Stay ConnectedWe are Woke WOC Docs, a podcast about the lives of womxn of color in medicine/health justice, including their unique experiences, viewpoints, and struggles in education, research, and practice. We want to reveal the insights we as womxn of color uniquely have on how medicine can transform to end health injustices and be a better institution of health, well-being, and healing.
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We are so excited to interview beloved community healer and warrior Chanel Durley, founder of 33rd and RiSING, a wellness space that provides healing for Black, Indigenous, and POC communities in the Bay Area and beyond. In this episode, we talk about Chanel’s experiences with Crohn’s in which she experienced racism and deep injustice and inequity in multiple encounters and 11 hospitalizations in the medical system. We also converse more about the toxicity of grind mentality and its roots in trauma and how her experiences as an intuitive healer came into her founding of 33rd & RiSING. Takeaways we love: -Who told us to stop believing in the wisdom of our bodies? -Going into doctor’s visits as interviews and seeing yourself as deserving of building your healthcare team. “These are my goals; this is the life I want to live: Are you with me?” -“You don’t validate me. I validate me.” -How are you unwinding? How are you unplugging from the matrix? For more info about Chanel and 33rd & RiSING: https://www.33rising.com/ https://www.instagram.com/33rdandrising/
We are hellaaaaaa hype to talk with Black Organizing Project, the amazing Black member-led community organization working for racial, social, and economic justice through grassroots organizing and community-building in Oakland, California. The Black Organizing Project (BOP) led the victory for Oakland to implement police-free schools in June 2020, a resolution that calls for moving the safety program to the equity/behavioral health departments and investing more money in mental health and special education staff, plus restorative justice programs. Together, we talk about the mission of BOP and why policing in schools significantly affects the emotional, mental, and physical health of Black students. We hear more about their amazing nearly decade long advocacy for police-free schools in Oakland and their recent victories with The People’s Plan, Black Sanctuary Pledge, and the George Floyd Resolution. In addition, we talk more about how their visions for a police-free world is rooted in personal and collective transformation. We celebrate with BOP on dissolving an entire police department in Oakland public schools as an all Black organization! Support them y'all and uplift their work!!! Police do not equal safety and GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING WORKS! Black Organizing Project: http://blackorganizingproject.org/ KQED News “After Abolishing School Police, Oakland Wants to Reimagine Safety in Education”: https://www.kqed.org/news/11826192/after-abolishing-school-police-oakland-wants-to-reimagine-safety-in-education Jasmine Williams is the Development and Communication Manager at Black Organizing Project. She hopes to use her writing to shift the negative narrative of Black people repeated in mainstream media and to ensure that Black people have a platform to uplift their voices and experiences. She is excited about reaffirming and celebrating the beauty of Blackness with BOP through storytelling, community building and organizing. Des Mims is a Mother, Community Activist & Member of Black Organizing Projects Communication team, who has dedicated herself to the work of abolishing school police to disrupt the school to prison pipeline and provide students and community with transformative justice.
For this episode, we are hella excited to interview our beautiful friends Noor Chadha and Aminta Kouyate, medical and graduate students at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and founding team members of the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine. Together, we talk more with Noor and Aminta about their work demanding and advocating for an anti-racist medicine through their research and student activist efforts. We talk with Noor and Bernie about their recent public launch of their inaugural "Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice" (co-authored by Noor, Bernie, Maddy Kane, and Brenly Rowland). We also talk with Aminta about leading a rally and protest through the White Coats 4 Black Lives (WC4BL) Berkeley chapter on demanding that racism be recognized as a public health issue. In addition, we learn more about their work being part of the founding team of the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine and their philosophy on being a student/community activist alongside the many responsibilities that come with being a student and human! Read the report at the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine website: www.instituteforhealingandjustice.org WC4BL Berkeley on Instagram: @wc4bl_berkeley Noor Chadha is a 2nd year med student at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program who strives to integrate compassion, justice, and joy throughout her life and medical career. She is a co-author of Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice. Her master's work focuses on youth civic engagement and health. Noor identifies as Sikh, as Punjabi American, as a daughter of Indian immigrants, as a sister, and as a dancer - she performed competitive Bhangra for several years, and who knows, maybe you'll see her make a comeback soon! Aminta Kouyate is a proud Bay native. Born in Oakland, she is dedicated to eradicating the systems of oppression that create the health disparities for marginalized communities. As a medical student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical program, her research is focused on building an anti-racist medical education curriculum for healthcare providers. She is a reader, a writer, a kitchen magic maker, and a deep believer in laughter and joy. Aminta is dedicated to working towards a fundamental change in the way we practice medicine. She envisions leaving behind a system that separates healing from health and cultivating a new practice learning from community wisdom to center healing, happiness, rest, and justice for all people. She is one of the founding members of the White Coats for Black Lives Chapter at UC Berkeley, a Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice collaborator, a student of the Program in Medical Education for the Urban Underserved (PRIME-US), and most importantly she is a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a co-conspirator to many beloved people.
