The Perry Family Free Clinic Focuses on the Health of Black Men: Fighting Low Life Expectancy
Rebalanced Life Wellness Association board members James Howard (l) and Fred Conley (r) join founder Aaron Perry at The Perry Family Free Clinic on Grand Canyon Drive.
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By Jonathan Gramling
When Aaron Perry, founder of Rebalanced Life Wellness Association, served on the UW-Madison Police Department, he was on a mission to be more than a law enforcement person who often took people’s freedom away. The times when he took Black men in custody, Perry asked them if there was anything that could have been done to prevent them from being in their present circumstances.
“There were times when they told me to f*** off,” Perry recalled. “But the ones that did talk shared things like, ‘I’m $100,000 in debt and owe child support. I don’t care.’ Guys would say, ‘I’m homeless. I don’t care.’ Guys would say, ‘I have a heart condition and I haven’t had my medication.’ I was listening to all of this as I was driving them to the jail. So I book them into the Dane County Jail. Literally I would show up the next day with job applications and housing applications. I was doing community policing long before it was even popular. And people were very uncomfortable with me showing up there. My thing was, ‘If I take your freedom away, I want to be a part of helping you get your freedom back.’”
And so when Perry left the force, due in part because it wasn’t the right fit for him, he continued his quest to do something about the situation and plight of Black men in Madison and America.
According to the CDC, the average life expectancy for Black males is 72.6 while it is 79.2 for Black women while it is 77.1 and 81.9 respectively for the U.S. population as a whole. The only ethnic group with a lower life expectancy than Black men is American Indians, male and female.
In Dane County, it is even worse.
“Right now, we have 15,600 Black men in Dane County,” Perry said. “We represent six percent of the male population. When we started doing this, the average age of death for Black men in Dane County was 51-years-of-age. And that information came from a public health epidemiologist. And so literally when we heard that, my thought it we have a top ten university in our back yard. We have several billion dollar hospitals. We have to figure out how to keep Black men alive longer than 51-years-old. In the 3-4 years that we have really been focusing on improving that, the number is now 52.45 years. It’s moving up slowly. We believe we’ve had a significant hand in helping that because we definitely brought awareness to Black men’s health.”
Perry made strides to improve his own life expectancy when he was the first Black man to compete in the Ironman as a diabetic. And it led him to found Rebalanced Life Wellness Association — which sponsors Black Men Run and Black Men Walk — to improve the health of Black men.
“I just started looking at what I could do to intervene in the lives of men who are struggling to help them get their lives back on track,” Perry said. “My thing is when you start looking at the health disparities, I knew that healthcare was at the bottom of everyone’s list because of all of the other issues they were dealing with in their lives. My thing was if we can help them move healthcare to the front, maybe their outlook on life could be a little better. Let’s look at your life and let’s just rebalance it. Let’s put healthcare at the top.”
Through grants from SSM Health and other sources, Rebalanced Life began to open health information centers where Black men were.
“We started with opening three Black men’s centers in three different barbershops: JP Hair Design, Resilient Hair Design and B. Right Barbershop in Sun Prairie,” Perry said. “We have three health centers in those barbershops. This is just part of that natural progression of listening to what men stated that they need, doing surveys and focus groups.”
And then to take it to the next logical step, Rebalanced Life opened up The Perry Family Free Clinic named after Aaron’s late mother and father.