2011 AMCHP and Family Voices National Conference ... - HRSA

2011 AMCHP and Family Voices National Conference: Welcome Plenary and
MacQueen Memorial Lecture
02/13/2011 Omni Shoreham, Washington, D.C.
organization, we can look for a different group of stakeholders. We can
actually ask who is it that cares about our problems and who is it that cares
about our solutions? I have found that the corporate world knows the
same thing that my government colleagues know, that it does $300,000 to
save a life of a baby. Even though we know it, sometimes it's hard in the
government sector to turn the curve and do something about it. But the
corporate sector is very, very much want *** to turn that curve because
they don't want to keep putting money into solving a problem and not
solve the problem. So we have an opportunity to look at other
stakeholders in terms of saying do you want to help us solve the problem.
When you look at the amount of money in both the national economy and
the global economy that is spent solving the problems of black women,
women of African descent, whether you're talking Africa, you're talking
Latin America, you're talking the United States or Canada. Wherever we
are, we're spending money because our sons are the ones who are
incarcerated. I think the second largest industry in California is the prison
industry. And the vast majority of men who drive the prison industries are
our sons. When you look at the education industry and you look at all the
money that we spend trying to fix our education system, we're talking
about kids of color. When you look at how we invest that money and who
is actually getting that money, people of color in the United States get less
than 10%. I think it's only 7% of the funding actually goes into people of
color-led organizations. So people outside of that community and those
communities get the bulk of the funding and the bulk of the responsibility
to solve the problem which they cannot solve by themselves. That's why
my challenge to you, and I think my contributions to the field, is for us to
figure out how we can integrate our communities into our bigger system.
And by that I don't mean hiring outreach workers. I don't mean figuring
out more ways to have us to go in and do what we think needs to be done.