Today, we have the pleasure of interviewing the organizing team of the Freedom Community Clinic. Founded in 2019, the Freedom Community Clinic provides community-centered, whole-person healing combining the strengths of Western medicine and ancestral and indigenous healing to the Bay Area. All services are for free and sliding scale. We are so excited to talk hear more about the origins of the Freedom Community Clinic and how Bernie, Tiffany, Sabrina, Krista, and Alexis have worked together as womxn of color healers to combine their professional/personal strengths, healing journeys, and work to bring community-centered, whole-person care directly to places and spaces where communities gather. Through this conversation, we will learn about how Western medicine must integrate its strengths with the wisdom of acupuncture, health education, Reiki, yoga, and herbal medicine. We are especially interested in hearing more about how their healing modalities provide a safe space for communities alongside the medical community. For more about the Freedom Community Clinic, visit their website at: freedomcommunityclinic.org.
In this episode, we have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Vibha Gupta, an emergency medicine doc at Kaiser Oakland and Richmond, and the founder of the No Immigrants No spice non profit. Vibha is second-generation daughter of Indian immigrants, born, bred and raised in the Midwest, and is now firmly transplanted in the Bay Area. As an emergency room doctor by day, Vibha is inspired by the humanity she sees on a daily basis. Together, we talk about Vibha’s amazing non-profit No Immigrants No Spice (NINS), whose mission is to flip the narrative on immigration and also support pro immigrant NGOs through merch, storytelling, and their inaugural event BBQs without Borders. She started NINS as a way to positively channel her frustration and create something that combines her passion for food, culture and people. Her hope is that NINS can be something that is fun, transcendent, educational and above all helpful. More about NINS: https://noimmigrantsnospice.org/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Let-s-look-at-immigrants-contributions-to-14465127.php
We are wishing everyone lots of love during this time. If you're in the Bay Area, the Freedom Community Clinic created a community mass resource sheet with up-to-date health information on COVID-19 at tinyurl.com/bayareacovid19help. We have the enormous privilege and excitement to talk with Dr. Alicia Fernández, a professor of Medicine, general internist at San Francisco General Hospital and the Director of UCSF Latinx Center for Excellence. In addition, Alicia does research on increasing language concordance between patients and physicians to improve patient care and health outcomes among many other topics. In this episode, we talk with Alicia more about her journey into and through medicine, including her immigration journey from Argentina to the United States at age 15, transitioning from political activism to health justice in the heart of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to where she is now-- a clinician, professor, mentor, and advocate for underrepresented and marginalized communities. All three of us have been incredibly grateful to Alicia for creating amazing programs for minority students here at UCSF (PROF-PATH and ALAS) that help us navigate academic medicine in ways that expand knowledge and mentorship on how to succeed and more fully show up as our true, authentic selves. Bio: Alicia Fernández, MD is a Professor of Medicine at UCSF in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Dr. Fernández has expertise in health and health care disparities, with a strong focus on diabetes, Latinx health, immigrant health, and language barriers. In addition to being the Director of the LCOE, she is also the co-director of two LCOE programs: FUEGO and PROF-PATH. She also serves as a faculty mentor for the UCSF ALAS program.
Whaddup y’all! Happy 2020. We are excited to launch Season 3 and share more exciting episodes with womxn of color in medicine and health justice work. For this episode, we’re giving a personal update on our lives: what’s been going on with each of us in 2019, gratitude to everyone who came to our live show last September, and goals for ourselves and WWD moving forward in 2020. Think of this episode like The Girls Room type chat you have with your girlfriends 🙂 In this episode, we also talk more about what clerkship year in medical school is and how we are integrating self-care, self-love, and healing in the upcoming year, including our excitements/anxieties/hopes/dreams about medicine! In addition, Bernie and Ivie shares their thoughts beginning a Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) program at UCSF and Kaiser SF. LICs are new, more radical, patient-centered methods of clerkship education in comparison to traditional block rotations! We’ll be having more of these reflective episodes each quarter in addition to our podcasts with featured guests. Stay tuned to see how we survive and thrive in clerkship year + what type of doctors/careers we’ll be imagining and refining for ourselves and our communities.
