• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Donate
Care Share Health Alliance

Care Share Health Alliance

Helping communities coordinate care and other resources for underserved people through collaborative networks and models

  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Our Team
    • Our Board
    • Community Strategists
    • Our Funders
  • Our Work
    • Equity+ Network
    • NCCOMeT
    • NC Get Covered
    • Podcast
    • Community Engagement
    • Consulting
    • Internships
    • Past Contracts
  • Events
  • Contact
  • News

Search Care Share Health Alliance

Contact Care Share Health Alliance

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Work With Us

Name(Required)
I want to work with Care Share on:(Required)

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

nc bipoc leaders

NC’s BIPOC Leaders: Rev. Dr. Dawn Baldwin Gibson at Peletah Ministries

Dec 2, 2022
Rev. Dr. Dawn Baldwin Gibson still remembers when she was only four years old sitting at a nurse’s station in the hospital, while her mother was visiting with Gibson’s father, […]

NC’s BIPOC Leaders: Rev. Dr. Dawn Baldwin Gibson at Peletah Ministries

December 2, 2022 by Erin Storie

Rev. Dr. Dawn Baldwin Gibson still remembers when she was only four years old sitting at a nurse’s station in the hospital, while her mother was visiting with Gibson’s father, who was dying of pancreatic cancer.

“So much of the work that I do around health equity comes from that very early knowledge of how important healthcare access is.” Says Gibson.

Her father had been with DuPont in Wilmington, NC  for many years, but when he got too sick to work, he was fired, and with that lost his health insurance. He died within months of his diagnosis, at just twenty-nine years old.

Gibson believes her father did not receive the kind of care he should have to help fight his disease.

“They said it was the flu. I don’t know that they really even took it really seriously,” she says.

It was a stark contrast to the care received by her mother, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer years later in the 90s, and had access to health insurance.

“She had the ability to get that good care. And so now she’s been cancer free for 20 plus years,” says Gibson. “I think that those are the early memories that stay with you, of how important healthcare is, how important early detection is, all of those things. All of those memories still remain with me.”

Gibson has gone on to use those memories to inform the work in the organizations she’s founded with her husband, Pastor Anthony Gibson: Peletah Ministries, Peletah Institute for Building Resilient Communities, and Peletah Academic Center for Excellence, all located in New Bern, North Carolina.

“New Bern is as much home as home can be for me,” she says. It’s where her mother’s family is from, and Pamlico County where she and her mother settled after her mother worked on master’s degree at then Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.

“We actually live on the farm that my grandfather purchased after his service in World War I. So my grandfather was born in 1891, and my mom is one of the folks that are still walking around who can say that her grandparents were actually enslaved.”

Although Gibson was born many years after her great-grandparents had passed away, she still heard stories about their experiences from her grandparents.

“The stories that my grandfather and my grandmother shared – they were just so impactful. The house that my mother lives in, my great-grandmother lived in that house. So there are these very significant connections that we have to the history of the land and the history of the community in which we live.”

As Gibson grew up, she went on to attain her BA in Liberal Studies from Shaw University, where her parents met.  She continued her education at East Carolina University, where she received an MA in English, and later started working on a doctorate in higher education administration at George Washington University.

“And halfway through my program, I said, you know what? I think I want to be a Christian counselor.” So Gibson took the unusual step of changing her doctorate, and completed her PhD at Christian Leadership University in Christian counseling. There, her focus was on trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in children of color.

She shares that part of what influenced her to make such a major change had to do with a tragic experience she had while working as an instructor at Lenoir Community College, where one of her students was killed in what she describes as, “just a senseless act of violence”,

“I really felt like there were things that I wanted to give my time to, and that administration in that sense might not be where my passion was,” she recalls. “I think that particular situation of violence really began to change my focus.”

Gibson also credits another, this time positive, experience with changing the trajectory of her work. At the time, she was working as a Community Response Coordinator with Easter Seals UCP, which sent her to a conference where one of the speakers was Dr. Vincent J. Felitti.

Felitti originated the research showing certain traumatic experiences and environments in early life, known as Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs) can have lasting, negative effects on a person’s health, well-being, and life opportunities, such as education and job potential.

Gibson – who admits she had attended the conference essentially because that’s just where her job sent her – recalls standing against the back wall of the packed ballroom where Dr. Felitti spoke, “That day, it changed my life and it changed the focus of my work in a way I could never have anticipated.”

