Six of our MPH students attended the 2020 CityMatCH Maternal and Child Health Leadership Conference, held September 16-18, online. What follows is a post from one of these attendees.
Tonye Fohsta-Lynch, BA
This year I attended the CityMatCH & MCH Epidemiology Conference with my fellow CEMCH Scholars. Due to COVID-19, this year’s conference was virtual offering both live and prerecorded sessions.
My experience at this year’s meeting was inspiring and affirming. I appreciated the effort of the CityMatCH conference coordinators to make the experience more engaging by having a virtual happy hour with opportunities to play games and have networking breakout rooms to interact with other conference attendees.
Many of the sessions I attended at CityMatCH highlighted the importance of acknowledging the role of race and more specifically racism on health, education, and economic opportunity.
depiction of life in a virtual conference
In a session led by Dr. Darrick Hamilton, he spoke about the importance of recognizing that we will not be able to make change and achieve equity without first dismantling the structures that allow certain groups more power and privilege than other groups. He also spoke about the importance of white people acknowledging their privilege and using it to help uplift communities. We have reached a point in time where it is not enough just to name the names and point fingers.
Through movements such as Black Lives Matter, we have moved to a space of action and most importantly community. Dr. Hamilton offered tangible solutions for ensuring equitable access to resources and opportunities, but I believe the most important is changing existing policies. America is a democracy, meaning a government for the people, by the people. At any point where policies set forth do not meet the needs of all people, we need to use our community to go out and advocate for change.
Tonye Fohsta-Lynch, BA, is a second-year MPH student, concentrating in Maternal & Child Health. She will graduate in December 2020. Her interests include adolescent sexual and reproductive health, health implications of adverse childhood experiences, provision of care for incarcerated youth and advocacy at the intersection of health equity and social justice. In her free time, she enjoys spending time in water, dancing, nurturing her plants, nature walks with her dog, cooking, and doing freestyle rap battles with her partner.
