To honor Black History Month, our Cancer and Careers Blog will focus exclusively on amplifying Black voices and leaders.
Our goal is to highlight individuals and organizations who speak to the very real complexities of being Black and navigating cancer. These will be voices that inspire us, educate us, and that we believe could provide knowledge and support as you balance life, work and cancer.
We also feel it is important to acknowledge that this will not be only a one-month focus. Our mission in the blog has been to look at workplace issues through the cancer lens. Our commitment moving forward is to expand that scope to also focus on race, ethnicity, age, ability, sexual orientation and gender identity.
The complexities of navigating cancer and multiple intersections of identity in a professional environment cannot be understated and must be believed. The difference to access for care and mortality rates for Black, Indigenous and People of Color with cancer is real. Discrimination at work is real. Unconscious bias in interviews and the workplace is real. Ageism is real. The panic of working for a boss or company who does not believe in COVID-19 and is not taking the proper precautions to protect employees, while forcing them to return to work is real. We see it. We hear it directly from the community we speak to. We believe it. And reflecting these issues, with insights from diverse voices who speak directly from their experience is important.
This includes your voice. We value your insight. We are prepared to listen, learn and adapt our approach so we can better help along the way. As Senior Program Coordinator, one of my many roles at CAC is Editor of our blog, overseeing what content we share and topics we address. Please feel free to email me directly at bmorvant@cew.org to share your thoughts, or tell me of organizations and individuals working in the field who you would like to see highlighted this month, or issues you would like to see addressed in the future.
In the meantime, we hope you will join us later this week for the first article. Our Executive Director, Rebecca Nellis, highlights someone who has greatly inspired her: Dr. Harold Freeman, whose work sits at the forefront of the conversation around poverty and health and who, in order to address very real crises his patients were experiencing, pioneered the use of patient navigation to help eliminate barriers and access to care in order to improve outcomes for people affected by cancer.
This article will be updated with direct links to each article as they are released.