The extensive work Dr. Gibson now helps lead at Peletah Ministries is sensitive to trauma in all areas. “Peletah is a Hebrew word for great deliverance,” she explains,” It’s holistic; not in just one area, it’s in every part of your life.“

This also involves early childhood intervention, through the Peletah Academic Center for Excellence, where Dr. Gibson, who has over 25 years of teaching experience, serves as Superintendent. PACE  is a culturally competent, trauma-informed, grief-sensitive Pre-K-12 school that provides both academic and social-emotional learning, as well as wraparound services for students’ families, such as access to a social worker and case managers if additional support is needed.

“I was always really interested in this area of education and how children, especially children of color, show up in classrooms, and the importance of education, the importance of the community, and the importance of these wraparound services,” says Gibson, “My Master’s degree concentration was technical and professional communications, but I did my thesis work around culturally responsive pedagogy as it relates to African American males as a learning discourse community.”

At P.A.C.E. Mondays through Wednesdays are strict academic days, Thursdays are dedicated to health and wellness and Fridays to place-based education.

“It is really about giving our scholars opportunities to create, develop, and thrive, on these health and wellness days,” Gibson says. “We have a dietician, we have a social worker, we have a clinician, and they are all doing different projects on Thursdays and Fridays for our scholars.”

As part of her work as Executive Pastor at Peletah Ministries, Dr. Gibson has also written a trauma-informed worship for her church, part of which includes keeping worship services private. Often, people say they can’t find Peletah’s church services aired on social media, but Gibson says that’s intentional. She makes a comparison to HIPAA, a law healthcare providers must follow to protect patients’ privacy when receiving medical services:

“Is there not a spiritual HIPAA, that we have an obligation to protect people’s information unless it’s going to hurt them or hurt someone else?” Gibson asks. She talks about “toxic resiliency”, where individuals, especially in the Black community, are taught “what goes on in the house stays in the house”, and to put on a smile in public regardless of what they’re been through, or are going through.

Gibson also references Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, a theory that the experience of slavery in the United States and the continued discrimination and oppression endured by Black Americans creates intergenerational psychological trauma.

“So much of the work for my doctorate I did around post-traumatic slave syndrome,” she says, “When we think about trauma and its impact – the brain is constantly either in this fight, flight or freeze posture, then you see high blood pressure, you see more incidents of heart palpitations and heart problems and diabetes. All of that is impacted by issues of underlying and ongoing trauma and toxic stress. Then you add in these different areas of poverty and the lack of health access. All of these are compounding factors that when people show up in a worship setting, they bring all that with them.”

Peletah also connects ministry with mental health services. “We’ve prayed for people at the altar and still made a referral to Crossroads psychiatric care facility,” says Gibson, “We’ve said ‘there are some other things that are going on here and we need to help you connect to a clinician.’”

Gibson is intimately familiar with how important access to mental health services is. In 2016, she suffered a tragic miscarriage at five months into her pregnancy with her daughter, Hannah Elizabeth. Her loss was only amplified by the treatment she received when she sought medical care.

During her pregnancy, Gibson suffered from uterine fibroids, which are more likely to occur in Black women like herself. The fibroids were so severe that at 5 months pregnant, Gibson’s abdominal circumference measured the same as if she had been nine months. Her daughter was literally being pushed out by the fibroids, causing Gibson to go into premature labor.

However, when she went for help at the ER, she was discharged while still in active labor, although she didn’t know it.  Later that night she was rushed back to the hospital by paramedics after she had given birth to her daughter at home.

“Hannah died probably about 45 minutes after her birth.”  Remembers Gibson, “I had a vaginal birth and they sent me home within an hour.”

She and her husband went home that morning and planned Hannah’s burial. Two weeks later Gibson attempted suicide.

Thankfully, she survived and was able to receive mental health services to help her deal with her loss at Crossroads Psychiatric Care Facility in New Bern, the same organization where she will now refer members of her congregation.

“That is the reason why I am probably one of their biggest advocates,” she says, “ Because I understand that when your serotonin level is off, it is off.”

She also describes the hesitancy many people in her community have toward addressing mental health issues, as opposed to seeking other healthcare services, “When my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, people said, ‘you gotta get over to the Leo Jenkins Cancer Center in Greenville.’ We actively did it. But when people talk about mental health struggles, that something chemically is happening in the brain, we kind of, well – we can’t do that.”

That mindset, and Gibson’s own experience, has helped inform  Peletah’s SHELL program, which helps other African American clergy in eastern North Carolina access culturally appropriate mental health counseling. It was developed by Gibson and her husband, Anthony – who has extensive experience in the mental health field – as a response to the emotional toll the COVID-19 pandemic was taking on pastors and lay leaders in Black churches.

