S2 E19: Understanding communities to prevent burnout
with researcher and community advocate Dr Melicia Whitt-Glover
Key Takeways
So I always knew I wanted to do something to make a difference in people's lives to help people. I want to do something like these interventions. People ask me about my career and how did I get here? And they think I had a plan. I didn't even know what exercise science was. When I got my doctorate in epidemiology, I didn't even know what epidemiology was.
I was doing physical activity interventions. I was doing volunteer work at my church. And one day somebody at my church said, what's your job? What do you do when you're not here? And I explained the research that I do. And they said, why aren't you teaching those kinds of things at church? We would benefit from this kind of information about health and physical activity. And that's where I got the idea to do my first faith-based physical activity program.
So it was living the academic life, doing the things that you're supposed to do to try to get promoted and tenured working on a number of committees, trying to manage two babies who were 13 months apart, driving back and forth, writing, writing grants, doing presentations, and just really started to feel like I was dragging. I was doing community-based work and that meant my work happened during the day with the institution. But if I really wanted to be engaged with the community, I also had to do things in the evenings when the people I was interested in working with were off. And I just started getting really burned out and stressed out at trying to do it all. And I knew that it was time to make a change when I got to the point where I was in tears every day on the way to work. I worked and worked and it just didn't seem like I was getting anywhere. And I was miserable.
And I took a leap of faith and agreed to join this woman's company and left and started the transfer of my grants. I stepped out and I fell flat on my face because within a month of me leaving she changed her mind. But all I knew was I had left my secure academic job. I was the primary breadwinner at home. I had two young children and we had no income and no insurance. And so I had to figure out something fast. This person had been helping me to understand how an independent research firm worked. I think that was the step that I needed to be able to pull me out for me to be able to stand up on my own. And so I ended up using that guidebook and formed my company, Gramercy Research Group, which combines the word grace and mercy. And I filed my formal paperwork on March 17th, 2009. And we've been going strong ever since.
As a black woman in academia, in a department that wasn't very diverse, I felt this intense pressure. I was always tapped to be on all these committees or to do all this service to the institution. Because in my mind I feel like it checked two boxes in terms of now you've got a woman and we've got diversity on whatever this committee was. I feel like I was expected to be there.
There's a history in some communities, particularly racial and ethnic minority communities where those academic institutions can fly in and do their research and fly out and do a lot of taken from communities and not a lot of giving back. And this community was certainly no exception. So when I was going out and doing my community work I would find myself almost apologizing for coming from the academic institution because I was often met with a lot of suspicion until I got to know folks.
And then I said earlier, I didn't know necessarily know what I wanted to do. I think I landed in the right place with this career, but I knew I wanted to do something to improve conditions for my community. And I just felt like my hands were tied so much when I was trying to do that in an academic institution.
I ended up renting building space right across the street from a childcare center. So that actually made it easier because we would all go to work together. And I literally could walk right across the street and drop them off, walk right across the street and pick them up. In my first office, one of my bookshelves, it had toys and books on it for them because they would come and hang out in mom's office. They knew where snacks and things were. And so we made it work and we could integrate it. In some ways that was easy, but in some other ways it was hard because when you're running your own business, you're hustling all the time.
I have to be diligent because I realized that if I don't protect my space, no one else will. And so I have started doing things like I create appointments on my calendar that really aren't appointments, but it just allows me space and freedom to be able to just take a mental break. You have to set those boundaries for yourself because otherwise people will encroach and you have to be able to keep those meetings with yourself. Just if you were meeting with somebody else, you wouldn't let something else encroach on it. The meetings with yourself are just as important. We started a tradition a couple of years ago, from Memorial day, until labor day, we don't work on Fridays. So we have three-day weekends in the summer.
And I had some hesitation about going back into an academic position, but I thought my focus is on doing work to improve health conditions in the black community. This is in a health profession school at a historically black college. What better way to influence that? And so I went in trying to help while leading that center with the idea that I could really help with what I learned about research. So I pushed and I made things happen, but it was like making things happen just by my own sheer will and not as much support as I thought that I might see. And when I got to the point again, where I was crying on the way to work, and sometimes I would just cry in frustration, I would have to go sit in my car and just cry. I got to the realization faster than I did the first time. And I said I can't go down this road again. And so I made the decision that I had to leave.
