Finally, another installment of our weekly series Brief but Spectacular.Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison are the founders of the nonprofit GirlTrek.It's part of their mission is to reduce the leading causes of preventable death among African-American women.Black women are dying faster and at higher rates than any other group in American from obesity-related diseases.We carry the trauma in our bones from systemic racism.We carry the trauma in our bones from serving other people before we serve ourselves, and that has to stop now.So, GirlTrek asks women to reclaim 30 minutes a day to their own personal self-careand to be a freedom fighter for themselves and their communities. That.I am grateful, like many black women in this country, to have been raised by a village of black women.My grandmother and my aunties stepped in when my mother wasn't available to care for me.And in that stepping in, they sacrificed so much.And I lost my grandmother at 66 years old to a heart attack. I have lost two aunts before the age of 60.The crisis is taking the women from my family at an age that just feels very unfair to me.GirlTrek is the largest health organization in the country for black women.We are reclaiming the streets of black neighborhoods, one woman at a time.Our goal is to rally one million black women to walk to save their lives.Eighty percent of black women are over a healthy body weight; 53 percent are obese.