“We are serious about changing how our communities have thought about mental health services.” She says. “We’re continuing to do that work because of the impact that Covid has had on our communities, on our mental health, on our ability to process effectively what grief is, what loss is. It is something that is going to be with us for decades, and we are going to have to really look at how this is impacting our health and our wellbeing.”

The Peletah Institute, where Dr. Gibson serves as Executive Director, could be considered something of an expert on how to support communities through the effects of COVID-19. In fact, in the beginning days of the pandemic, they were in the very unique position of actually knowing what to do.

While institutions from the federal government to local clinics were struggling with how to reach everyday Americans with accurate information and, eventually, the vaccine, Peletah utilized a framework and network of connections they’d had in place from shortly after their church had opened, which happened to be just six weeks before hurricane Irene hit North Carolina.

“So very quickly we were doing disaster work,” Gibson recalls, “We were going around after Hurricane Irene and we saw all of this need. And what we now say is that whatever is in the community at the time of the disaster is only amplified by the disaster.”

In response, Gibson says they put together what they call their own “FEMAA” approach to help communities be resilient after disaster. Peletah Institute’s version of FEMAA stands for Food Access, Educational Recovery, Mental Health Support Resources, Affordable Health Care and Affordable Housing.

“And in the meantime, we ended up connecting with 300 plus churches across eastern North Carolina; that’s now grown above 500 churches that we’ve connected with so that when things are happening, we can get resources and information to them.”

“When Covid happened, we just did the same thing. We started up with those same churches just like it was a disaster; because it really was.”

She recalls during hurricane Florence, her community didn’t have internet access for weeks, so they relied on free conference call phone numbers to spread needed information.

“When Covid happened and people needed information, we just went back to those free conference calls. But the thing that we were able to do was that everybody had gotten these phones where they could see Facebook.”

So Peletah partnered with their local hospital to host “Vaccine 101” Facebook Lives.

“The first one we did was with State Health Director Betsy Tilson and some of the staff at the NC Department of Health and Human Services. They said, well, you get a hundred or 200 people to come on, and that will be great.”

But 200 people didn’t come – 12,000 did. Eventually, Gibson says, they ended up reaching hundreds of thousands of people through Facebook and other social media platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok.

Some of the platforms were not familiar to Gibson, but she put her trust in her staff to figure them out. “The staff just did such an amazing job,” she says. “There were so many different things they kept learning how to do and how to develop to reach different populations. It was all about making sure that people were getting factual information, and so we were really fortunate to continue to expand in that way.”

Peletah’s work providing accurate information and access to vaccines for African American seniors in their community even earned a shout-out from Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy,  as part of a White House COVID-19 Press Briefing in 2021.

“I still don’t know how it happened.” Gibson says, as no one had informed her that her organization would be mentioned by the Surgeon General, “But what we realized was that was the way to connect to people and make sure they were getting information.”

So, what was it that made Peletah so effective when so many other organizations struggled at the time? Gibson credits their success in both disaster relief and addressing COVID-19 to the fact Peletah Institute’s work is a direct response to the needs expressed by her community.

“It’s something about being in community, not assuming, not hearing part of what I want to hear, but hearing the whole matter,” Gibson explains. She describes a call she had with a mentor, who helped her understand the importance of community voice.

“One time I called her and I said, ‘we need to make all these changes and the people, they need this, this, this, this, this.’” The mentor allowed Gibson to say her piece, and then asked, “But what did the people say?”

“She said, ‘the wisdom is in the room’.” Gibson recalls, “And now I’ve kind of expanded what she taught me and say, the wisdom is in the community.”

Pelatah’s approach is not to assume what a community needs, but instead, Gibson explains, “We let them tell us what they need, and then figure out how we partner to support the infrastructure being built strong in this community.”

“We don’t need little Peletahs everywhere.” She says, “We need the people who have always been doing the work to be supported in a way where they can get the resources, they can get the funding, they can get the opportunities that they need for the communities where they’ve been doing this all along.”

That work is done partly through the Eastern North Carolina Regional Church and Community Resiliency Collaboratives hosted by Peletah, which originated in the  SHELL Program.  SHELL stands for Safety, Hope, Efficacy, Lasting, and Linkage. Specifically, “Lasting, sustainable systems for building resilient communities” and ”Links to community partners.”

As a part of helping create sustainable systems and linking to community partners, Peletah organized a meeting of local pastors to share community needs. “Now we thought we probably have about 25 pastors show up, which was great for a Monday.” Recalls Gibson, “We had 154 show up.”

