Woke WOC Docs

It's been a minute since we published an episode!

In this episode, we have an intimate conversation with Bernie about her decision to not go to residency after medical school to lead the Freedom Community Clinic. Facilitated by Nicole and questions from the audience, Bernie talks more about her journey of coming to that decision while in medical school, her thoughts on the limitations of the medical system and changing from within, and why we need to imagine and create new systems like the Freedom Community Clinic to provide the healing and care that our communities deserve.

4:00 An overview of Bernie's journey to not go to residency and lead Freedom Community Clinic in Oakland

20:00 On the emotional journey and hardship of deciding to not go to residency

24:00 On Bernie's thoughts and pushback on being our "ancestors' wildest dreams"

26:30 On what Bernie will use her MD for/how medical school was valuable for her life journey

28:50 On why we deserve to lead and create our own systems when the majority of hospital CEOs don't even have MDs lol

29:50 On why Bernie cannot be part of DEI recruitment efforts for medical school

35:00 Conversation between Nicole and Bernie on what is healing; influential books, people, habits; and why institutions don't wanna see you rested and healed

45:30 On building community relationships and Freedom Community Clinic while in medical school

50:20 On patient relationships at Freedom Community Clinic vs. the hospital

51:20 How leading Freedom Community Clinic has changed Bernie's perception of healing and community

53:40 Nicole and Bernie's advice on pursuing creativity while in medicine

56:30 Bernie's future plans and dreams

1:00:32 Bernie's thoughts on self-mentorship

1:05:00 Q&A on mentors outside of medicine, why we cannot let these institutions silence us, and tapping into our aliveness

Recorded on Sept 30, 2021

2020 was a hot mess. Phew. Y'all didn't need us to say it.

Together, we talk more together about the lessons we learned from our third year of medical school/research year and our wellness strategies in the midst of this crazy year while working in the hospital daily and doing research.

We delve deeper into what surprised us about the field of medicine, how we've been able to take care of patients through drawing on our unique life experiences/backgrounds/strengths, and how we've maintained a sense of groundedness and community in the midst of so much individual and collective trauma.

Lots to look forward to in 2021 and we're so thankful to y'all for being on this journey with us! Stay woke y'all.

We are so excited to interview beloved community healer and warrior Chanel Durley, founder of 33rd and RiSING, a wellness space that provides healing for Black, Indigenous, and POC communities in the Bay Area and beyond.

In this episode, we talk about Chanel’s experiences with Crohn’s in which she experienced racism and deep injustice and inequity in multiple encounters and 11 hospitalizations in the medical system. We also converse more about the toxicity of grind mentality and its roots in trauma and how her experiences as an intuitive healer came into her founding of 33rd & RiSING.

Takeaways we love:

-Who told us to stop believing in the wisdom of our bodies?

-Going into doctor’s visits as interviews and seeing yourself as deserving of building your healthcare team. “These are my goals; this is the life I want to live: Are you with me?”

-“You don’t validate me. I validate me.”

-How are you unwinding? How are you unplugging from the matrix?

For more info about Chanel and 33rd & RiSING:

https://www.33rising.com/

https://www.instagram.com/33rdandrising/

We are hellaaaaaa hype to talk with Black Organizing Project, the amazing Black member-led community organization working for racial, social, and economic justice through grassroots organizing and community-building in Oakland, California.

The Black Organizing Project (BOP) led the victory for Oakland to implement police-free schools in June 2020, a resolution that calls for moving the safety program to the equity/behavioral health departments and investing more money in mental health and special education staff, plus restorative justice programs.

Together, we talk about the mission of BOP and why policing in schools significantly affects the emotional, mental, and physical health of Black students. We hear more about their amazing nearly decade long advocacy for police-free schools in Oakland and their recent victories with The People’s Plan, Black Sanctuary Pledge, and the George Floyd Resolution. In addition, we talk more about how their visions for a police-free world is rooted in personal and collective transformation.

We celebrate with BOP on dissolving an entire police department in Oakland public schools as an all Black organization! Support them y'all and uplift their work!!! Police do not equal safety and GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING WORKS!

Black Organizing Project: http://blackorganizingproject.org/

KQED News “After Abolishing School Police, Oakland Wants to Reimagine Safety in Education”: https://www.kqed.org/news/11826192/after-abolishing-school-police-oakland-wants-to-reimagine-safety-in-education

Jasmine Williams is the Development and Communication Manager at Black Organizing Project. She hopes to use her writing to shift the negative narrative of Black people repeated in mainstream media and to ensure that Black people have a platform to uplift their voices and experiences. She is excited about reaffirming and celebrating the beauty of Blackness with BOP through storytelling, community building and organizing.

