Raising the Voice of Young Community Health Advocates

Speed Read

• New REACH program trains young advocates to implement change in their community
• Program provides a bridge to sought-after youth engagement and involvement in health
• Medical student McKenna Stoudemire of the Global Initiative Against HPV and Cervical Cancer (GIAHC) helped develop the program

“I love that this generation of women knows that their voice matters.”

McKenna Stoudemire is just finishing her first year of medical school at the University of Colorado in Denver. Before she leaves for a clinical rotation in emergency medicine in South Africa, she shares how incredibly inspired she feels by the young women she’s been working with in REACH, a new program she helped create as the vice chair of youth advocacy for the Global Initiative Against HPV and Cervical Cancer (GIAHC), a nonprofit working to eliminate HPV-related cancers, starting with cervical cancer.

With REACH (Raising Empowered Advocates for Community Health), Stoudemire is working with young women from all over the world. REACH came together when GIAHC’s Young Leaders program and the nonprofit Women Empowering Nations (WEN) met through the Global HPV Consortium and decided to collaborate, creating a youth community health advocacy training program. “[Participants] are from all different backgrounds and countries, and they’ve joined this program already knowing that they can make a difference.”

Through a series of skills-based workshops, participants each developed a community health improvement project they could implement in their own community.

“We worked on health advocacy, science communication, and media literacy training by using HPV and cervical cancer as a case study,” says Stoudemire. “That way, everyone would walk away with a ton of knowledge about HPV and cervical cancer, as well as a lot of skills that they’re going to be able to use no matter what health issue they want to make an impact on. “

Stoudemire knows first-hand the value of skills that help advocate for a specific cause. When she started her undergraduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, she was taking pre-med courses and aiming for medical school. A study abroad program with a focus on reproductive health in India, South Africa, and Brazil was “the first time I ever learned about cervical cancer and was introduced to global health,” she says. “I just started realizing there were so many different ways to be involved in improving global health — and I knew it’s what I wanted to do.”

When she graduated, the San Diego native decided to take a gap year to “get a better understanding of global women’s health and be absolutely certain that my favorite part of global health was the clinical part.”

She landed a job at CureCervicalCancer, an NGO focused on preventing cervical cancer in developing countries, and it deepened her interest in cervical cancer. The gap year turned into four years as she helped plan and launch a fully mobile testing and treatment clinic that processes HPV self-testing kits and provides thermal ablation pre-cancer treatment in remote locations in western Kenya. To date, the mobile unit has screened more than 30,000 women.

The experience also confirmed her commitment to becoming a doctor, as she most enjoyed working on the clinical aspects of the project. Yet even as she applied to and started medical school, she took a position as the youth outreach chair with the GIAHC Young Leaders Program and continued to focus on eliminating cervical cancer through vaccination, screening, and treatment. “Clearly, based on all the work that I do, cervical cancer elimination is something I’m still really, really passionate about.”

Stoudemire says she hopes to continue the REACH program with new cohorts each year, as it gives young people who are passionate about making a change in their communities the concrete steps to take to make an impact, including how to find reliable information, how to convey that information to diverse audiences, how to build an advocacy program, and how to monitor the impact.

“I think a lot of young people are so aware of the problems around them and their community, and they’re energized and passionate and they want to do something about it. Having been in that position once myself, it can be really difficult to know what your next step is.”

Her own next step may be specializing as an obstetrician/gynecologist, or possibly in emergency medicine — with working to improve global health as her ultimate goal. Meanwhile, she is thoroughly enjoying medical school and will continue to work with young people interested in making a difference, particularly in cervical cancer elimination

“These young women are so plugged in, so confident in a way that I don’t think I was at their age. So, it’s really inspiring to see them this passionate, bright, motivated and imagine what they’re all going to do going forward. It gives me a lot of hope.”

Watch the video presentation about GIAHC, WEN, and REACH..