The attendees were appreciative of the information provided but wanted to communicate directly with governmental organizations that Gibson and her staff were working with. So Peletah brought together those organizations for the first ENC Church and Community Resiliency Collaborative in March of 2022.

As part of the event, a listening session with government officials was held, including the Director of Community Partnerships and Faith-Based partnerships for FEMA, the Director of the NC Office of Recovery and Resiliency, and NC Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Equity and Inclusion.

There was also a “health equity room” where visitors could get COVID-19 vaccines, blood pressure checks, anxiety and depression screenings, and could talk to representatives from Medicaid managed care plan providers. Next door was an “intake room” with other services like housing assistance, clothing for job interviews, Legal Aid, Land Loss Prevention, and social service providers, in addition to 30 vendors sharing their services with the community. They also gave out over 300 boxes of groceries and fresh produce in partnership with Conetoe Family Life Center.

Gibson was expecting to have around 200 attendees, but, again, what was expected to be a relatively small event turned into something much more when nearly 700 people showed up. Due to the overwhelmingly positive response, the Resiliency Collaboratives have become a regular occurrence.

“We have another one coming up,” Gibson shares. The ENC Regional Church and Community Holiday Resiliency Collaborative will take place on Monday, December 12, 2022 at the New Bern Riverfront Convention Center.

“We have more than 80 vendors. We’re excited that the hospital will be doing COVID-19 vaccines. We’ll have ACA open enrollment opportunities,” says Gibson, “All of our Medicaid managed care providers will be on site. We’ll have lots of free health screenings. We’ll have 500 food boxes, and Toys for Tots ( which requires pre-registration.)”

With everything her organization is doing, and all of the roles Dr. Gibson has at Peletah, one wonders how she has time to sleep. However, she says that she makes self-care a priority, both for herself and those she leads.

“Our staff come with a lot of their own knowledge, skills, and education to this work. It is a lot that they carry and it’s a lot that we’re doing. We recognize how important it is, but we also recognize how important it is to get rest for self-care.”

“Self-care is not being selfish,” says Gibson, “It is being mindful of how important it is to care for yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup.”“Let’s refocus from wrong to strong.“

For more information on Peletah’s work, including the upcoming NC Regional Church and Community Holiday Resiliency Collaborative you can visit peletah.org or follow their social media:

https://twitter.com/PeletahMinistry

https://www.instagram.com/peletahministries/

https://www.facebook.com/peletahministries

 

Filed Under: NC BIPOC Leaders Tagged With: nc bipoc leaders

NC’s BIPOC Leaders: Yesenia Cuello, Executive Director at NC FIELD

Sep 30, 2022
Yesenia Cuello may only be 30 years old, but she has a lifetime of experience to inform her work as Executive Director of NC FIELD, a non-profit working with farmworker […]

NC’s BIPOC Leaders: Yesenia Cuello, Executive Director at NC FIELD

September 30, 2022 by Erin Storie

Yesenia Cuello
Yesenia Cuello, Executive Director at NC FIELD

Yesenia Cuello may only be 30 years old, but she has a lifetime of experience to inform her work as Executive Director of NC FIELD, a non-profit working with farmworker youth, families, and H-2A guest workers by utilizing grassroots organizing principles to teach leadership, promote education, health and safety, and facilitate access to opportunities, including internships, certifications, and higher education. 

Cuello was born in California; her mother is originally from Mexico and her father the Dominican Republic. When she was just 5 years old, her mother decided to move Cuello and her siblings to North Carolina, hoping to provide a more peaceful environment for them to grow up in. They eventually settled in the small town of Pink Hill in Lenoir county. 

“I’m pretty sure that making the transition from California to rural Eastern North Carolina was like from one country to another,” Cuello says about her mother’s experience. 

Her father had stayed in California, so Cuello remembers her mother working long hours to support her daughters. The type of work that was available for her – an undocumented immigrant who spoke little English at the time – was in agriculture, specifically tobacco, a labor-intensive crop that poses significant risks to the workers who harvest and process it.

Cuello says that growing up watching her mother leave early in the morning for work and coming back late in the evening made her and her siblings understand the sacrifices she was making for them. So, when Cuello was around 14 years old, she and her 12 and 13-year-old sisters decided they wanted to help their mother out. 

“They would call us “las chicas poderosas” even back in the day,” Cuello recalls the nickname given to the three of them (which is the Spanish title for Power Puff Girls.) Like their cartoon heroes,  “They said that whenever we got together, there was little that we couldn’t accomplish.”

