In late January, Isabel Perez and her team prepared to meet with church leaders, community organization heads and local teenagers at the Public Health Advocates office in Stockton. They gathered notes from ongoing projects, laid out snacks and waited for the group of 25 or so folks to arrive.
Perez manages Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health, a federally funded program known as REACH, housed inside PHA. She and her colleagues, Khadija Fox, assistant program manager, and Erica Burton, a program specialist, are charged with addressing health disparities that affect African Americans in Stockton. Their work started in 2022 and has reached thousands of people across the city.
While they waited for community members to arrive, Perez and her team caught up on emails from the day before. One of the messages was a gut-punch from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…