Des Mims is a Mother, Community Activist & Member of Black Organizing Projects Communication team, who has dedicated herself to the work of abolishing school police to disrupt the school to prison pipeline and provide students and community with transformative justice.

For this episode, we are hella excited to interview our beautiful friends Noor Chadha and Aminta Kouyate, medical and graduate students at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and founding team members of the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine.

Together, we talk more with Noor and Aminta about their work demanding and advocating for an anti-racist medicine through their research and student activist efforts. We talk with Noor and Bernie about their recent public launch of their inaugural "Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice" (co-authored by Noor, Bernie, Maddy Kane, and Brenly Rowland). We also talk with Aminta about leading a rally and protest through the White Coats 4 Black Lives (WC4BL) Berkeley chapter on demanding that racism be recognized as a public health issue. In addition, we learn more about their work being part of the founding team of the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine and their philosophy on being a student/community activist alongside the many responsibilities that come with being a student and human!

Read the report at the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine website: www.instituteforhealingandjustice.org

WC4BL Berkeley on Instagram: @wc4bl_berkeley

Noor Chadha is a 2nd year med student at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program who strives to integrate compassion, justice, and joy throughout her life and medical career. She is a co-author of Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice. Her master's work focuses on youth civic engagement and health. Noor identifies as Sikh, as Punjabi American, as a daughter of Indian immigrants, as a sister, and as a dancer - she performed competitive Bhangra for several years, and who knows, maybe you'll see her make a comeback soon!

Aminta Kouyate is a proud Bay native. Born in Oakland, she is dedicated to eradicating the systems of oppression that create the health disparities for marginalized communities. As a medical student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical program, her research is focused on building an anti-racist medical education curriculum for healthcare providers. She is a reader, a writer, a kitchen magic maker, and a deep believer in laughter and joy. Aminta is dedicated to working towards a fundamental change in the way we practice medicine. She envisions leaving behind a system that separates healing from health and cultivating a new practice learning from community wisdom to center healing, happiness, rest, and justice for all people. She is one of the founding members of the White Coats for Black Lives Chapter at UC Berkeley, a Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice collaborator, a student of the Program in Medical Education for the Urban Underserved (PRIME-US), and most importantly she is a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a co-conspirator to many beloved people.

Today, we have the pleasure of interviewing the organizing team of the Freedom Community Clinic. Founded in 2019, the Freedom Community Clinic provides community-centered, whole-person healing combining the strengths of Western medicine and ancestral and indigenous healing to the Bay Area. All services are for free and sliding scale.

We are so excited to talk hear more about the origins of the Freedom Community Clinic and how Bernie, Tiffany, Sabrina, Krista, and Alexis have worked together as womxn of color healers to combine their professional/personal strengths, healing journeys, and work to bring community-centered, whole-person care directly to places and spaces where communities gather. Through this conversation, we will learn about how Western medicine must integrate its strengths with the wisdom of acupuncture, health education, Reiki, yoga, and herbal medicine. We are especially interested in hearing more about how their healing modalities provide a safe space for communities alongside the medical community.

For more about the Freedom Community Clinic, visit their website at: freedomcommunityclinic.org.

In this episode, we have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Vibha Gupta, an emergency medicine doc at Kaiser Oakland and Richmond, and the founder of the No Immigrants No spice non profit. Vibha is second-generation daughter of Indian immigrants, born, bred and raised in the Midwest, and is now firmly transplanted in the Bay Area. As an emergency room doctor by day, Vibha is inspired by the humanity she sees on a daily basis.

Together, we talk about Vibha’s amazing non-profit No Immigrants No Spice (NINS), whose mission is to flip the narrative on immigration and also support pro immigrant NGOs through merch, storytelling, and their inaugural event BBQs without Borders. She started NINS as a way to positively channel her frustration and create something that combines her passion for food, culture and people. Her hope is that NINS can be something that is fun, transcendent, educational and above all helpful.

More about NINS:

https://noimmigrantsnospice.org/

https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Let-s-look-at-immigrants-contributions-to-14465127.php

We are wishing everyone lots of love during this time. If you're in the Bay Area, the Freedom Community Clinic created a community mass resource sheet with up-to-date health information on COVID-19 at tinyurl.com/bayareacovid19help.