That summer, Cuello and her sisters told their mother they were coming to work with her in the field. They wanted to help pay the bills, and maybe earn some spending money of their own to buy new school supplies. Their mother agreed to take them, which might come as a surprise given the difficult nature of working with tobacco.

“Oftentimes we do receive that question, ‘who would let their child go work in such a dangerous industry?’” says Cuello, “My mom said she looked at us and she was like, ‘these girls, they’ve just never worked a day in their lives. They don’t know what they’re asking, so I’m going to let them come with me one day. They’re going to be out there the entire time with me, and they’re going to see how hard it is, and they’re never going to want to come back.” 

On what their mother had planned to be their one day in the field, Cuello and her sisters woke up very early in the morning to get dressed like any North Carolina teenager would during the summer: in t-shirts, shorts, and flip-fops. 

“We were out there like we were going to a beach,” Cuello recalls, “My mom took one look at us walking out of the room we shared, one behind the other, and said, ‘I don’t know where you think you’re going.’”

“She sent us right back in. She said socks. She said tennis shoes. The most rundown jeans you have. One of those long sleeve thin plaid shirts. Definitely a hat. And we were like, it’s so hot outside!” 

But Cuello’s mother had the right idea. Unbeknownst to her daughters, two of the top dangers of fieldwork are chemical exposure from pesticides and heat stress. Working with tobacco adds the extra risk of Green Tobacco Sickness – also known as “nicotine poisoning” – which can cause nausea and vomiting severe enough to require hospitalization. It also puts workers at a greater risk for heat stroke, which is the leading cause of work-related deaths among farmworkers.

Covering up the way Cuello’s mother instructed her daughters can help reduce the risk of these dangers by providing a barrier between the skin and hazardous chemicals or nicotine.

When Cuello got to the work site, she says no one asked about her or her sisters’ ages. “The gentleman just asked if we had ever done farm work before, and we said yes, even though none of us had really ever worked before. ”

She soon realized how difficult the work she had signed up for was.  “For the first couple weeks I dreamed of tobacco,” she recalls.

She would work in long rows of tobacco where she couldn’t see the beginning or the end. Sometimes Cuello, who is 5’10”, would work with plants taller than herself. To keep an eye on one another, she, her sisters, and her mother would call out to each other or sing songs to keep themselves entertained. Whoever finished first would go back to help the others still working to make sure they all left the field at the same place. Usually, their mother finished first and would go back to help her daughters keep up.

“We knew she was watching out for us, but we also thought: who is watching out for her?” Was part of Cuello’s motivation to continue with field work years after the “one day” her mother had expected. 

At the age of 17, while she was still working in tobacco during the summer, she became one of the founding members of NC FIELD’s Poder Juvenil Campesino (Rural Youth Power) group for children of farmworkers and youth working in the fields. It helped teach her skills for public speaking, the importance of advocacy, and provided health and safety education. In fact, joining the PJC  was the first time Cuello learned about the danger of working with pesticides.

While in the youth group, Cuello also worked on a study with Wake Forest examining Migrant Farmworker Housing.

“The goal was to be able to collect data as to how farmworker housing was having a direct impact on farmworkers’ health.” She explains. During the study she learned more about the structure of farmwork in the US, such as workers who come on H-2A visas and how the migrant stream works. And, through hearing farmworker stories, about the lack of transparency in the industry.

“The youth group played such a huge role in my life,” says Cuello, “ After a few years in the youth group, I’d worked my way to the president.”

From there, she joined NC FIELD’s  Board of Directors, working as the public relations chair for a couple of years before transitioning to hired staff as Program Manager, which included managing the PJC. After three years as Program Manager, she became NC FIELD’s  Executive Director.

“It was a decade’s worth of transition,” she says, “But every step of it led me to where I am today.” 

Some of the work Cuello has been part of has had major impacts on farmworkers all across the country. Through NC FIELD , Cuello worked with Human Rights Watch on a study that informed how the EPA revised Worker Protection Standards in 2015 – the first time since they had been created. The standards were updated to better protect farmworkers and their families from pesticide exposure by increasing the frequency of mandated safety education, which must be provided in the language the worker speaks. The advocacy also resulted in the first-ever minimum age for pesticide handlers in US agriculture. 

“The fact that we were able to be a part of that, and realize that this is the kind of positive change that we can make encouraged us to continue this movement in the right direction,” Cuello recalls. 

