Last year, The Hundreds partnered with Pharrell Williams and his Billionaire Boys Club brand to raise awareness and directly infuse funds to organizations that are critical in the preservation of Black lives. The resources that were raised with the collaboration were split between Black Lives Matter and the Black Mental Health Alliance, an incredible group of clinicians and activists fighting to save lives every day.

Based in the Baltimore and Washington DC area, the Black Mental Health Alliance is a multifaceted platform that creates culturally relevant educational forums, training symposiums, and referral services to support the health and wellbeing of Black people of all ages and other vulnerable communities.

While we championed their work last year during the rollout of that landmark collaboration, it’s imperative we dive deeper into their work and let you know what the BMHA does on a daily basis so you can support or get involved in any way you can. They are making an incredible difference in the everyday lives of people who are suffering in ways many of us just don’t understand.

I spoke with Andrea Brown, the Executive Director of the Black Mental Health Alliance, to gain a better understanding. Brown joined the BMHA last year but has decades of experience in the field, serving in leadership roles at the NAACP and holding seats on many boards and advisory committees where she lives in Baltimore and around the country.

DUKE LONDON: How are you doing?
ANDREA BROWN: I’m doing good. There’s a lot going on, as you can imagine. We’re all juggling glass balls and we can’t drop any of them. As we look to what is next, we really have to make healing communities of color a priority. I mean, it just has to happen. One of the things we are working on is making racism a public health crisis. Nobody wants to hear that and it’s not a sexy thing to talk about. It’s uncomfortable. But we don’t care. People love the notion of a “road to recovery” but that looks very different for Black and Brown communities. That road to recovery has to include some acknowledgment of the impact of systemic racism and our trauma. We need to heal. Like, what does radical self-care look like? You asked me how I’m doing and I ran right into that. [Laughs]

No, go ahead, I’d love to discuss that further. For our readers who may be unaware, can you let us know what the Black Mental Health Alliance is, how it got started, and how you personally got involved?
In two years, the Black Mental Health Alliance will celebrate its 40th birthday. It was started by one of our co-founders, Dr. Maxie Collier, and part of what he was seeing was an ongoing trend of misdiagnoses of Black men. So, he and a few other doctors and clinicians got together to look into it and realized there were not enough Black clinicians treating people of color. It became their mission to provide Black and Brown folk with access to therapists who not only look like them but understand them from a culturally grounded and culturally sensitive way. Nobody was talking about the trauma that we’ve endured. And I don’t have to go back 400 years, I can go back to yesterday. First, we had to create a database of Black therapists who could understand. Then, we had to reduce the stigma around therapy in the Black community. We’re constantly told not to let anyone know what’s going on or how we’re feeling. From there, it just grew, and in the past five years, we’ve gone to another level. The Black Mental Health Alliance has become this incredible platform for healing, but it can’t just be one-off and it can’t just be when one of us is killed by the police.

How have communities of color been hurt exponentially worse throughout the pandemic?
Oh my gosh, there are so many things. First, there is a digital divide, so many of our kids can’t get on Zoom, which creates a disconnect in their education. They can’t get their assignments, they can’t participate. It keeps them behind. Then there is a disconnect in terms of community as well. For Black people, the community is family, community is Joan three doors down. Our sense of community is critical. That’s who helps raise our children, that’s who we borrow sugar from. That’s who helps us when we need it. The inability to have a community in the way we’ve had it in the past has been very difficult. But on a larger scale, it’s what we all feel: social isolation and fear. We have praised our frontline workers across the board but it looks very different in the black community than it does nationally. Doctors and nurses are putting themselves at risk, but so are the workers who have to go into the hospital and change the bedpans every day. Our bus drivers are at risk. Our postal workers are at risk. Some of these people make up the Black middle class, and some of them don’t. Many of them are the working poor. They’re out getting exposed, and their children are at home alone because they’re not in school. There are just different collateral consequences in our community.

We’re seeing short-term effects already from these factors but what are some of the long-term effects of this down the road?
The breakdown of relationships. In our community, everyone on the block is your extended family and even people who aren’t really your uncles are your uncles. There has been a breakdown of that community. Another thing, and we’re working with our partners at the office of Suicide Prevention, is an increase in Black male suicide which we had not seen before. Black men are already an endangered species, and now they’re killing themselves. Some of that is tied to the loss of employment, which in many ways can feel like a loss of significance. It cuts off a lineage of what could be. We’ve yet to even see the true damage this will do long-term. We’re trying to get ahead of it by providing a safe space for our young people to still have a voice.

