Both my passion for Black women’s healthcare and my desire to work with Dr. Shalon’s Maternal Action Project were born out of my own professional and personal experiences.

After graduating from high school with honors and throughout my undergraduate years at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, I gained professional experience in the healthcare industry by working part time as a certified nursing assistant for a nursing home in my hometown.

Upon graduating magna cum laude from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, I was presented with the unique opportunity to help spearhead the sale of supplemental insurance products as a sales representative for USAble Life Insurance company, the only Blue Cross Blue Shield life affiliate insurance company of its kind at the time. In this capacity, I was responsible for opening new accounts and selling supplemental insurance products. But it was through countless training classes, exposure to statistical data, and more specifically my role in helping individual employees determine their out-of-pocket medical expenses for their flexible spending accounts that helped me to notice the glaring disparities between male and female coverage when it came to healthcare. I remember the utter frustration when I, the only Black salesperson in the entire company, saw my demographic at the worrying end of virtually every graph, table, and statistic.

Personally, this frustration was multiplied years later when I began to experience issues with my own health, in the insufferable difficulty I encountered in my effort to feel heard by many of my healthcare providers. Sadly, I found that my Black friends had the same experiences and, like me, most of their negative experiences were with physicians in obstetrics and gynecology. When it became clear that surgery was necessary, I had to see thirteen physicians before I could find found one whom I felt that I could trust enough to treat me. Whether I was seen by a solo practitioner or a physician at some of the best medical institutions in the country, I was often left feeling dismissed, disrespected, and irrelevant. While I have since found wonderful and attentive doctors, those feelings and frustrations have never left me. It was these experiences and the recognition of race as an obvious and major factor in the quality of healthcare that Black women receive that led me to Dr. Shalon’s Maternal Action Project (DSMAP).

The fact that Black women in America are three times as likely as white women to die from childbirth-related complications is a national crisis and makes the existence and efforts of DSMAP that are aimed at reducing the number of Black maternal deaths in this country vital. As its Co-Director, I am passionately driven, professionally trained, and personally vested in helping advance those efforts.