Listen to excerpts of the testimony featured alongside Erica Hamlett's portrait, providing an opportunity to hear about their life and experiences as a community health worker.
Selections from Erica Hamlett's Testimony
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[Erica Hamlett] I am Erica, just a girl from Baltimore City that's an overcomer. Right now one cool grandma, a mom, a daughter, a friend, and a super advocate for my community. I've took my pain and turned it into purpose, and I'm teaching others to do the same. I speak for so many CHWs before they were CHWs, so many community health workers before there was a title for community health worker, and I say, "Thank you. I see you. This work will continue on long after we're gone, and I'm so happy and proud to have been a part." Yeah, that's it, and I hope you see you and you'll be great too. Erica out.
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For my first job as a community health worker, a CHW, I really had to think about all of my own life experiences and how important they were. I've been exposed to things that people don't normally talk about from challenging foster care to growing up as a child with a gay parent, being a mother of a gay child, being a teenage parent, growing up with two parents who struggled with drug addiction and battling alcoholism. I lost my twins at 16 weeks. My mom and son were both diagnosed with cancer six months apart, stage three breast cancer and leukemia, respectfully. I was the caretaker for both of them and was my father's caretaker when he was sick with HIV, AIDS. I've had that lived experience. So many different things in my life intertwined that it made me proud to advocate for others. T.H.E. S.O.A.P. is an organization that I started because of my own personal experience witnessing my parents struggle with addiction, it stands for Thriving Healing Empowered Seeds of Addicted Parents.
Creating a support system for children of those struggling with substance abuse became a purpose for me. We can no longer ignore the fact that addiction leaves a profound impact on families, especially children. In addition to becoming a certified CHW, I will become a peer recovery coach and advocate for my peers, the children of those dealing with substance abuse. My purpose is to show children that we not only survive, but we thrive. An important factor is to not just bringing awareness, but also funding family recovery treatment options for everyone. This is my pain turned into purpose, and I believe that's where my CHW advocate spirit was born. I realized that being an advocate, helping people advocate for themselves in a way where they were understood was a missing piece in the system.
You go to the doctor, the doctor looks at you, gives you a diagnosis, but they don't see the things you deal with in your community, in your home, in your work. They can't put all the pieces together. Doctors can't say that they understand how it feels to hear gunshots go off every other day. They probably can't tell you a story of showing up to school one day and your classmate is missing because they were shot and killed. That could be a contributing factor to somebody's decline in health or somebody's decline in mental state or somebody's inactivity. Being able to relate to things and also understand that the healthcare system and a lot of other systems are not designed for people that look like us is important. It's not easy to not be seen. It's not that patients don't care about their health or their family member's health.
When you feel like systems have used and abused you over the years, you remove yourself from the systems. For so many years, these patients have felt like what a doctor or professional says is law. That's it. So I advocate for people on that level of just sitting down, having a conversation with somebody and coming up with questions for them to ask their doctor at their next appointment. They feel like they don't have the time to ask questions, but I tell them that that's their time to have dialogue with their physician about their concerns. It's their time to spend with their care provider so they can care for them.
I don't have a problem with advocating for people because I feel like that's a part of my gift and a curse. I explain to people that this isn't just a paid position, it's my life's work. People come to you because they know you can find a resource or provide a resource. I'm always thinking about ways to elevate my community and the people I love and care about. It's never just about yourself. I go to bed thinking about ways to better serve and elevate my community, and then I get up and I act on those ways. My daughter has to remind me often that the things that I do are really big. I don't know. I just, when I see it wrong, I try and right it. That is my life's worth.
Visual Description:
This visual description uses language that reflects how the CHW described themselves during discussions with BMA staff.
A family of five people, all with dark skin, including two women, a teenage girl, a man, and a baby stand together in a tight cluster. They are outdoors on a grassy lawn across the street from a residential complex—the Cherry Hill Homes of Baltimore. The man in the back center of the group wears a white t-shirt and holds his son, who wears yellow, in his right arm. He wraps his left arm around a woman in a red tank top—his grandmother. The woman to his right—his mother—wears a white t-shirt with faded gray sleeves while the girl in the front center wears a white t-shirt and holds a red baseball cap in her left hand. They each look at the camera and smile softly. The baby, however, looks back over his right shoulder at his grandmother.
Erica Hamlett Standing In Front Of Cherry Hill Homes With Her Grandson, Son, Daughter And Mother (Kaysen Nicholson, Jawone Nicholson, Rickiara Tyson, Duanelle Woodard). LaToya Ruby Frazier: More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022 (Detail). 2022. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, BMA 2023.114
