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International

Ruth T. Perot Executive Director/CEO rperot@shireinc.org

On December 8th, 2022, Summit Health Institute for Research and Education, Inc. (SHIRE) celebrates our Silver Anniversary in Washington, DC. We will be commemorating 25 years of service, advocacy, and community engagement in pursuit of health justice, equity, and empowerment for African Americans and other people of color.

Since 1997, SHIRE has maintained a rock-solid commitment to help eradicate racial/ethnic health disparities and to promote optimal health and wellness for the communities we serve. For example, the impact of our cutting-edge policy research focused on racial/ethnic data collection is reflected in the Affordable Care Act. Our leadership and advocacy aimed at the inclusion of people of color, with respect to health information technology, has served as a catalyst for federal and state policies and programs. The convening of people of color under the banner of Out of Many One has been a model for multicultural collaboration. Our refurbished website www.shireinc.org features more information about these and other activities.

At the same time, SHIRE has become a highly respected partner with numerous community organizations and has engaged thousands of residents in the District of Columbia in wellness initiatives. The Early Childhood Obesity Prevention Collaborative convened over 100 stakeholders, including parents, educators, government representatives, and members from community organizations, universities, corporations, and the media who develop creative policies and programs. Another childhood obesity prevention effort was SCOOP, SHIRE’s Childhood Obesity and Overweight Prevention program, that engaged young children and their teachers in activities promoting movement using music and drama created for that purpose. Our Passport for Youth Program, conducted in partnership with the YMCA, has served as a model for encouraging middle school youth to become involved in physical activities, such as swimming, that were new to them. We have trained and involved over 50 individuals as health coaches and peer educators who have spread the message of health and wellness throughout 5 DC wards. Over 1500 men and women have participated in SHIRE’s Wellness Circles to date. They have acquired tools and strategies to improve their health outcomes and make lasting lifestyle changes—taking charge of their health and their lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has revealed the urgent need for fundamental change in our healthcare systems, also offers an opportunity to think differently about health and wellness. SHIRE offers a compelling answer to this challenge. We have equipped community residents with the information and tools they need to demand respect, high quality treatment, and promote changes in the healthcare systems that serve them. Although we are aware of the influence of social determinants, we firmly believe that fostering self-determination and empowerment is a powerful strategy for meaningful change. This is the mission that we carry into our next 25 years.

In 2023, we will vigorously promote our Wellness Circle program as a concept applicable to new groups and health challenges. For example, we will seek partners and sponsors to advance improved maternal health, which has been greatly impacted by the recent Supreme Court decision. Building on past experience, SHIRE will seek to involve youth in Wellness Circles—particularly those impacted by violence to aid their development as self-empowered health ambassadors. Our approach is to equip individuals with the tools they need—accurate information, skills and experiences, encouragement and motivational group support— which can be applied to many challenges facing community residents. Lastly, we will build on the success of Wellness Circles focused on chronic health conditions by offering this program to providers of health services and health insurance agencies in the District of Columbia and surrounding jurisdictions.

Indeed, there are many reasons to celebrate SHIRE’s past, present, and future. Over the past 25 years, SHIRE has continued to thrive and with the support of the community our collective success is assured. WI

OUR 25TH ANNIVERSARY WHY WE CELEBRATE

1. SHIRE commemorates 25 years of service, advocacy, and community engagement for people of color. 2. SHIRE maintains a rock-solid commitment to eradicate health disparities and to promote health and wellness for communities of color. 3. SHIRE is a highly respected community partner and engages hundreds of the residents in the District of Columbia in their Wellness Circle programs. 4. SHIRE empowers people of color with health information and the tools to improve their health outcomes and make lasting lifestyle changes. 5. SHIRE trains community residents as health coaches and peer educators to spread the message about health and wellness among DC residents of color.

6. SHIRE has influenced policies that support health equity and justice at the national level. For more about SHIRE’s Silver Anniversary

By Lee Ross / WI Staff Writer

Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States By Anne Pollock

From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis--and even the life-threatening childbirth experience for tennis star Serena Williams--author Anne Pollock takes readers on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare. She goes beneath the surface to deconstruct the structures that make these events possible, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and the hypervisibility of Black athletes’ bodies. Ultimately, Sickening shows what these shocking events reveal about the everyday racialization of health in the United States. Concluding with a vital examination of racialized healthcare during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter rebellions of 2020, Sickening cuts through the mind-numbing statistics to vividly portray healthcare inequalities. In a gripping and passionate style, Pollock shows the devastating reality and consequences of systemic racism on the lives and health of Black Americans.

We’ll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity

David Chanoff, Louis W. Sullivan

Racism in the U.S. health care system has been deliberately undermining Black health care professionals and exacerbating health disparities among Black Americans for centuries. These health disparities only became a mainstream issue on the agenda of US health leaders and policy makers because a group of health professions schools at Historically Black Colleges and Universities banded together to fight for health equity. We’ll Fight It Out Here tells the story of how the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools (AMHPS) was founded by this coalition and the hard-won influence it built in American politics and health care. David Chanoff and Louis W. Sullivan, former secretary of health & human services, detail how the struggle for equity has been fought in the field of health care, where bias and disparities continue to be volatile national issues.

Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine By Damon Tweedy

When Damon Tweedy begins medical school, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center and black bodies are considered pathological and inherently diseased. Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. Tweedy discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients, and e illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of many health problems in the Black community. Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination By Alondra Nelson

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture, touting revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Alondra Nelson, however, uncovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.

Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism By J. Hoberman

Black & Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today. Black & Blue penetrates the physician’s private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies. WI

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