So one of the projects that I was working was looking at unconscious bias and perceptions that people have in the medical system. And we did a series of vignettes where we looked at an issue related to unconscious bias from the perspective of the patient, from the perspective of the provider, from the perspective of the practice manager, and from the perspective of a bystander. And we talked about for all of those people, how everyone had biases and how those biases could impact a person's care.
It's supposed to be the idea is that it is incorporated at all levels in the training that students get while they're in school. So a lot of times when we're doing the unconscious bias training, it's after people are already out and then people feel like they're getting a slap on the wrist and that they've done something wrong. And so they tend to be, I think, a little bit more resentful when they're getting that kind of training. But if it's embedded in courses, it begins to help people to recognize what their own biases are. And that goes from students who are coming in, it's professors who are teaching courses, because professors may not realize that they have high expectations for some people, low expectations for others.
It was a series of vignettes, but then also discussion guides, an action plan. What do you do now? How do you recognize your biases? What can you do now? What happens? We also shared some information. What happens when you may be engaged in this kind of behavior. We looked at it from everyone's perspective. And I think sometimes that's also helpful because a lot of bias training seems to hit folks over the head with you have these biases and it's wrong. But in our vignette, it revealed that the care provider, who in our vignette was black, had her own biases against a patient who is white. And so they were reacting to each other and we don't often talk about it that way, that we all have biases. And we all have to think about them. And so what can we all do? What can we all do differently?
We focus a lot on structures, but we don't focus on the policies and the systems and the environments and the people that can make those physical structures good or bad. And just using this as a healthcare example, we want to make it easier for people to access care. And so we often think about the physical structures, but we forget about some of the things related to how are people treated when they go in for care. And so if you walk into a care provider and you feel unwelcome because people have biases that they've never understood that they have, and they don't know how to respond to them. And they don't know how to manage those biases so that they give you the best care, then that could impact your experience.
And I'm realizing and doing more of this work on policy systems and environments that so many of us don't even understand how policies are put into place, what, how policies impact people and who makes policy. And so I think it starts with putting policies in place, people understanding those policies, but then it's also accountability because if you have a policy in place and no one's held accountable for following it, then it doesn't matter.
And we've got to understand who our policy makers are because we elect people who represent us in our different communities and we don't hold them accountable. And we've got to do that. And if those people who are elected, who make the policies are not making the policies that are in our favor, then we've got to find new policymakers. And I often think that particularly communities that have been historically underrepresented, I don't know that we often recognize the power that we have to collectively make change.
I think people treat so many things like pie, if I give you something, then it's less for me. And we often forget that we rise together and we fall together. We are all tied together. And we just don't recognize that enough.
I'm just going to speak from the perspective of my black women friends. Although I know shelter at home was not a positive thing, the number of people who said that being at home, allowed them the opportunity to finally exhale and they didn't realize they were holding their breath for so long was just surprising to me. And then you realize that when you're getting up every morning and you're having to rush your family out and make sure that you are present and maybe you're present in places that are not always welcoming. And so there's always this bit of tension that's there that you just honestly don't feel when you are at home in your space, still being able to get things done, but also being able to stop in the middle of the day as needed to take care of whatever you need to take care of.
I hope we all keep discovering what works for us to allow us to get things done, but also be able to live our best lives. And we definitely need to create those boundaries, but I personally think it's okay to mix and match. It's not taking anything away from the zoom call if I am also feeding my child at the same time, because it lets you know that I'm human.
Bio
Dr. Melicia Whitt-Glover is President and CEO of Gramercy Research Group in Winston Salem, NC. Gramercy Research Group’s mission is to positively impact and improve the lives of individuals and communities by addressing health and related issues. She is also Executive Director for the Council on Black Health, which is housed in the Dornsife School of Public at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. CBH’s mission is to develop and promote solutions that achieve health in Black communities.
For over 20 years, Dr. Whitt-Glover has been engaged in research and evaluation projects designed to identify effective strategies to promote adherence to national recommendations for physical activity, diet, and healthy weight gain to address disparities in chronic disease morbidity and mortality. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, national and local foundations, and local government organizations. She was a member of the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee, which was a group of the country’s most accomplished physical activity and health expertise who will play a critical role in a comprehensive process, culminating with the publication of the second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.
Dr. Whitt-Glover received her BA (Exercise Physiology, 1993) and MA (Exercise Physiology, 1996) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. (Epidemiology, 1999) from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Whitt-Glover completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (2000 – 2002).
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