Choose Healthy Life: The DFA Black Clergy Action Plan
Since January 2020, COVID-19 has spread throughout the United States and has devastated the Black community. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put members of racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting COVID-19 or experiencing severe illness, regardless of age. Black persons are hospitalized from COVID-19 at a rate approximately 5 times that of non-Hispanic white persons.”
H. Rap Brown, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s once said, “When White America gets a cold, Black America catches pneumonia…” and today local Black communities are at the center of this health crisis.
The Action Plan is based on the DFA Choose Healthy Life Standard – a sustainable, scalable and transferable approach to public health. The highly successful Standard was created and developed by Debra Fraser-Howze, founder of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, to address the AIDS epidemic. It is centered around the Black church – the oldest and most trusted institutions in the Black community. Learn more...
MEET DEBRA FRASER-HOWZE
Ms. Fraser-Howze has been widely recognized for more than three decades of global leadership to communities of color regarding teenage pregnancy, social welfare, and HIV and AIDS. She advised two U.S. Presidents while serving on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS from 1995-2001.
Fraser-Howze was the Vice Chair of the HIV Human Services Planning Council in New York City and chaired the National Institute of Heath’s Public Education Technology Committee. In 2003, she was appointed to the New York City Commission on AIDS and in 2007 to the New York State Governors Health Advisory Council. In 2009, she was the recipient of the National Medical Association’s (NMA) highest honor, Scroll of Merit, and in 2010 she was inducted into the Hunter College Hall of Fame for distinguished achievement.