Like most organizations, NC FIELD  had its work cut out for them during the COVID-19 pandemic, which in North Carolina began while the farmworker community was still feeling the effects of Hurricane Florence.

“In rural areas, we lack a lot of infrastructure, so a lot of the roads were damaged,” says Cuello, “As if transportation wasn’t already hard, during the hurricane we had to find different ways to get to the families that weren’t able to get out of their homes.”

There was another serious concern for some farmworker families beyond the difficulty of getting out of their homes after the hurricane. Cuello describes walking into one home and, “Seeing a mother who was scared to leave her house because we had a situation where somebody documented that there was an ICE vehicle parked outside of Walmart. So we were running into situations where families were scared to leave their homes to even go to the store. So they were starving in their homes with their families.”

“The things that we saw and that we witnessed were absolutely devastating,” she recalls. 

Then there was a direct transition from the aftermath of Hurricane Florence to the COVID-19 pandemic, which no one was prepared for. 

“We realized that because we are a fairly small nonprofit we have very little room for trial and error, so we have to expand,” Cuello says. 

There was a surprising equalizing effect from the pandemic that allowed NC FIELD and other organizations like it to provide access healthcare and other services for populations like the farmworker community that may have been excluded before.

“The pandemic didn’t exclude anybody,” explains Cuello. “COVID didn’t care if you were documented or undocumented; it didn’t care where you sat in terms of society. It didn’t discriminate at all.”

Through that NC FIELD was able to, “Expand and grow and realize that the only way that we’re going to be able to even create one positive dent in this pandemic is if we work together.”

One way NC FIELD found to work together was by establishing an advisory board made up of organizations involved with the farmworker community, and reaching out directly to local health departments and community health centers.  Gathering partners allowed different organizations to help one another in their missions to serve their community while also avoiding the duplication of services. 

“So NC FIELD could focus on a service gap that exists that nobody else is doing.” Cuello says, “A lot of the work that we’re doing now is making sure that the community has the tools it needs to be able to advocate for themselves as well.”

An example of that work was a challenge from the community that was very familiar to Cuello: finding ways for young people to help provide for their families without having to work in the field. 

Agriculture in NC contributes over $90 billion to our economy. We’re also the country’s top producer of tobacco and sweet potatoes, two crops that bring in over $500 million to the state, and could not be harvested without intensive labor from farmworkers. Despite that, a farmworker’s median salary is $29, 680. Many of our H-2A guest workers earn less than $12,000, which makes them ineligible to receive subsidies to help pay for health insurance through the Health Insurance Marketplace because they don’t earn the minimum amount to qualify.

“We did need to teach people that, yes, take children out of the field,” explains Cuello, “but this is a much larger issue in terms of how much farm workers are making and how much the industry is bringing in. The reality is, as long as extreme poverty and systemic discrimination exist, children will work in agriculture to help their families and have money for school supplies, clothing, technology, and other needs.”

And while NC FIELD  actively campaigns against child labor in agriculture, Cuello says, “Sometimes that child was providing for that family and putting food on that table. So we’re advocating for a child to be at least 18 to work in a tobacco field, but that means that now that child can’t work in agriculture. That means no food is put on the table. So what are you doing to supplement some of that?”

According to Cuello, what NC FIELD  did was develop a sustainable solution for farmworker children and their families:

“With PJC a lot of the work that we do is around internships on a very small scale, with help from Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and Resourceful Communities Creating New Economies Fund, and more recently the Louise Oriole Burevitch Endowment. We’ll create educational internships over the summer; whether that looks like a garden project, or farm worker children going to labor camps with an adult ally to provide occupational health and safety education.”

“That model is our way of being able to supplement some of that income the child would have received, ensure they understand health and safety when they work in fields, and seek to limit the number of children that we have work in agriculture.”

NC FIELD, in collaboration with partners, also hosted an extensive, four-day healthcare access event in Mt. Olive that offered COVID-19 rapid testing and essential health screenings, with the help of Dr. Joseph Cacioppo and Campbell University Community Care Clinic medical students.

“We are based in the heart of agriculture at our office in Duplin County, surrounded by 30 plus farm worker labor camps, and hundreds of field and meat processing workers sustaining their families.” says Cuello, “We were able to screen 606 members from the farmworker community. Even people that had been doing work supporting farmworkers a lot longer than I have said, “We’ve never seen a response like this in the last – I don’t know how many years!”

The event helped NC FIELD not only provide services for the farmworker community but also get a deeper look into how to support them in caring for their long-term health.

