Credit: Aryana Noroozi for CatchLight Local/Black Voice NewsThis street medicine team provides healthcare services to people experiencing homelessness in a Calif. countyIn 2017, Kristen Malaby, a California resident, got injured while working at a warehouse, an accident which created space for her to spend time outside in the community. She began organizing trash cleanups across the region. Through this work, she encountered several people experiencing homelessness, a population that, according to San Bernardino County's 2023 records, totals nearly 4,100 adults and children. Gradually, Malaby began bringing food and clothing to these individuals, which soon caught the attention of Eddie Menacho, a physician assistant and regional medical director at Healthcare in Action. The organization comprises healthcare professionals, community health workers and social workers who provide medical care to unhoused individuals across California. Menacho's team brought on Malaby as a peer navigator, forming Healthcare in Action’s first street medicine team in San Bernardino County in 2022.

As of last year, their street team has served 443 unhoused individuals in the city alone, reports Black Voice News. They provide services ranging from substance abuse and mental health treatment to diagnoses of acute and chronic illnesses, and preventative care services similar to what one would receive at primary care clinics. 

Menacho says the team travels in a van to various locations and treats up to eight patients in four hours, a level of efficiency Menacho says is necessary to do this work. They reach patients wherever they are — be it an encampment, shopping center or parking lot. 

See the dedicated team in action through the lens of Black Voice News’ photojournalist Aryana Noroozi →

Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images via Capital BDollar stores force local grocery stores to close. This woman opened one anyway.When Marquitrice Mangham saw the worsening housing situation in her small, rural town of Webb, Mississippi, a mostly Black community with fewer than 500 people, she knew the problems wouldn't go away. Residents in this town also didn't have a grocery store within a 20-mile radius, making it a food desert. Capital B reports that Mangham, a military veteran and planning expert, who left her hometown after high school in the '90s and returned in 2016 after inheriting her family's farm, decided to use that land to open a 2,500-square-foot neighborhood grocery store in October 2022. The grocery store, Farmacy Marketplace, which operates under Mangham's nonprofit, provides residents with fresh foods and meats sourced from local farmers — a relief from the frozen and processed foods residents had been getting from the town’s Dollar General for over a decade before it closed down.

Mangham is not alone in her fight of tackling food insecurity. 

She is one of many Black entrepreneurs nationwide working to improve health outcomes and food accessibility in rural communities and Black neighborhoods. Hear from Mangham as she shares how her nonprofit helps local farmers grow their businesses and more in her interview with Capital B →

Credit: Cherie Conliffe via Epicenter-NYC

This Black-owned business uses tea to spread Caribbean nutrition to other communitiesDuring Cherie Conliffe's childhood in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, she found it difficult to access her family's traditional West Indian foods outside her home. Despite being surrounded by corner stores filled with junk food and unhealthy snacks, Conliffe rarely heard conversations about her neighborhood being a food desert. However, as she learned about the connection between junk food consumption and health issues like hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder, she was empowered to start her own wellness company in 2021. Her company, CherVitality, specializes in crafting tea blends using herbs and spices.

As a registered dietitian who once took an elective class in nutrition at the University of Connecticut, Conliffe shared with Epicenter-NYC her observations about the gaps in nutrition education during her days in public school. 

“I said, ‘Wow … this is bad, because at a young age, you should learn about what food you should eat,'" she said. “They taught us to say no to drugs, but nothing about nutrition and how the body works.”

Read more to learn about Conliffe's wellness journey and the health benefits of moringa and other traditional teas in Epicenter-NYC →

Highlighting the innovators transforming health outcomes in our communities

For over 15 years, Mica Anders has been helping BIPOC trace their ancestral roots in Minnesota's Twin Cities. “For a lot of people in the African diaspora, history was just taken from them through the slave trade and all of the things that happened after that,” Anders said. “It’s really about telling those stories, uncovering them, and giving people their history back.” → 

Credit: Aaron Nesheim for Sahan Journal