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Edmonton Charity Races to Raise Money To Fight Systemic Health Inequity | RibbonRougeFoundation.com

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Ribbon Rouge Foundation has worked in Edmonton since its registration in 2013.  It was created  to close the gap in  gender and racial disparities faced by African, Caribbean and Black communities. They do this through storytelling, community engaged arts and meaningful community conversations. At the core of their work is addressing social injustice brought by inequities such as economic disparities, barriers to justice and the peculiar problems faced by Black Canadians. 

In addition to the extensive work they do on mitigating the effect of HIV on black Canadians, their research indicates that ‘poverty, intergenerational conflicts, family and community fragmentation, an overall lack of safe spaces and a need for strengthening community action all lead to problems in equity for Black Canadians’. 

Morenike Olaosebikan, founder of Ribbon Rouge Foundation, came up with a brilliant socially innovative initiative designed to mobilize data and bring meaningful change to Black health equity. Her initiative is  the Black Equity in Alberta Rainforest (B.E.A.R).  Her vision is to create a collaborative environment where knowledge, resources and connections are evenly distributed to close these gaps. B.E.A.R was informed by over three years of listening deeply to people of African descent across Alberta.  B.E.A.R  looks to gather data to cover gaps for Black Canadians, empower people living with HIV, create awareness and provide information on sexual health and justice for black youths as it relates to mental health.

She joins Tee on Friday the 15th of January 2020 to talk about her new initiative B.E.A.R and her plans for 2021.

The report below sheds more light on the research facilitated by the Ribbon Rouge Foundation. It has been published with the express permission of the authors: Morenike Olaosebikan and the Ribbon Rouge Foundation.

Health inequity is rooted in a number of systemic issues, especially economic  disparities, and barriers to justice, employment, civic leadership, academia and, of course healthcare. Many of these compounding factors disproportionately affect Black people and communities. Health determinants which compromise equity include, but are not limited to, a lack of remunerative, meaningful employment, income inequality and poverty, housing discrimination, lack of access to quality, nutrition, and chronic stress due to structural anti-Black racism. By the time one looks at the area of care alone, the impact on overall health inequity for Black populations is clear, including:

  • Diminished wellness and health, and increased comorbidities
  • Lack of access to care
  • Lack of quality care
  • Medical negligence and/or diminishment of symptoms
  • Delayed care
  • And more

At present, most of these factors and their cumulative influence on each other remain understudied.

Enough is Enough: Fast Facts Show the Urgency in Alberta & Canada

  • Black youth are overrepresented in the child welfare system
  • Black high school completion rates are unknown in Alberta, and lower than non-Blacks in Ontario
  • Black male students are least likely to enroll in college & university
  • There is no data on Black deaths from the opioid crisis and yet Black people continue to die due to it
  • Mental health services remain inaccessible or unsafe for Black populations leading to poor mental health overall
  • Black Canadians have a 3.4x higher incarceration rate than the overall population
  • 16% of all hate crimes are anti-Black in nature
  • Less than 1 in 2 Black Canadians find police treat people fairly
  • 71% of Black people who felt they have been treated unfairly by the criminal justice system believe it is because they are Black
  • Unemployment is 73% higher among Black Canadians who also earn 75.6 cents for every dollar a non-racialized worker earns when employed. This gap increases when factored with gender, education, religion and/or ability.
  • Black children face food insecurity 2.7x more often, live in low income 3.5x more often, and are both recent immigrants and low income 4.7x more often than non-Black populations.
  • 33% of Black workers have dealt with overt racism in the workplace
  • Black trauma in the justice system is affected by racial profiling practices, police brutality, a lack of low-cost, high competency legal representation, a lack of funding for inmate reintegration, and a lack of restorative forms of justice.
  • Black economic disparity is affected by limited access to start-up capital, higher debt ratios and interest rates, an overall lack of financial literacy programs and tech education in community, a lack of upward employment mobility and a host of negative stereotypes associated with Black businesses.