“We ran into the issue that now we’ve done the screenings. Now they have a general idea of their health. But we’re realizing that some people are pre-diabetic or have some other health concern, and they want to be able to prioritize their health, but at the same time with the work schedule that farmworkers sometimes have they’re not able to get to clinics. Or transportation is a big issue.”

There are more than 20,000 H2A guest workers in the state between March and November, and over half of them are in eastern North Carolina. It’s estimated there are at least as many seasonal workers, plus family members, so farmworker communities expand to between 40,000-50,000 vulnerable people during that time.

However, despite the large need in the community, and how essential farm work is to North Carolina, these workers who are part of the backbone of our state’s agricultural economy often lack access to basic healthcare

One reason, as Cuello explained, is the difficulty of getting to a healthcare provider during regular clinic hours. Many farmworkers can work from sun-up to sundown, which could mean 6:00am-8:00pm during the summer growing season. Even healthcare facilities that have a large farmworker patient base, such as certain Federally Qualified Community Health Centers, still may not have hours to accommodate that kind of schedule. 

Additionally, even if they are able to get to a provider, farmworkers frequently speak little or no English, so run into a language barrier if no interpreter is available. 

Finally, like the mother afraid to leave her home to get food for herself and her children after Hurricane Florence, many of our country’s 2.5 million undocumented farmworkers fear deportation as a consequence of seeking care at the wrong facility.

With the barriers the community faces, large-scale positive change for its members often has to come as a result of an indiscriminate crisis like the pandemic (where farmworkers were recognized as essential workers, although what protections they received from that is questionable) or an “act of God” like Hurricane Florence. 

In fact, during the hurricane, Cuello remembers that many members of the farmworker community originally could not understand the alert messages they were sent about the storm because they were only in English, until the necessity for emergency messaging to be sent out in Spanish was brought to the attention of state authorities. 

“You know, it did take a hurricane in order for that to happen,” Cuello says, “but we’re glad that it got done.”

Due to many of the same reasons it’s difficult for farmworkers to receive care, people who are not part of the community are often unaware of how it’s been excluded from basic resources. 

This is something that’s not lost on Cuello, “Whenever we do highlight the work and the life of farmworkers, I still receive shocked faces, and realize there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.”

“I oftentimes do tell people that, we’ve been knowing about these problems for a while, but we’re just glad that the rest of the world is catching up with this.” 

As for her leadership advocating for her community, when asked about her leadership style, Cuello first recalls her time working at McDonald’s, “Within the first year I was transitioned into the management position. I don’t necessarily think that I’m a bossy person, but I want to say that I am a good leader in the terms of the fact that I’ve been there and I’ve done this work and I don’t ask anybody to do anything that I wouldn’t expect myself.”

She also brings up the importance of transparency with staff and within the organization, “I maintain the highest regard for full transparency and communication. It’s the only way that this is going to work even amongst us. Our communication is that we remain a hundred percent transparent.”

An example of that transparency is helping ensure staff is set up for long-term success in their careers while working at a small non-profit, “ A lot of the funding that we received throughout the pandemic has been COVID response money” She says, “So even though it supports a lot of our staff as well, they realize that some of the funding is very short term.”

“So whenever we hire staff on, we say,  ‘yes, we’re going to make sure that this is how you arrive, but we’re going to make sure that with the training you receive while you’re here, you’ll be able to take that and implement it somewhere else if funding gets cut off.”

Whether they will eventually move on or not, it’s clear NC FIELD’s staff is dedicated to their work, “The current staff do not make enough for the work that they do. I don’t pay them enough.” Cuello admits, “But they also realize that with the experience they have, they can go somewhere else and make more money. And yet they choose to continue to stay with us.”

Cuello also feels that her experience and background have had a big impact on her leadership. In many ways, it’s a benefit to her work, especially in the sense that, “People are more likely to open the door to me if I look like them.”

However, she has experienced difficulties even within her own community, “I have gotten the feedback of, ‘Yesenia, you’re from the United States. You don’t know what it’s like [to be undocumented].” 

“To be honest, that one sometimes ticks a nerve. I become extremely defensive, but that’s because they don’t realize that even though I am documented, I did grow up within an undocumented background.”

While many people assume that having a child who is a US citizen provides citizenship to the parent as well, that is not the case. Over 4 million American children live with at least one parent who is undocumented.

“It had a huge, huge impact.” Cuello says of her own experience, “I remember that growing up, one of the first things that I kept from people was where my mother was from. Through school, you ask questions like, ‘oh, why doesn’t my mom go on field trips with me?’ ‘Why can’t I do sports?’”

