DESCRIPTION: Health & Wellness Coordinator

The Philadelphia Reparations Task Force seeks a Health & Wellness Coordinator to lead cohorts and a health and wellness committee to develop reparations proposals that address and resolve the issues in public and private health, the medical industry, wellness and well-being that impact Black Philadelphians. The coordinator must have the capacity to provide pro bono professional expertise, be excellent coordinators, and work very well with others. Applicants should have experience in the sector, and experience in activism, social justice, grassroots community organizing, or reparatory justice. Task Force members will be generally expected to:

  • Develop, read, review, and write reports.
  • Coordinate meetings, dates, and timelines.
  • Build and maintain partnerships in their sector.
  • Conduct surveys and co-create related reports.
  • Advocate for the descendant group’s self-determination.
  • Develop and manage committees, subcommittees, and stakeholder relationships.
  • Participate in and lead courses, conferences, convenings, fundraising efforts, media and community forums, and public events.


Responsibilities
The Health & Wellness Coordinator will work with members of the Task Force to examine the impacts of slavery and Jim Crow on the descendant group’s health, actively address health disparities and deficits of the descendant group, and explore the illnesses, traumas, exposures, and diseases they face as a result of being subjected to various unhealthy conditions and circumstances. The health expert will examine the afterlives of slavery including the higher morbidity/mortality rates, limited access to health, and premature death that the descendant group faces. The Health and Wellness Coordinator will employ a holistic approach to composing mental, physical, and spiritual remedies that provide healing and healthy systems to and for Black Philadelphians, and support innovative systems that care for their health and medical needs in real time.

Reports will provide the legislature and Black Philadelphians with a guide on ways to: 

  • Address and provide remedies for the descendant group’s health disparities, excess death, chronic diseases, hereditary and environmentally influenced illnesses, race-based stress, and transgenerational consequences of racial discrimination.
  • Determine long-lasting, multidimensional remedies and solutions to Philadelphia’s systemic healthcare issues affecting the descendant community.
  • Eliminate the afterlives of slavery in medicine and the racial health gap.
  • Ensure descendant group healthcare coverage and ability to seek natural or alternative methods of healing through insurance.
  • Conduct an audit of medical education curriculums, pedagogy, research, and practices regarding the descendant group in Philadelphia medical schools and industry.
  • Provide recommendations on medical education, curriculum development, and medical research in diagnostics and treatment.
  • Explore the potential replication of the historic descendant institutional model of inclusive hospital and teaching schools to train and employ descendant physicians and nurses and its contemporary applicability. 
  • Outline the historical and structural origins of contemporary racial health disparities in the city and work with community partners for health equity.
  • Address and solve implicit and explicit forms of bias at the multiple levels of health care delivery.
  • Investigate the history and development of automatic race corrections in medical diagnosis and treatment.
  • Re-humanize the descendant group and document their unacknowledged contributions to development of medicine.
  • Examine the potential for HBCUs in the Delaware Valley to establish medical schools to train descendant medical professionals.
  • Build on the 2022 City of Philadelphia apology for the allowance of unethical medical experiments by Dr. Albert Kligman on inmates from the descendant group at Holmesburg Prison from the 1950s through the 1970s including developing reparations proposals for descendants members who suffered the dermatological, biochemical and pharmaceutical experiments and exposure to viruses, fungus, asbestos, and chemical agents.

Necessary Skills and Required Responsibilities

  • Ability to keep an accurate and organized account of the medical data and necessary historical records.
  • Knowledge and review various medical regulations and policies.
  • Prepare monthly, quarterly and annual financial audits of various sectors and co-create reports of data with committee members.
  • Proven work experience in the public health and medical field.
  • Advanced experience using medical software.
  • Excellent analytical and numerical skills.
  • Sharp time management skills.
  • Strong ethics, with an ability to manage confidential data.
  • Professional qualification as first responder or medical physician is considered a plus.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  • Experienced, empathetic, culturally competent, and trauma-informed, with expertise working with various communities, children, adults and professionals in the healthcare and medical fields.
  • Ability to coordinate committees and collaborate with communities.
  • Display adept organizational abilities in managing the subcommittee’s research efforts, ensuring all facets of the descendent community’s legacy are thoroughly examined and synthesized.
  • Attend internal Philadelphia Reparations Task Force meetings, subcommittee meetings, and public community sessions.
  • Coordinate with Task Force Members to ensure seamless study of health and medical research with public comments.
  • Assist with the integration of the Task Force’s policy goals, public education, and targeted campaigns.
  • Leadership ability to co-create effective initiatives and solutions that acknowledge and resolve past injustices, and build a new and improved healthcare and medical system that honors the descendant group.

Complete applications by January 15th, 2024 via the form
Please send all questions to info@ncobraphl.org.