[Piano begins playing] [La Kerry Dawson] Hi, my name is La Kerry Dawson. I am a special needs mother going through the journey of raising a child with limited resources, being resilient. [Piano music fades] My name is La Kerry Dawson. I'm community health worker, someone that advocates in the community for, I hate to say it, the word justice, because in healthcare, we really shouldn't have to talk about justice, right? It's supposed to be something that we all have, that we all want to make sense of, that we all have access to. Everyone has access to healthcare, right? We get free healthcare. Everyone is getting the best quality of care, so they claim. That is untrue. So if I'm really advocating for the community that I'm serving, making sure that we're getting the best quality of care and working as a liaison between the doctors and the providers, that's what a community health worker is to me. I'm passionate about advocating for healthcare because of my daughter. I remember how I felt to be a person that did not understand the system. I was a correctional officer in my 20s. After I found that I was pregnant, I told the state and I lost my job because at that time, you could not be pregnant and work in correctional field if you wasn't there a year. I had to change my insurance to medical assistance. I remember the time when I went to a doctor appointment with my medical assistance card. I waited in the doctor office for over 45 minutes, waiting, restless, tired. I was hungry at that time. I spoke up and I asked, "When is the doctor going to see me?" I heard another person whisper, "She has medical assistance. She doesn't matter." I was 42 weeks pregnant and miserable. Saying miserable was a hindsight. I've been walking around with pain, so much pain on my cervix. I went to get my sonogram, and I told the lady that I felt so miserable that it was no room for my baby to move. At that time, she sent me away, said that my fluid was fine. I came back again when I was two and a half weeks late. I was so uncomfortable and sore again. I could feel the baby tugging on me. It felt like she was tugging on my cord. I said to the lady, "I'm so uncomfortable again." She sat down, looked at the screen. Again, you could sit, hear them talking about I had medical assistance. And in certain channels, they have to go by, but I would be fine because my fluid levels was fine and they would induce me on Monday. I went to the hospital to get induced. Again, I was so uncomfortable and in pain. It took that time setting me up to get induced. It was one nurse that came in, and she kept on saying that every time I had contractions, the baby heart rate would drop. They went to the doctor, and the doctor say, "Oh, she's fine. She's a tough cookie. She'll be fine." I was in active labor for 72 hours. Lo and behold, here comes my baby, so beautiful, wrapped in joy. I felt so sick after having her. Again, they told me I was fine. Later, my mom comes up and she tells me, "Kerry, I don't want you to get upset." Anytime my mom tells me, "Kerry, don't get upset," I know something is coming. Angel was having seizures. She had 21 seizures her first hour of life. They had to sedate her and put her onto life support. My daughter now has hypoxia and is brain damaged. That's a lack of oxygen to the brain. And she's also had cerebral palsy. So I was a young 23-year-old African-American woman with a young girl, a beautiful young girl that we call Angel that they discharged to me after 14 days of being with life support, 23 additional days in a hospital with no resources and nothing. At that time, a community health worker would've been the best thing for me. If I don't know how to advocate for myself, I don't know how to advocate for others. It's hard to find people that want to help you with your child when you're just trying to make it. The concept of how we're valued as Black people and as women kills me. They say, "We're in this together." If we're in this together, we should have a system without so many barriers. We should have a system that sees us together. This is a joke. We're trying to send a man to Mars, but we can't reform healthcare? Of course. And we're really into this together, then we need to start showing it, remove the barriers. Really, reform healthcare. Make it holistic. Give us quality. If you want to do public health, you want us to do it the right way. If you want us to do public health, you will understand that we're really dealing with human lives.