ORGANIZING A CONFERENCE OR WORKSHOP (9 PTS.) ADRIANNA MORTON (C/O '27)

 

    For the past few months, I have had the opportunity to serve as a BLK HLTH Community Advocacy for Racial Equity School (CARES) Fellow, an interdisciplinary and intergenerational professional public health advocacy fellowship program aimed at training young professionals to advocate for/within their local communities. The opportunity to grow through BLK HLTH, an organization devoted to advancing health equity in Black communities through antiracist, education, advocacy, research, and programming framework is further enriched by the intercollegiate community with the Georgia HBCU cohort comprising 5 institutions. An aspect of the fellowship enables students to plan an advocacy workshop for fellow college students to gain knowledge about the role of advocacy in advancing health equity in their community. I was most inspired by the exchange of information pertaining to health initiatives on our respective campuses, breakout groups that facilitated needed conversation around our topic areas of interest, and actionable strategies that were put in place shortly after the session. Not only did this space cultivate a natural environment for networking, it also united campus leaders in the conversation about health needs as college students and invited them to take action. While social determinants of health are central to the public health conversation, especially those attending HBCUs should recognize that there's a distinctly racialized and gendered experience for students that requires an anti-racist outside of the framework - 5 types of social determinants of health (education, access to quality care, economic stability, environmental factors, and social/community context) that makes this fellowship's mission so impactful!

- Adrianna Morton (C/O 2027)