Looking Back on the Evolution of Black Women’s Wellness Efforts: Black Resilience (Part 2 of 2)
Lisa Peyton founded The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness in 2012 as the first sustained and continuous movement to improve the wellness of Black women and children.
by Jonathan Gramling
On February 21st, the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness celebrated its 15th Wear Red Day observance to highlight the impact heart disease has on Black women and to point the way to a holistic approach to the well-being of Black women. While Lisa Peyton started the first Wear Red Day observance in Madison at the Urban League in 2012, the seeds for it had already been planted when her mother died of congestive heart failure at the age of 64 and Peyton started observing Wear Red Day in honor of her several years before she moved back to Madison.
And ever since, Peyton and the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness has grown its capacity to serve hundreds of Black women with holistic programming designed to help the women to reach a state of wellness. It’s come a long ways from that first Wear Red Day held in the Urban League’s Evjue Room. It now combines direct service, program collaboration and advocacy to elevatge the wellness of Black women.
An example of their advocacy was the passage and signing of the Medicaid increase in postpartum coverage to one year. Peyton was one of the speakers a the bill-signing event.
“What started as ways of convening women and giving immediate education and immediate support and a space to envision differently would definitely build over time into more complex work of not only programming and services to women and families, but also to this systems-level change work,” Peyton said. “We have really grown and evolved in being a significant and consequential partner in driving policy and practice change in how health care is shaped and delivered to Black women about policy, gains like the recent 12 month postpartum Medicaid expansion. We worked for four years as a major player and advocate for that work across the aisle and with a coalition of other partners to actualize and realize that victory last week. We’ve been critical in working with health systems — all of our health systems in Dane County — in helping to inform about the root causes and better solutions for addressing the Black maternal and infant health crisis.
The Foundation has also been working with the Dane County Health Council — composed of representatives of major health organizations — to create comprehensive strategies to address Black Women’s wellness.
“We have co-built different models of care and system that are impacting how Black women are being screened and supported through services in every clinical setting in Dane County through Saving Our Babies and the Connect RX initiative,” Peyton said. “We built a community health worker model and team that is serving families across the highest need zip codes in Dane County. We’ve built a child and maternal health workforce of doulas and community health workers in community and clinical settings that are serving hundreds of Black women and now all women in our community in different capacities so that we are addressing what we call the social determinants of health. We know that housing, food, employment and transportation impact health as much as access to medical care, prenatal care and postpartum care. We’ve built this system of care that looks different than it looked 10 years ago before we entered the scene as an organization. Last year, we were approached by Quartz Health, one of the largest insurers in Wisconsin, and asked to partner with them as they were building their first doula benefits for HMO customers. And so we launched a whole new body of work called Umama Birthing Services to partner with Quartz to enable Wisconsin’s first commercially-reimbursable doula services. I could name many other services.”
And beginning in May, the Foundation will make a major leap forward with a five year grant it received.
“We received a five-year, $1.75 million grant from the Merck Foundation to invest in heart health equity, going back to the root of what brought me to launch this organization with the loss of my mother and so many women in my family from heart disease and cardio-vascular conditions,” Peyton said. “We have been doing education, engagement, and empowerment around heart disease and then building that track record to the place where we now have the positioning to garner that level of support to go even deeper in offering a real, robust programmatic solution to Black women living in Dane County who are suffering with hypertension and working with partners like Merck. It’s over five years and providing a solution and a pathway that is tangible for women to access a deeper level of care. It brings all of our existing programming that we have built, our Project Live Well, our health and wellness classes, our nutrition classes, our stress management classes, all of those things will be wrapped into this program. Everything that we’ve built over time is being integrated in a way that there is again a holistic approach to how we create and design our programming to bring all of those resources to bear for women to access to immediately address what they are living with today with this longer vision of how we are going to change the trajectory of the condition of heart disease in Black women in Dane County over time. There are going to be four cohorts. We’re launching the first one this May. There will be four cohorts of 50 women over the next five years. I think it is amazing.”
According to Peyton, the Foundation impacts the lives of about 10,000 women per year through either their digital and virtual training and services and through its in-person programming. And while they are positively impacting the lives of hundreds and hundreds of women, it’s hard to make a dent in the macro-demographic data.
“We know in a perfect world, we all want to believe that the work that we have been doing for the last 15 years has changed all of those broad statistics and data that our public health department and our state Department of Health Services collect,” Peyton observed. “But we know that it takes more than a few years to change a pattern that has been in motion for many, many decades and you can argue for over 100 years. We have been collecting this aggregated data in Wisconsin around health, education and other areas for the last 30-40 years. We’re just beginning over the past few decades to have data that compares and shows us population health statistics.”
And it is very difficult to move the needle in terms of seeing macro-demographic change because the population of Black women keeps changing in a very mobile society. And the funding and service models change as well.
“What we haven’t had over that time is consistent, committed funding to ensure that the interventions that we create stay in place,” Peyton emphasized. “Every couple of years, priorities change. You have leadership change in state government. You have leadership change on the local level. You have leadership change in foundations. And philanthropy is always changing. But yet, nonprofits are expected to weather all of those changes, changes in priorities and the external environment and ecosystem without steady streams of funding. We’re all raising our budgets every year. Multi-year commitments that give you the continuity to prove a concept and stick to it is very rare. It’s very unfair often when people say, ‘Well why haven’t you resolved this health disparity for Black women?’ Well where have the major investments to help us be able to focus intently, continuously and unbroken on investing dollars and time in order to realize that? It takes a generation to make a difference. And what is the length of a generation, 25 years? We know in the unique circumstances of Black women, families and communities, we’re talking about a multi-generational pattern of disparity.’
And Peyton is concerned about the impact of the present federal administration on these efforts and initiatives.
“Look at all of the policy shifts and changes, all of the fighting, all of the progress and then the regression, the progress and the repression,” Peyton said. “Right now, we are living in yet again, another cycle of repression where there is the actual, blatant dismantling of all things related to civil rights, human rights, diversity, equity and inclusion and equity in general to the point where you’re forbidden from using these words when you are writing grant applications. And those things count. And they are not new. It’s a cycle that we’re always impacted by. And so you really can’t argue the question. It is a multi-generational body of work with many, many ups and downs and wins and losses along the way hold that line.”
And so for Peyton, she is revitalized and continues to push forward because of the change in the micro-demographic picture that she sees every day.
“Where we look to see the most impact is in the individual story or within the population that we are serving,” Peyton said. “What data do we have from the point that a woman starts her journey with the Foundation to her midpoint to the endpoint. In certain programs, we close out a client after they’ve gotten a certain number of services and they achieve the goal they came here to achieve. What stories can we tell in that data that demonstrates how our methods, our interventions are really helping women turn their entire life around and send them on a new trajectory. We have hundreds of stories like that that demonstrate that when you have budgeting and you have proper staffing and you have best practice interventions and programs, it works.”
Peyton knows that positive change is happening and soon what they see on a micro level, the entire community will be able to see on the macro level.
“The needle is getting moved,” Peyton said. “Even if it is incremental movement, we have to celebrate those wins. I know for a fact that we have better perinatal care being delivered in Dane County today for Black women.”
A positive change is going to come.