Memories and Manifestos

In March of 2020, Ala Stanford, a board-certified pediatric surgeon, rented a van and began to drive to churches and mosques in Philadelphia, where she would set up a triage hospital, administering tests for the COVID-19 virus in their parking lots. She had been hearing from Black friends that they were having challenges getting a test. “I was getting messages saying, ‘Ala, I think I have this COVID, but I went such and such a place and they turned me away, and should I be worried?’” she remembers.

These were people with health insurance and two educational degrees. Stanford thought that if they couldn’t access resources then those who lived in marginalized areas—like where she herself had grown up in North Philadelphia—would definitely struggle.

Stanford decided that she could do more good in a van than in the OR and created the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, which grew to serve thousands of people, providing tests and, eventually, vaccines. She founded the Dr. Ala Stanford Center for Health Equity in North Philadelphia, was asked by President Biden to serve as regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and joined Penn as a Professor of Practice in the Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences. She holds appointments as Director of Community Outreach for research activities in the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, and as a Research Associate in the Annenberg School for Communication.

Now Stanford has published a book, Take Care of Them Like My Own: Faith, Fortitude, and a Surgeon’s Fight for Health Justice, which not only describes her work during and since the COVID outbreak, but also tells the story of how she became the person who decided to rent that van—the experiences and spirit that made her both a surgeon working within the healthcare system and an innovator who could think creatively and do a different kind of good when she saw that system failing.

High Hopes and Low Expectations

Before she was one of Fortune magazine’s 50 greatest leaders in the world and one of Forbes’ most influential women, a recipient of the George H.W. Bush Points of Light Award, and a national leader in health equity, Stanford was a girl growing up in poverty in North Philly. She knew from age eight that she wanted to be a doctor, but no one really expected much from her or any of her peers. That, more than anything, motivated her to write her book, a project she’d been thinking about for a long time.

“I thought my story might be inspirational to some young people, regardless of their socioeconomic status or their ethnicity, because so often people don’t talk about the bumps and bruises along the way."

“I thought my story might be inspirational to some young people, regardless of their socioeconomic status or their ethnicity, because so often people don’t talk about the bumps and bruises along the way,” she says. “You just see them and you think, wow, I want to be that. But they don’t talk about some of the hurdles they’ve had to clear.”

Then, when COVID hit, “there were so many things that I didn’t really talk to anyone about when they were happening,” she says. “I’ve kept a journal since I was in high school. It’s sort of my conversations with myself, my conversations with God, the things that you don’t want anyone else to know you’re thinking.”

A reporter’s question during the pandemic brought her book idea back to mind. Now it’s a hardcover reality with quotes on the back from Oscar-winning actor Will Smith and Nobel Laureate Drew Weissman, Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research in the Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation.

“What I think about is how different those two people are,” Stanford comments. “Obviously, you have one Black, one white, one spiritual Christian, one Jewish, one academic, one entertainer, right? But both with a similar message. If we could all, in our lives, have more people who are from different backgrounds and different religions and different experiences, how much better might not just our health but the world be for it?”

Joys and Challenges

Stanford starts at the beginning in the book, describing how she was raised in poverty and educated at public schools. “There was some joy, and there were some challenges,” she says. “The kids who read this book who live in Philly and were impoverished will definitely relate. And if you lived in Philly and you weren’t impoverished, it’s going to give you insight into what life is like in ZIP codes and communities that you don’t enter.”

For many of the children in those ZIP codes, life comes with a lack of expectation that they will amount to anything productive in society, says Stanford. “They’re told, ‘This is where you were born. This is where you’ll live. This is where you’ll die.’ But there aren’t any, ‘You’re going to be the next President of the United States. You’re going to be the next surgeon.’ Because people may think they don’t have the resources to achieve it, or the aptitude to get there, but you can still have the desire. You can still have the aptitude, and you can still achieve it without having all the resources in the world.”

Stanford herself persevered and competed to become one of a tiny number of Black women pediatric surgeons in the U.S. “It doesn’t mean that you don’t belong there,” she says. “It just may mean that you have to do some things to catch up.”

That adversity prepared Stanford for the actions she took during the early days of COVID-19. When a journalist asked what made her decide that she could just go into a parking lot and start testing people for COVID in the middle of a pandemic, she says, “I didn’t think about it, and I think if I had thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I would have started thinking of all the risk that was involved.”

She chose the name Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium for the project to send a message, when literature was showing that Black Americans were dying during the pandemic at three times the rate of white Americans. “I wanted them to know that this was for them, for them to say, Okay, it’s Black doctors talking about this COVID. Let me go check it out. Because what already existed was not working.”

The book is ultimately both memoir and a manifesto for health equality and justice, explaining how all of Stanford’s experience has informed her understanding of America’s racial health gap, a form of inequality that exacts a devastating toll on Black communities across the country.

A Celebration That Goes Beyond a Book

The release event for Treat Them Like My Own is being held today, August 6, at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, but those attending will celebrate more than the book. Legendary WDAS radio personality Patty Jackson will be the mistress of ceremonies, and Stanford will be in conversation with TODAY’s Sheinelle Jones. But Stanford is most excited about the mass combined choir from all the churches where she and her fellow coalition members tested and vaccinated so many people.

“We’ll all come together and acknowledge what we did, and I say we, because everybody—Black, white, rich, poor, educated, uneducated—came together, and supported the consortium,” Stanford explains. “The spotlight was on Philly in a positive way. Bloomberg News reported that we had vaccinated more Black Americans in Philadelphia than any other city with greater than 500,000 people largely because of our intentional efforts.”

“How do I train folks to think with an empathetic lens, to approach medicine in a culturally sensitive way, so that they are thinking about taking care of people like their own?"

The celebration doesn’t mean that the work is over, however. Stanford continues to highlight and address the discrepancies that exist between the health of different populations in the city and nation. Now at Penn, she says, she’s with thought leaders who are also looking for ways to move the needle—not just how to treat illness but how to prevent it, and how to pass this awareness and knowledge on to the next generations.

“That’s where my mind is now,” Stanford says. “How do I train folks to think with an empathetic lens, to approach medicine in a culturally sensitive way, so that they are thinking about taking care of people like their own? Because if you ask me, ‘How do we get to equitable care for everyone?’ I’m going to say, take care of them like it’s your son, like it’s your husband, like it’s your mom, like it’s your grandma. And so now, I’m hoping to expand that even further, and then in some way standardize what I did and duplicate it across the city, across the nation, across the world.”

In the meantime, she says, “I just want everyone to read this book. Not just Black kids, not just women, not just surgeons. You think about all the times you felt like maybe this isn’t for me, or I’m giving up, or this is harder than it should be. It’s worth it, just sticking with it, because there’s a whole plan that we don’t know. Everything you’re doing is leading you to be at a certain place at a certain time to do a certain thing, and you don’t know what that might be.”