75
years
Jubilee Park and Community Center Announces
Expanding Our Health "Pillar" Article by: Libby Hayhurst, Advancement Coordinator at Jubilee Park & Community
When Jubilee Park resident Alejandra Saldaña returned to Dallas after graduating from Syracuse University in 2017, she felt triumphant. By every measure, she had made it and defeated the odds against her: she had graduated high school, gone to college, and now she was working at Jubilee, the same organization she had received services from as a young teen growing up in Southeast Dallas. “By working in Community Outreach at Jubilee, I wanted to help my neighbors overcome their circumstances, too”. But a frustrating experience with the healthcare system would cause her to rethink whether it was even possible for communities like hers to truly break free. Needing to see the doctor, Alejandra left her house before dawn to get in line for an appointment. For her, this was normal. Jubilee Park is designated as a Medically Underserved Area by the federal government, meaning that there are too few primary care physicians, a large senior population, and high
poverty. Only a small handful of clinics serve the entire Southeast Dallas sector, so getting a doctor’s appointment can take months. Instead, residents gather in front of the clinics before dawn in hopes of a last-minute cancellation or no-show. When Alejandra was turned away that day, she was tired, sick, and defeated. But she returned the next day, and the next. Waiting for hours outside the clinic, Alejandra realized how similar her experience was to so many of her neighbors that she was serving at Jubilee. She thought of one of her clients, Mrs. Doris, who ignored her abdominal pain before it became too much to bear, and who, like her, waited for days in the hot sun, desperate to be seen. Mrs. Doris stood here, where Alejanra stood, taking days off work and losing pay that she couldn’t afford to lose. When the doctor finally called Alejandra in, she didn’t feel relieved, she felt angry. “I thought—I went to college. I have a good job. I did not succumb to my circumstances yet I could not seem to escape them, even by doing everything ‘right’,” she recounts. “Three days off of work. Three days standing in a line before dawn. Those three days are what Mrs. Doris and I have in common.” Alejandra realized she was fighting against a system more far-reaching than she could have ever imagined. Over the next few months, her love of health ignited into a passion, and when Jubilee announced its plan to grow its health "pillar", it was clear that Alejandra should lead the newly expanded initiative as the first-ever Health and Wellness Manager. In preparation for her new role, Alejandra enrolled in a part-time Master’s in Public Health program and began poring over Dallas County health indexes. What she found was startling. “Our community is twice as likely to be diabetic, and our residents live twenty-two years less than people living just a few miles away. I have watched my family struggle with chronic illness, and I realized it was a much wider con't pg. 8
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THE ARCHANGEL EASTER 2021