We are so grateful to the 100+ people who attended our live podcast recording at Red Bay Coffee in Oakland on September 27. We're hella excited for our listeners to hear the amazing wisdom and energy of the room when womxn of color healers from Oakland talk about the healing, movement, and social change in the beloved Town. The intro and Bernie's meditation goes until 4:00. This will be our last episode for 2019 as we cook up some amazing new initiatives for 2020! Keep in touch with us on our instagram @wokewocdocs. Thank you to all our listeners for the AMAZING support during our first year in existence! Y'all are real ones! Panelist Bios: Jasmine Stallworth aka: Honey Gold is a singer-songwriter, music producer, poet and ARTivist based in the Bay Area, known for her eclectic and innovative sound that combines experimental elements of hip-hop, R&B, and neo-soul. Her social entrepreneurship Honey Gold Presents is a multifaceted entity that uses events, workshops and art creation to produce holistic healing possibilities for people of the Afrikan diaspora. Her festival Increase the Piece hopes to erase the mental health stigma in Afrikan American communities and empower them to seek healing from within through music creation and therapy. Angela Aguilar is a doctoral student in the Ethnic Studies graduate program and a traditional birth attendant. Her dissertation project is Bay Area community-based and solution-oriented and focuses on ancestral, indigenous, and traditional healing and health/care, embodied methodologies, and radical social movements. She is a core organizing member of the Healing Clinic Collective. Dr. Aisha Mays is a core faculty member at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, clinical researcher at the UCSF Bixby Center for Reproductive Health, and founding Medical Director of Dream Youth Clinic in Oakland. Her current research centers on advocacy for girls who are at risk or engaged in sexual exploitation. Leah Kimble-Price is a third generation Oaklander rooted in the traditions of activism and Pan African theory. She earned her Master’s of Science in San Francisco State’s Clinical Psychology program and has been working with marginalized youth populations since 2004. Leah currently leads the anti-trafficking efforts at Catholic Charities of the East Bay including Day Star Mentoring & CSEC Education program and the much anticipated Claire’s House therapeutic living community for child survivors of sex trafficking. Frances Fu is a proud Oakland-native, daughter to Vietnamese refugees, a soul sister & sister friend to many, a healer, a creator, a scholar-activist, a public health practitioner, an aspiring social worker and therapist & a full-time cat mom. Her program and research focus in her MPH centered on mental health, intergenerational trauma in refugee communities and healing.
Join us, Woke WOC Docs, for a live podcast recording and community celebration with womxn of color healers rooted in Oakland! Together, we talk more about healing by and for womxn of color and communities in Oakland and how various healing practices, frameworks, and modalities can work together for community medicine and healing. As Woke WOC Docs has grown bigger with 500+ subscribers across our platforms and nearly 10k+ plays in less than a year since its infancy, this event will launch our third season and podcast tour to different cities across the US, starting in the Bay Area. We will be visiting different cities throughout fall 2019 and 2020 doing live podcast recordings and community gatherings in partnership with HBCUs, institutions, and cities that have a rich history for womxn and communities of color. Oakland-rooted Confirmed Panelists: Aisha Mays, teen doc and founder of Dream Youth Clinic Leah Kimble-Price, founder of Claire's House Frances Fu, activist, creator Angela Aguilar, full-spectrum doula/traditional birthworker and PhD student in Ethnic Studies Honey Gold Jasmine, artist, art therapist Light food and refreshments will be available. Friday, September 27 6:30-8:30pm Red Bay Coffee HQ 3098 E. 10th St. Oakland (near Fruitvale Station BART) RSVP at wokewocdocs.com
For our last episode of our Summer Series, we are talking with Dr. Paula Lum and Dr. Triveni DeFries, both physician activists of the UCSF Primary Care Addiction Medicine Fellowship. In this episode, we talk more about the historical and racial roots of the socially constructed phenomena of “the opioid epidemic”. In addition, we talk about how structural and social determinants have affected historical and current drug epidemics, including the rising methamphetamine epidemic going on now. We most importantly talk about how health professionals must de-stigmatize the culture of shame around drug use both in patient care and within our institutions through our words, actions, and activism. We also talk about how to expand resources in our hospitals and communities in order to address drug epidemics and their associated stigma and shame for people affected. We hope this episode serves as a call to action for many people to address personal and institutional biases about people and communities affected by the rise of current drug epidemics. Most of all, we hope this episode brings compassion and humanity to these very real issues of our communities. Also check out our brotha Max’s podcast “Flip the Script” episodes “Opioids in Black and White” Pt. 1 and 2 for further context on the current opioid epidemic! https://soundcloud.com/yaleuniversity/opioids-in-black-and-white-pt-ii-imani?in=yaleuniversity/sets/flip-the-script Bios: Paula J. Lum, MD MPH is Professor of Clinical Medicine and Program Director of the UCSF Primary Care Addiction Medicine Fellowship. She has been a faculty member in the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital since 1999. Board certified in internal medicine and addiction medicine, Dr. Lum practices at the place where HIV, addiction, and poverty collide. Her research and clinical activities are grounded in evidence-based, patient-centered care to improve health outcomes and life quality of the urban poor. Her current areas of focus include: (1) HIV and viral hepatitis prevention and treatment in persons who inject drugs, (2) evidence-based interventions in primary care and non-traditional settings for substance use disorders and their complications, and (3) curricular interventions to provide health care professionals with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to offer effective patient-centered care to persons who use drugs. Triveni DeFries, MD, MPH was born and raised in Washington, DC. She studies Human Rights & Latin American Studies as an undergraduate at Columbia. After completing her MPH in Global Health at Columbia University, she moved to San Francisco where she attended UCSF for medical school and internal medicine residency. She worked for the Indian Health Service as a general internist in the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, NM for 2 years. Her professional interests are in transforming and teaching primary care to be trauma-informed and integrate the care of people with substance use disorder. She also spends time working on medical evaluations of people seeking asylum in the US. She enjoys spending time outdoors with daughters!
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