We have the enormous privilege and excitement to talk with Dr. Alicia Fernández, a professor of Medicine, general internist at San Francisco General Hospital and the Director of UCSF Latinx Center for Excellence. In addition, Alicia does research on increasing language concordance between patients and physicians to improve patient care and health outcomes among many other topics.

In this episode, we talk with Alicia more about her journey into and through medicine, including her immigration journey from Argentina to the United States at age 15, transitioning from political activism to health justice in the heart of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to where she is now-- a clinician, professor, mentor, and advocate for underrepresented and marginalized communities.

All three of us have been incredibly grateful to Alicia for creating amazing programs for minority students here at UCSF (PROF-PATH and ALAS) that help us navigate academic medicine in ways that expand knowledge and mentorship on how to succeed and more fully show up as our true, authentic selves.

Bio:

Alicia Fernández, MD is a Professor of Medicine at UCSF in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Dr. Fernández has expertise in health and health care disparities, with a strong focus on diabetes, Latinx health, immigrant health, and language barriers. In addition to being the Director of the LCOE, she is also the co-director of two LCOE programs: FUEGO and PROF-PATH. She also serves as a faculty mentor for the UCSF ALAS program.

Whaddup y’all! Happy 2020. We are excited to launch Season 3 and share more exciting episodes with womxn of color in medicine and health justice work. For this episode, we’re giving a personal update on our lives: what’s been going on with each of us in 2019, gratitude to everyone who came to our live show last September, and goals for ourselves and WWD moving forward in 2020. Think of this episode like The Girls Room type chat you have with your girlfriends 🙂

In this episode, we also talk more about what clerkship year in medical school is and how we are integrating self-care, self-love, and healing in the upcoming year, including our excitements/anxieties/hopes/dreams about medicine! In addition, Bernie and Ivie shares their thoughts beginning a Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) program at UCSF and Kaiser SF. LICs are new, more radical, patient-centered methods of clerkship education in comparison to traditional block rotations!

We’ll be having more of these reflective episodes each quarter in addition to our podcasts with featured guests. Stay tuned to see how we survive and thrive in clerkship year + what type of doctors/careers we’ll be imagining and refining for ourselves and our communities.

We are so grateful to the 100+ people who attended our live podcast recording at Red Bay Coffee in Oakland on September 27. We're hella excited for our listeners to hear the amazing wisdom and energy of the room when womxn of color healers from Oakland talk about the healing, movement, and social change in the beloved Town. The intro and Bernie's meditation goes until 4:00.

This will be our last episode for 2019 as we cook up some amazing new initiatives for 2020! Keep in touch with us on our instagram @wokewocdocs. Thank you to all our listeners for the AMAZING support during our first year in existence! Y'all are real ones!

Panelist Bios:

Jasmine Stallworth aka: Honey Gold is a singer-songwriter, music producer, poet and ARTivist based in the Bay Area, known for her eclectic and innovative sound that combines experimental elements of hip-hop, R&B, and neo-soul. Her social entrepreneurship Honey Gold Presents is a multifaceted entity that uses events, workshops and art creation to produce holistic healing possibilities for people of the Afrikan diaspora. Her festival Increase the Piece hopes to erase the mental health stigma in Afrikan American communities and empower them to seek healing from within through music creation and therapy.

Angela Aguilar is a doctoral student in the Ethnic Studies graduate program and a traditional birth attendant. Her dissertation project is Bay Area community-based and solution-oriented and focuses on ancestral, indigenous, and traditional healing and health/care, embodied methodologies, and radical social movements. She is a core organizing member of the Healing Clinic Collective.

Dr. Aisha Mays is a core faculty member at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, clinical researcher at the UCSF Bixby Center for Reproductive Health, and founding Medical Director of Dream Youth Clinic in Oakland. Her current research centers on advocacy for girls who are at risk or engaged in sexual exploitation. 

Leah Kimble-Price is a third generation Oaklander rooted in the traditions of activism and Pan African theory. She earned her Master’s of Science in San Francisco State’s Clinical Psychology program and has been working with marginalized youth populations since 2004. Leah currently leads the anti-trafficking efforts at Catholic Charities of the East Bay including Day Star Mentoring & CSEC Education program and the much anticipated Claire’s House therapeutic living community for child survivors of sex trafficking.

Frances Fu is a proud Oakland-native, daughter to Vietnamese refugees, a soul sister & sister friend to many, a healer, a creator, a scholar-activist, a public health practitioner, an aspiring social worker and therapist & a full-time cat mom. Her program and research focus in her MPH centered on mental health, intergenerational trauma in refugee communities and healing.