Ribbon Rouge Foundation Listened…

At Ribbon Rouge, over a period of two years (2017-2019), we took our existing knowledge of these issues to the next level by doing deep community listening. The local context in Alberta helped us to get to the heart of how some of these social issues affect health equity at home. We learned and affirmed that right here and right now poverty, intergenerational conflicts, family and community fragmentation, an overall lack of safe spaces and a need for strengthening community action all lead to problems in health equity for Black Canadians. These issues, however, are not being properly addressed by existing community institutions due to gaps in communication, the redundancy of services, competition in service delivery and a lack of opportunities for meaningful collaboration. 

Since many of the needs of Black Canadians are not being adequately met by the organizations designed to serve them, Ribbon Rouge created a Leadership Caucus which determined some of the most important factors for meeting those needs and achieving health equity. With 60 stakeholder organizations and people meeting over a period of 18 months, the top interventions were named as follows:

  • To enable disaggregated race-based data and enable Black-led governance/ have authority over research and data on these issues
  • To have mediation between Black people and the health and justice systems
  • To develop an intentional community of Black people dedicated to health equity in Alberta
  • To facilitate positive systems change for Black people living with HIV
  • To develop the capacity of Black communities’ enterprises, entrepreneurship, and meaningful employment

This is how the vision for the Black Equity in Alberta Rainforest (B.E.A.R) was born.

What is B.E.A.R?

The B.E.A.R is a holistic socially-innovative community initiative designed to mobilize data and research to bring meaningful change in Black health equity. The vision is to create a collaborative environment where knowledge, resources and connections are shared to close racial gaps. 

Why a Rainforest?

Rainforests are lush, interconnected ecosystems which flourish in their exquisite diversity. Rainforests have a synergy that exists in the whole that cannot be found in their parts alone. They are also fluid and fluctuating spaces and the B.E.A.R will be no exception. As facets within the system move and take shape, concrete data collection will be a regular part of operations to ensure that the developing population of the B.E.A.R system continues to be sustained by it. 

The Vision

It is clear that we cannot operate without first understanding the truth of what Black Canadians are facing. B.E.A.R offers us the multidisciplinary initiative that we need to generate critical knowledge about the effects of anti-Black racism on health equity. From this work, a field guide including 13 interdisciplinary reports) will be produced for existing organizations in Alberta to engage with solutions for capacity-building in the areas of Black Canadians’

  • Relevant dis-aggregated Black data governance
  • Employment
  • Culture
  • Justice
  • Civic engagement and, of course,
  • Health

These reports will be produced in tandem with professors and graduate interns at accredited post-secondary institutions where relationships have already been established. A total of  7 professors/ content experts and 14 interns will be involved in the production of these crucial reports. These reports will be translated into multimedia documents such as infographics, posters, digital communications as well as various creative responses such as paintings, theatrical interactions, poetry, podcasts, stories, podcasts and more. Many of these formats will be produced at monthly ArtSpaces where Rainforest members can share the stories of their lived experiences, and further group cohesion and action planning. Our stories and concrete information must be made accessible to as many people as possible and will be presented at conferences, festivals, and other key community events. Finally, a strategic media communications plan will propel the truths about racial health inequity (and the Rainforest working to eradicate it) to the fore.

As a targeted set of outcomes during the production of these deliverables, four foundational parts of this project include:

  • Relationship development
    • This is the heart of the “Rainforest” – an ecosystem approach that connects people, communities, businesses, leadership and organizers with key stakeholders.
  • Asset-based community development
    • The goal of any shared system would be to elevate all actors within it, leveraging the existing strengths and gifts within the community to work coherently towards the same goals while minimizing waste.
  • Social innovation lab
    • There are custom tech requirements for data storage, analyses and governance in bringing B.E.A.R to life that will lead to the creation of an information portal, asset maps, skill inventories and job banks that are accessible to all members of the ecosystem.
    • The maps also expose the gaps. This will result in a feed-forward process of showing where community services fall short of what is needed for racial health equity and what solutions can further be brought forward.
  • Knowledge synthesis
    • The more knowledge our system produces, the more targeted our approaches become. 

Call to Action

This project is built for collaboration and is based on collaboration.  They cannot do it without your help. 

To find out more and to donate: https://www.ribbonrouge.com/take-action/

 

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