When we worked with the Black Mental Health Alliance last year, it was around the time of the worldwide protests against police brutality. We all saw the opposition these protests faced from police in riot gear, throwing tear gas and shooting rubber bullets at peaceful protestors. What kind of message is given to young people in your community about these protests and then, in contrast, when they see something like the insurrection at the Capitol recently?
We are trying to train our children, going to area middle schools and high schools helping them understand what is really going on. We’re helping them understand the value of their life. You and I and everyone else know there is no way in Hell that any Black man or woman could have scaled the wall at the Capitol and lived to tell about it. There is a message in that. “How did they get away with that?” What our young people see is Black Lives Matter and other activists being met with National Guard and shields and all those things. We’ll have to pay for that as a people and as a country. We tell our children they have value but yet they can’t sleep, and that is not okay. And all of this has consequences elsewhere, like with the vaccine. For Black people to understand the significance and to trust the vaccine is a whole other process. It’s going to take another six months to figure out how to get people to trust this process and the product.

And this goes back to that acknowledgment piece you mentioned before. How important is it for someone to have a therapist who truly understands where they come from and what they deal with on a daily basis?
On a scale of one to ten, it would be ten. We are unapologetic about pushing Black and Brown people to clinicians that look like them, but there are clearly not enough. The thing is, it is important for clinicians who care and are well-intentioned and don’t look like us to be serious about learning and understanding. When judgment looks different, how they help us heal looks differently. This is our top priority. There is a growing need for this healing and understanding and our ultimate goal is to have Black Mental Health Alliance chapters in every city and town across the country so we can train clinicians, Black and white, about this space we’re in. That’s the only way we’re going to get our entire community to take control of their healing. We’re trying to prevent yet another generation of broken and worn people who have no sense of why they really feel like this.

As you reduce the stigma around therapy in the Black and Brown communities, is the thinking that you’ll get more people to get treatment but also get more people from these backgrounds to look at therapy as a profession?
Yes, or at least go into social work. And we’re seeing that happen. But more importantly, we aim to build awareness and shift the messaging.

Are there resources for white clinicians or Asian clinicians or whoever else to learn and better understand these issues, even if they don’t look like their clients from the Black and Brown communities?
I’m glad you asked, and there are. We have lots of educational resources and we can customize training to whichever situation we need. Our website and the SAMHSA website both provide resources for clinicians outside our community who want to become more culturally aware and grounded. And there are so many books on this topic, you just have to have a willingness to learn and listen.

The Black Mental Health Alliance survives on donations primarily, so can you let our readers know how the organization puts this money to work most efficiently and effectively?
We always tell you the truth. We provide training, both to clinicians and young people. We organize things like healing circles, whether in person or virtually online. We’re teaching folks how to heal with music, which helps them find their voice. We help people who want to get into the field with their certification process. We organize mental health symposiums. We are able to roll up our sleeves and do so many more things we weren’t able to before thanks to an increase in the resources we have access to. Once the pandemic is over, we’re aiming to do a Healing Tour across the country, something we need so desperately.

We really look forward to working with you on something in Los Angeles.
We want that so much, we would absolutely love to come to LA and collaborate on something. It is so amazing to us that The Hundreds would lend its reach and its voice to these efforts. It’s a huge deal to us.

It’s so important to us, too. I think for young people, it can be very effective to hear positive things about therapy not just from therapists and people in that world but also from the brands and people they already listen to and engage with. We couldn’t be happier to help amplify your message.
I agree, I think we are getting through. This is such a moment for people in marginalized communities to be healed, from generational trauma, from Covid, from heightened racism across the country, from all of it. This is such a moment to make a difference and make an impact.

What are some positive things you’re seeing happen right now that give you hope for the future?
There are a couple of things. If I look at cities like Baltimore, I see young people committing to participate in healing circles, committing to participate in open mic nights. Also, there is some discussion that the new administration has some understanding of what is going on. They’ve asked us about our first responders program, they’ve asked about our programs for young people like the Healing Youth Alliance. I think that’s important. We are seeing people ask more questions like, “What should we be doing?” The conversations are starting in a real way. For a long time, that hasn’t happened. The pendulum is moving. Something beautiful is emerging, but we still have to do the work.