Dear Community:

As we move through this busy holiday season, I want to share a few important updates and gentle reminders with you.

First, due to the forecasted weather, we’ve made the difficult decision to cancel our Black Women’s Health Movement Holiday Refresh event scheduled for tomorrow, December 13. While we’re disappointed, the safety of our community, partners, and staff must always come first. We look forward to gathering again soon and will share updates as plans develop.

And I want to acknowledge that the holidays can be especially challenging for many. Financial stress, family pressures, grief, and high expectations can intensify feelings of anxiety and depression. Please remember, you are not alone. Be gentle with yourself, reach out when you need support, and check in on one another.

Wishing you care, connection, and a safe and healthy week ahead!



Renee Mahaffey Harris

President & CEO

A CALL FOR HALLE-BRATION VOLUNTEERS!

The 13th annual Halle-Bration Black holiday market returns December 12-13! We are looking for volunteers to help make this event successful. There are various time slots available. Halle-Bration features vendors, live entertainment, and fun activities for the entire family. Come out and support this wonderful event!

Public Health in Action: Confronting Black Maternal Health Disparities

by Jennifer Vo ’27, Davidson College

Women’s health and public health have always been important to me.

So, when Prof. Butts offered her “PBH 375: Disparities in Maternal Health” class, I knew I had to take it. I had not heard about the maternal mortality issue before, and this class opened my eyes to just how severe this problem is in the United States, especially for Black women.

Despite spending more on healthcare than any other nation, the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income country. Even more shocking, Black women are three-and-a-half times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. This was a wake-up call for me, and I knew I needed to learn more.

Researchers develop AI tool to identify undiagnosed Alzheimer's cases while reducing disparities

Researchers at UCLA have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can use electronic health records to identify patients with undiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease, addressing a critical gap in Alzheimer’s care: significant underdiagnosis, particularly among underrepresented communities.

Disparities in Alzheimer’s and dementia diagnosis among certain populations have been a longstanding issue. African Americans are nearly twice as likely to have the neurodegenerative disease compared to non-Hispanic whites but only 1.34 times as likely to receive a diagnosis. Similarly, Hispanic and Latino people are 1.5 times more likely to have the disease but only 1.18 times as likely to be diagnosed.

“Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and affects 1 in 9 Americans aged 65 and older," said Dr. Timothy Chang, the study's corresponding author from UCLA Health Department of Neurology. “The gap between who actually has the disease and who gets diagnosed is substantial, and it's more significant in underrepresented communities.”

Men of Honor Celebrates Distinguished Honorees

Men of Honor | A Salute to African American Men was created in 2010 to provide a unique opportunity for the community to celebrate extraordinary African American men who have succeeded against all odds and achieved special greatness. 

On November 22, the organization welcomed 750 community members, family members, colleagues, and friends to the Turfway Park Event Center to salute this year’s five distinguished honorees: Clifford A. Bailey, Rance Duke, Evans Nwankwo, Dr. H. James Williams, and Barron Witherspoon.

To nominate someone for next year’s Men of Honor | A Salute to African American Men, please complete the nomination form and submit it no later than Monday, January 12, 2026.

The Killing of Black Women in America: A Public Health Crisis

Black women in America are being killed at rates far higher than any other group, according to Tameka Gillum,PhD, associate professor in The University of New Mexico College of Population Health (COPH). Gillum and her co-authors note this pattern represents a severe health disparity and warn that ignoring it costs lives.

Their summary of the evidence and call to action, for what they say is an urgent and neglected public health crisis, has been featured in high profile journals, including the American Journal of Public Health and the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.

Gillum worked with colleagues from UNM, The University of Maryland Baltimore County, and a Milwaukee-based community organization. Together, they found that in 2020, Black women were murdered at a rate of 11.6 per 100,000 people, while White women were murdered at a rate of three homicides per 100,000 people, that same year. The starkest contrast was seen in Wisconsin, where Black women were 20 times more likely to be killed than White women.

RAISE: Elevating Person-Centered Data for Healthy Communities

The availability of person-centered data is critical to more robustly characterize populations, which facilitates solutions to address unmet medical needs. The goal of RAISE (Real-World Accelerator to Improve the Standard of Collection and Curation of Race and Ethnicity Data in Healthcare) is to curate existing efforts to improve data collection, share the data with leaders in health care, and provide an enduring resource to support organizations in transforming their data systems to support healthy communities.

We developed 11 virtual workshops to share solutions and address common barriers in reporting, collecting, curating, and sharing demographic data with experts from health care delivery systems, payers, data technology companies, government agencies, research settings, and local communities. We summarized workshop proceedings into thematic areas and, through community polling, developed a multidimensional action framework to translate our learnings into actionable steps to address the most pressing gaps in the collection of person-centered data, using race and ethnicity data as an initial use case.

Community partnership is central to cocreate data systems that curate information necessary to produce reliable data that support health care and healthy communities. Doing so requires respect, intentionality, standards, education, and collaboration with partners across the health care ecosystem, including the communities themselves.