Listen Notes.

“I think Change Our Outcomes is much deeper than that. I think it also dives deeper into, ‘Can I even talk and have an honest conversation with my health care provider because they don’t look like me?’” Grice says. “And there’s a lot of … lack of trust within the healthcare field because of the lack of representation.”

According to a 2018 brief titled “Black Women’s Maternal Health: A Multifaceted Approach to Addressing Persistent and Dire Health Disparities” from the National Partnership for Women and Families, 22 percent of Black women report discrimination when receiving medical care at the doctor or clinic.

“There are certain things that systemically I go through as a Black woman, especially when talking about things like maternal and infant health, that a white physician might not totally understand,” Johnson-Ward says.

The brief also cites that “Black women experience higher rates of many preventable diseases and chronic health conditions including diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease,” which is based off data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that stems from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Johnson-Ward’s modern version of Change Our Outcomes aims to bring awareness to the overall disparities Black women face with medical care and health-related issues.

“… Black women specifically get the least amount of physical activity, we live the most sedentary lifestyles, which are one of the key factors in getting things like cardiovascular disease and strokes and diabetes and obesity,” Johnson-Ward says.

Although Change Our Outcomes is branded by JohnsonWard, and will go wherever she goes outside of OU, Brandon emphasizes the importance of the initiative.

“I think it’s important for a space anywhere on earth,” Brandon says. “It should be in our communities because Black women, they’ve had to carry the burden and the barriers and the oppression as far as a marginalized group and underserved group in every facet: in education, in health care, in no access to healthy foods, and this goes back decades and decades …”

The organization had its first kick-off event in November 2021 with an awareness walk.

Group members go on walks and sometimes walk together. They also meet up for fitness classes, rock climbing and overall, aim to encourage fitness among the Black student community at OU. Johnson-Ward can be found at most of these events.

Johnson-Ward also hosts her own biweekly podcast called “Our Space,” where she discusses health-related topics and sometimes talks with Black medical or health-related professionals. JohnsonWard believes that some of the issues Black people face within the healthcare field may stem from how medical students are learning and what has been taught to them.

Ultimately, she hopes that Change Our Outcomes can continue to help OU students become more active and increase awareness about Black women and their health care, both physically and mentally.

“... We want to change our outcomes,” Johnson-Ward says. “We don’t want to continue dying at these high rates of maternal mortality and chronic disease and mental health.”b