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Building eastern NC’s community health workforce, in barbershops, beauty salons

By Vibhav Nandagiri

In an ongoing effort to get essential health information to people in nontraditional settings, one organization in eastern North Carolina is using an approach that empowers their community’s trusted voices. 

Shackle Free Community Outreach Agency helps train barbers and beauticians to share important information on vaccines and chronic disease prevention and treatment. They also share information about accessing food, housing and other resources.

The program, known as Shackle Free Buzz or “The Buzz,” is active in five counties — Duplin, Jones, Onslow, Pender and Sampson.

For the organization’s founder and Executive Director Chiquitta Lesene, teaming up with barbers and beauticians to promote health made a lot of sense. 

“You see them more often than you see a physician,” Lesene said. “What we found out was, a lot of times, people share their health conditions to a trusted messenger — like their barber.”

Over the past few years, Shackle Free has developed a strong community health workforce in eastern North Carolina, with a focus on reaching rural communities of color where barriers to accessing health care persist, Lesene said. In 2021, the organization partnered with the Duke Cancer Institute Office of Health Equity to provide training on how to distribute information about cancers, diabetes, hypertension and other chronic diseases. Through the session, participants earned community health ambassador certification. Forty-one of the 101 Shackle Free community advocates who attended the four-hour training sessions were barbers and beauticians, Lesene said. 

“It’s the largest organization that we have trained,” said Angelo Moore, the former director in the Duke office who designed and oversaw the training. In June, Moore was named executive director of the North Carolina A&T State University Center of Excellence for Integrative Health Disparities and Equity Research.

Once trained, the barbers and beauticians return to their communities equipped with additional knowledge and skills that can complement many of the conversations they’re already having with the clients in their chairs.

“We did this to let people know how efficient it is…to utilize our barbers and beauticians to empower our communities,” Lesene said. 

Getting going

Shackle Free was started in April 2019, but getting it off the ground was not an easy lift. One of the first things Lesene noticed after starting Shackle Free was the lack of comprehensive options to address people’s health and their social needs. 

“Everything is pretty much in siloes, and nobody’s working together, nobody’s talking to each other,” she said. 

The organization is primarily financed through grants. During the first year, though, funding was mostly out-of-pocket as Lesene and her colleagues worked hard to secure small grants, often for just a few thousand dollars.  

Then, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Shackle Free played a key role in ensuring vaccine access in communities of color in eastern North Carolina. Data from the pandemic’s early months in North Carolina show that Black people were dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than non-Hispanic white people. Positive cases in Hispanic and Latino people were more than two times more common than for non-Hispanic people. This prompted state health leaders to tailor vaccine outreach to communities most harmed by the pandemic. 

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Publish date : 2024-08-25 21:30:00

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