Both parents who are undocumented and their children often have worries that most of us wouldn’t even consider.  “If you don’t feel good, you hop in the car and you go to the doctor. If you need to buy food for your family, you hop in the car and go to the grocery store,” explains Cuello. But it wasn’t the same for her, and isn’t for many in her community,  “For us, you know, if my mom would hop in a car and leave, the possibility that she wouldn’t return was always very present.”

Studies have found having an undocumented parent has significant psychological effects on children. Just like Cuello described, these children face fears of losing their parent to deportation or have the responsibility of hiding their family member’s legal status. They, unsurprisingly, face higher rates of anxiety, depression, fear, attention problems, and rule-breaking behavior than children whose parents are not undocumented.

Still, Cuello allows her experiences to be a learning opportunity. “I made some very interesting friends, in terms of politics and how people think,” she says, “ After I share, and we can have adult, mature conversations, I let them know my mom is ‘undocumented’ – because people oftentimes use the word ‘illegal’ – and now that you know me, how can you look at me and tell me I don’t belong?”

“That is my way of helping people understand that we’re human, and we belong, and we deserve to be able to live long healthy lives.”

To organizations and individuals advocating for the farmworker community, Cuello shares an important piece of advice, “In all of my experience within this field, I’ve learned to definitely celebrate every win.”

“Realize that we’re not out there alone. We are a community and we are making a change in it. I’m very hopeful that with what attention this community has been able to garner within the last few years, we’ll be able to continue to push on this movement for positive change.” 

And, of course, her passion for her community will inform Cuello’s future work, 

“I am very much not only embedded in the community but a part of the community that I support,” she says, “Being able to see that direct impact and realizing that this is something great that we’re doing here, and wanting to see that forward is what has kept me with NC FIELD for as long as it has.”

“And if I can do anything to better the lives of my community and my neighbors and my family, then that’s what I’m going to continue to do.”

To learn more the work of NC FIELD visit: https://www.ncfield.org/

Filed Under: NC BIPOC Leaders, Social Drivers of Health, Uncategorized Tagged With: nc bipoc leaders

Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Community VoicesMaking Change

NEWS

NCDHHS Delays Implementation of the NC Medicaid Managed Care Behavioral Health and I/DD

North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services will delay the implementation of the NC Medicaid Managed Care Behavioral Health and Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities Tailored Plans. The launch was scheduled for […]

Job Opportunity – Virtual Admin Assistant

Position:          Virtual Administrative Assistant  Reports to:      Executive Director   Type:                Part Time   Location:         Virtual  Compensation: $25/hr.   The Virtual Administrative Assistant will work with the Care Share Health Alliance staff […]

Care Share Health Alliance Statement on the Murder of Tyre Nichols

At Care Share Health Alliance we approach this statement with intense sadness for the loss of life of Tyre Nichols and with the deepest sympathy for his family to have […]

Care Share Honors Jan. 16, 2023 as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

“Of all forms of discrimination and inequalities, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.” This quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is often cited by those of us […]

NC’s BIPOC Leaders: Rev. Dr. Dawn Baldwin Gibson at Peletah Ministries

Rev. Dr. Dawn Baldwin Gibson still remembers when she was only four years old sitting at a nurse’s station in the hospital, while her mother was visiting with Gibson’s father, […]

NC’s BIPOC Leaders: Yesenia Cuello, Executive Director at NC FIELD

Yesenia Cuello may only be 30 years old, but she has a lifetime of experience to inform her work as Executive Director of NC FIELD, a non-profit working with farmworker […]

Tailored Plans will be delayed until April 1, 2023

NC DHHS has announced that implementation of the NC Medicaid Managed Care Behavioral Health and Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities (I/DD) Tailored Plans will be delayed until April 1, 2023 instead of December 1, 2022. Tailored […]

Request For Proposal: Independent Auditor

Care Share Health Alliance is seeking a qualified auditing firm to provide accounting services. Specific questions to which we ask your response are listed in Exhibit I.  Please note that […]

Guidance on Preparing for the End of the PHE

Since it began in January 2020, the COVID-19 federal Public Health Emergency (PHE) helped prevent NC Medicaid beneficiaries from losing their health coverage during the pandemic, even if someone’s eligibility […]

About
Newsletter
Equity+ Network
NC Get Covered
NCCOMeT

Contact

Name(Required)
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Care Share Health Alliance does not provide direct medical care.
Copyright © 2023 Care Share Health Alliance · All Rights Reserved · Website by Tomatillo Design Top