Minority Health Project

National Health Equity Research Webcast

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26th National Health Equity Research Webcast

The archive of the NHERW-Truth to Power:  Building Solidarity for Health and Democracy webinar is available now.

National Health Equity Research Webcast is Sponsored by:

Sponsors for the 26th NHERW: The Gillings School of GLobal Public Health, UNC Research, UNC Center for Health Equity Research, and NC AHEC

Moderator

Leoneda Inge, M.J.
Race and Southern Culture Reporter
North Carolina Public Radio

Leoneda Inge is WUNC’s “Race and Southern Culture Reporter,” the first public radio journalist in the South to hold such a position. She explores modern and historical constructs to tell stories of poverty and wealth, health and food culture, education and racial identity. Leoneda is also co-host of the podcast Tested, allowing for even more in depth storytelling on those topics.

Leoneda’s most recent work of note includes “A Tale of Two North Carolina Rural Sheriffs,” produced in partnership with Independent Lens; a series of reports on “Race, Slavery, Memory & Monuments,” winner of a Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists; and the series “When a Rural North Carolina Clinic Closes,” produced in partnership with the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.

Leoneda is the recipient of several awards, including Gracie awards from the Alliance of Women in Media, the Associated Press (AP) and the Radio, Television, Digital News Association (RTDNA). She is also the winner of an Alfred I. duPont Award from Columbia University for the group series – “Understanding Poverty.” In 2017, Leoneda was named “Journalist of Distinction” by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

Leoneda is a graduate of Florida A&M University and Columbia University, where she earned her Master’s Degree in Journalism as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics. Leoneda traveled to Berlin, Brussels and Prague as a German/American Journalist Exchange Fellow and to Tokyo as a fellow with the Foreign Press Center – Japan (FPCJ).

Panelists

Amanda Maria Navarro, DrPH, MPH
Chief Impact Officer
PolicyLink

Amanda Maria Navarro, Chief Impact Officer at PolicyLink, oversees all strategy, impact, and learning functions across the organization. In this new role, Dr. Navarro focuses on creating greater alignment across programmatic functions and leads in shaping the organization’s strategic direction to maximize impact and drive innovative results-based efforts. She will continue to direct the national Convergence Partnership, as well provide strategic guidance on national philanthropic initiatives. Since joining PolicyLink in 2009, Dr. Navarro has worked closely with philanthropic institutions and government agencies, as well as trained hundreds of diverse leaders and constituencies across the country, on a range of strategies to advance racial and health equity. Before joining PolicyLink, she worked at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coordinating several programmatic and research activities related to racial and ethnic health inequities, social determinants of health, and community health promotion. She holds a Master of Public Health from Boston University and a Doctor of Public Health from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health.

Mia R. Keeys, M.A., BA
Director, Health Equity Policy & Advocacy
American Medical Association

Mia R. Keeys is the Director of Health Equity Policy & Advocacy with the American Medical Association. She formerly served as the Policy Director of Congresswoman Robin Kelly’s (D-IL) Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Health Braintrust, the premier health policy arm of the CBC. In April 2017, The National Minority Quality Forum recognized Mia as a 40 Under 40 Leader in Minority Health. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences features Mia’s children’s book on health equity—titled Cole Blue, Full of Valor—in their national archives, “Visualizing Health Equity.” Mia has been a Kaiser Family Foundation Barbara Jordan Health Policy Scholar; a Fellow for the City of Philadelphia in the Deputy Mayor’s Office for Health and Opportunity; and an HIV/AIDS researcher in South Africa. Mia was also a U.S. Fulbright Fellow to Indonesia, where she lived and worked in various teaching, public health service and research capacities for three years, while simultaneously learning the national language, Bahasa Indonesian.

Anita Chandra, Dr.PH, MPH, BA
Vice President and Director, RAND Social and Economic Well-Being
RAND Corporation

Anita Chandra is vice president and director of RAND Social and Economic Well-Being and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Prior to this role, she served as director of RAND Justice, Infrastructure and Environment and as director of RAND’s Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department. She leads studies on civic well-being and urban planning; community resilience and long-term disaster recovery; effects of military deployment; equity, health in all policies and advancing a culture of health; and child health and development. Throughout her career, Chandra has engaged government and nongovernmental partners to consider cross-sector solutions for improving community well-being and to build more robust systems, implementation and evaluation capacity. This work has taken many forms, including engaging with federal and local government agencies on building systems for emergency preparedness and resilience both in the U.S. and globally; partnering with private sector organizations to develop the science base around child systems; and collaborating with city governments and foundations to reform data systems and measure environmental sustainability, well-being, and civic transformation. Chandra has also partnered with community organizations to conduct broad-scale health and environmental needs assessments, to examine the integration of health and human service systems, and to determine how to address the needs of historically marginalized populations in human service systems. These projects have occurred in partnership with businesses, foundations, and other community organizations. Chandra earned a Dr.PH in population and family health sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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“Thank you for selecting three speakers who were excellent and provided three different and thought provoking perspectives on health disparities. I appreciate the provision of the slides and handouts for the presentations.”

– Viewer (Los Angeles, CA)