By serving people in their community, we build more resilient citizens.
Right To Health is about health prevention. It’s about bringing people together to share, care and alleviate the disparities that come with racial injustice and economic inequality. We are a wholly volunteer group with a vision: to create a national network of healthcare providers, researchers, scientists, healers, community leaders, technologists, educators and anyone else committed to alleviating the ills of racism across all ethnic groups, with particular attention to Black Americans.
Our Guiding Principles
- To clear up perceptions about race and how racism impacts health disparities in the United States. Racism in America is alive and well as most of us know, but many Americans are afraid, intimidated or simply uninformed on how to address and overcome it.
- To encourage dialogue and a shared understanding of the subtleties of racism. Subtle racism impacts people’s lives just as much as overt, racist behavior. On the contrary to what many Americans assume about a person’s access and affluence, racism undermines the health outcome for people of color regardless of their socio-economic status, for ALL ethnicities and identities.
- To drive more research (and to secure its funding) related to racism and health outcome for Americans. Example: A police officer is waiting for you in front of your driveway. He/she is one of several that have been following you after work over the past few weeks. This is not the first time. You didn’t do anything. What are you feeling? The heat coming out of the body. Gripping teeth. Frustration.
- To encourage the education in, and more study of, the roots of white privilege and “white fragility.” What is it like to be unable to hear that racism exists without going on the defensive?
- To drive civic engagement so that we talk about all the above with respect for each other. Just like our American veterans who return to civilian life, this is not an easy party conversation. We are all human, and we all want to be happy, be free and prosper.
Let’s do this together.
Leslie
Gregory
Leslie Gregory, Founder
A certified Physician Assistant (PA-C), navy veteran, and mother of two, Leslie is a longtime Portlander and social justice activist focused on healing those affected by everyday racism. She believes in the importance of taking a dynamic approach to teaching racial justice through health practices.
Leslie is an experienced antiracist facilitator and conflict facilitation mediator. She writes and conducts research on the health impacts of racism for ALL Americans with a clinical and public health lens, accessing the humanistic and preventive approach. She encourages people to use empathy, introspection and intention around interpersonal and sociopolitical engagement.
Her Words
This is the work of my heart, this seeking of a non-violent way forward. To create a legacy of unstoppable change — to manifest a future for my children, and their children’s children, where our collective clear eyes can see that race is just a construct. But where we never forget that racism is very real, and that the strong medicine of racial justice is always needed.
This personal decade+long quest — informed by a pioneering maternal spirit that fundamentally formed me — still feels late to the game. And it is. Because people are dying as they lay in our very arms. The chasmic loss of too many tens of years of black and brown women losing their men and children to violent racism is an open-wounded generational trauma that is a medical crises. An aching, bleeding injury that has been cut deeper through the compounding loss and starkly revealed inequities inherent to this global pandemic. And we must act to interrupt this public health crisis, together, with urgency.
We cannot move with the strength and speed required, without pulling together. We are all inherently invested as everything is connected. If one of us is marginalized, then we are all diminished. And it starts at the local level, by building more resilient citizens, one person at a time. By deploying care in the form of a mobile health unit in neighborhood communities of color that have deep and growing needs. By asking each of us — that can become all of us — to step into civic engagement and mitigate the root-cause issues that signal and perpetuate the chronic disease of racial injustice and economic inequality.
The macro is a prism that holds all the micros. And this is how change is born.