The Bannister Awards 2021 – Rhode Island monthly

There is no one like her: Christiana Carteaux Bannister, born in 1819 to a black and indigenous family in North Kingstown, changed the course of history. She was active in the Underground Railroad, she fought for social justice amidst the racism of the reconstruction era, she was a voice for the elderly and worked all the time as a hair doctor bringing out the beauty in all people. She moved the world forward, and her life has been a blessing to her community and her painter husband, Edward Mitchell Bannister, whom she sponsored and who famously said, “Without her, I would be nothing.”

No, there is no one like Christiana Carteaux Bannister. But there is also nobody like Dr. Taneisha Wilson. And Marcy Reyes. And Ray Rickman. And Tina Pedersen. Dr. Omar Bah. And Kilah Walters-Clinton. Chosen by a group of dedicated local judges, these individuals work to eradicate inequalities while celebrating the beauty of our differences. Join us as we follow her path to a just future for all Rhode Islanders.

Judge: Jamie Hull, communications and marketing executive, Rhode Island Foundation; Rose Jones, vice president of foreign affairs, YMCA of Greater Providence; Ray Nuñez, community director of Nuñez Co .; Kannyaka Pouk, Program Director, Center of Southeast Asians

Contributors: Edelinda Baptista and Ashlyn Messier

Dr. Taneisha Wilson. Photography of Dee Speaks.

Dr. Taneisha Wilson

Doctor working for an anti-racist emergency room

During her stint at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, Dr. Taneisha Wilson that she was only one of two black women in the program. So she started recruiting more people of color while trying to “make sure the environment supports her life experience,” she says.

But there was room for improvement in all areas of the emergency department, so Wilson – along with Hannah Barber-Doucet and other colleagues – developed the innovative “Discussing Anti-Rassism and Equity in Emergency Medicine” (DARE-EM) curriculum for healthcare providers who Emphasizes an anti-racist culture in the emergency room.

According to a colleague Wilson nominated for the Bannister Awards, “These issues are difficult to discuss, especially after the year we had in the emergency room during the pandemic, but she does it with grace and compassion.”

The twelve-month DARE-EM curriculum challenges Brown Emergency Medicine and Brown Physicians nurses to examine the legacy of structural racism in medicine and evaluate their own prejudices while creating goals for active anti-racist practice. Participants who volunteer have access to lectures, reading materials, patient-provider simulations, and a quarterly book club. DARE-EM also uses internal ED data to investigate and correct inequalities in care.

“As doctors, nurses, or caregivers, we don’t want to be the reason someone has a bad day,” said Wilson, who is also an assistant professor at Brown. “Our jobs are tough enough. It’s easy to forget that we’re not just gears in a machine. We treat people. “

For as long as she can remember, Wilson wanted to be a caregiver. According to family tradition, it all started when she stuck a kernel of corn in her ear when she was two years old. Your pediatrician removed it quickly and painlessly.

“It’s an old, mundane thing,” says Wilson, “but I just wanted to do for others what this doctor did for me.”

Wilson wasn’t into pediatrics, but she turned to treatment and research areas where she could provide real relief to her patients. At the University of Connecticut Medical School, she studied sickle cell anemia, a rare disease characterized by pain crises that may require hospitalization.

“It’s a chronic disease that mostly affects people of color, and they use opioids to treat their disease,” she says, “so there is explicit and implicit bias. We try to alleviate this bias because I think these are the patients who sometimes fall short when seeking care. “

Wilson says hospitals serving large black populations, including New York City and Baltimore, are better at adhering to sickle cell care guidelines – intravenous pain medication within sixty minutes, Wilson says – while Rhode Island lags behind them.

Earlier this year she received a $ 300,000 grant that could strengthen those guidelines in places like Rhode Island. Wilson is developing a way for providers to assess patients on triage chairs, which could speed the necessary treatment, prevent hospitalization, and ultimately restore confidence to patients in severe pain – “They feel like they’re dying,” says Wilson – but not always be treated that way.

If anyone can change that, the Bannister judges agreed, it would be Wilson.

Marcy Reyes. Photography of Dee Speaks.

Marcy Reyes

Champion for financial literacy in Communities of Color

There’s a picture of Marcy Reyes graduating from kindergarten, all dressed for a performance with numbers on her tiny hat and dress. Her role in the play predicted a future that would help city kids like her keep their finances on their sleeves – and with pride.

“We didn’t talk about money at all when we were kids,” says Reyes, who grew up in Providence and graduated from Central High School. “There was an unspoken dynamic in our household.”

Attributing her father to her strong work ethic, Reyes recalls her first job at age 14 when she was doing a summer program in town for $ 4 an hour.

“My mom would take it and give me $ 20,” she says of her weekly wage. “But there was no communication about the budget or anything. All of those things were pretty absent, so as a young adult I made pretty stupid financial decisions. “

Reyes, who had a daughter at the age of twenty, describes how she got a settlement payment and lost the money on travel and clothing, and at that moment an idea occurs to her: she should create an exercise for her students from the FLY initiative, to see how much money she would have now if she had used those dollars back then.

In his three-year tenure, Reyes’ nonprofit Finance Literacy Youth [FLY] Initiative, has helped more than 700 students in the urban core of Rhode Island with workshops and seminars that walk students through the basics of personal finance, including paying taxes, managing loans, saving for college, and investing. Experiential learning is an important part; For example, FLY students receive gift vouchers to open their own investment account.

“I view personal finance as a social justice issue. If you don’t have access, that’s an equity problem, ”says Reyes, who appears as director of the Individual segment of Blue Cross Blue Shield and teaches at Rhode Island College, her alma mater where she took her first personal finance course – the class that taught them to save for their master. “It’s unfair that East Greenwich and these other schools have personal financial magnets and are instant wealthy people, and we have our kids still figuring out how to open checking accounts.”

Reyes, the only teacher on the program, says she has secured private funding to expand her nonprofit and hire more teachers to lead workshops and semester-long courses in city high schools. She says she is committed to also hiring educators who look like her students so they can envision a financially savvy future.

“It wasn’t until I got my hands on the right information that I had the opportunity to end this cycle,” she says. “The only way to give something back to the universe, if you will, is to make sure other people have it too.” Flyinitiative.org