Perry Family Free Dental Clinic to Open Soon in the Boys & Girls Club’s Allied Drive Location: Giving Visibility to the Health Concerns of Black Men
Above: Aaron Perry continues to advocate for the health needs of Black Men who currently have an average life expectancy of 52.45 years in Dane County.
Below: A dental hygiene station in the soon to open Perry Family Dental Clinic.
By Jonathan Gramling
It sometimes seems that Aaron Perry, president & CEO of The Rebalance Life Wellness Association, is like a voice crying out in the wilderness when it comes to the health concerns of Black men in Wisconsin. A NAMI-Dane County article on racial disparities in healthcare painted a stark picture.
“On the topic of life expectancy, racial disparities come in the form of higher rates of chronic diseases, illnesses, and death in populations of people of color compared to their white counterparts,” the article said. “In fact, “Heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death across race, ethnicity and gender. African Americans were 30 percent more likely than whites to die prematurely from heart disease in 2010, and African American men are twice as likely as whites to die prematurely from stroke” (National Academies of Sciences, 2017). Not only do African Americans receive worse or less preferable treatments in health care, but they are faced with the highest rates in some diseases, making the issue of access to quality health care even more prevalent.”
Perry put it even more bluntly.
“We don’t matter in Dane County,” Perry said. “The data in Wisconsin as a whole clearly reflects that. And if there is anything that I am trying to change it’s that we matter. We only have about 14,300 Black men in Dane County. We provided preventative health screenings of four or more hours to 7,500 Black men. That’s over 50 percent of the Black men in our community. You would think having access to those individuals, every health system would be partnering with us. But if you look at our flyer, you see there is only 1-3 sponsors at the bottom. In terms of what we do here, a lot of health systems believe that because they support Black women, they are indirectly supporting Black men. And that is a cop-out. When I first started this work about seven years ago, the average life expectancy for Black men was 51 years of age. So we’ve gone up slightly to 52.45 years. But that is an embarrassing statistic. We’re not trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill. We are trying to bring attention to it. But we are also saying ‘Shame on a place that has a Top Ten university and three billion dollar hospitals in our back yard, yet we can’t figure out how to keep Black men alive longer than 52.45 years of age. We can’t figure it out because it isn’t a priority. But at the end of the day, we matter.”
Perry’s advocacy has brought him national recognition.
“I talk to health systems from all over the country, at least 5-6 every week, because I am the national director of Health Wellness and Disease Prevention for Black Men Run,” Perry said. “Black Men Run has 50 chapters across 29 states. So every week, I’m talking to a leading health professional in 29 states. It really is a clear indication that if you can’t even engage with America’s Leading Black Men’s Health Advocate, according to Time magazine, who is in your backyard, you clearly are not going to be engaging with Bubba down the road in that underserved zip code. He’s getting left out. And that is what we are trying to change.”
Perry and Rebalanced Life Wellness have made the most of the limited resources that they have. The medical clinic next to JP’s Hair Design on Madison’s west side is still humming along.
“We’ve had 170 total unique patients,” Perry said. “They circle back quite often. These are our most vulnerable in our community, uninsured and under-insured and those individuals who have gaps in their insurance. So we’ve been doing very well. We continue to provide primary care, diabetic foot care, physical therapy and our partnership with Edgewood College’s American Family Therapy Program has been a huge bonus
because they in essence brought their entire mental health outpatient clinic to our location. And so, we’ve been seeing a significant number of people coming in for mental health counseling. That’s been huge for us. What we are finding is that some of them do come over for the socialization. We know there is a sense of loneliness that is happening in the community. And because of that, that’s why we created the Check-In Wednesdays, which is another initiative that we do for Black men 60 and over. And so we do that every second Wednesday of the month. We will be hosting that tomorrow.”
In partnership with SSM Health, Rebalanced helped open a health clinic in Freeport, Illinois.
“They reached out to me and they said their patients in the Freeport, Illinois area weren’t doing very well in terms of keeping their appointments, and follow-through,” Perry said. “So they asked us if we would be willing to set up a similar barbershop health center down there. The day we opened was April 30, 2022. That is going very well. That is our first replicated men’s health center.”
And now, they have opened another health clinic in Madison.
“We just opened up on September 14th a free clinic inside Second Baptist Church,” Perry said. “We had 10 guys show up the first day. I would say it was a home run. It went very well. I am very thankful for Pastor Anthony Wade to see the vision and to see our vision and knew that was something important to do. The neat thing about opening up that clinic in Second Baptist Church is this is part of that 53711 zip code. It’s an underserved zip code.”
What is also coming to the 53711 zip code area is a free dental clinic at the Boys & Girls Club Allied Drive Center. More Smiles had built a clinic there in 2018 and operated it until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. After the pandemic receded, the clinic never reopened. Perry got wind that Michael Johnson, the club’s CEO was looking to move the dental equipment. And Perry got to work in planning and gathering resources for a dental clinic.
“My staff, our medical director Farah Kaiksow and I have conversations when people come in to the clinic for mouth pain,” Perry said about people coming to the health clinic. “And we were not equipped to deal with the dental pain. We know that whatever is going on in your mouth tends to be what is happening in your body. We were making a lot of referrals to the free clinics in Beloit and Milwaukee. The problem is once we made the referrals, we really couldn’t follow up on how the guys were doing. But we did understand that a significant number of them were going from our place straight to the ER.”
The dental clinic will be opening in a couple of phases. The first will focus on prevention and dental hygiene.
“Right now, we’re just focused on the preventative screening,” Perry said. “Teeth cleaning is part of that overall preventative screening. People will come in and get their teeth cleaned, get an oral exam, which involves x-rays. And we will have an actual hygienist go in and tell them what they are observing. The biggest thing that we are looking for is any signs of oral cancers so that we can refer that out. If we do find that guys have signs of infection, we also want to observe that and refer that. That’s part of our preventative screening.”
In order to open in late November, Perry has been piecing together the services using various sources for the technicians needed to provide the screenings.
“We partner with Erica Olson, a dental hygienist,” Perry said. “We hired her as a consultant. We’re currently vetting out a lot of the different programs and different hygienists. We’re looking at the Madison College dental hygienist program to potentially get some of those students to do their internships over here. Right now, it is a volunteer effort put on by oral hygienists. Our hope is to of course hire one full-time dental hygienist. But the rest of the staff would be AmeriCorps volunteers, public health AmeriCorps workers and then more volunteers.”
And in phase two, Perry hopes to have dentists on board. To fill cavities,do dental implants and root canals among other procedures.
But for right now, they are planning to open up on Saturdays with men’s activities along with the services of the free clinic.
“We want to fill this gym up,” Perry emphasized. “We want guys who can come in here when the weather is cold and do some exercises. We’ll have yoga classes here. We’re going to do cooking demonstrations. We have that big rock-climbing wall in the back. We want to make sure that this place is a hub for Black men getting and staying healthy.”
While it may be a sometimes lonely quest, Aaron Perry and Rebalanced Life Wellness are determined to raise the life expectancy of Black men in Dane County.
