The Leadership and Health Communication’s Alliance

This Alliance represents the collective and interwoven energies and imaginations of community organizing, health workforce diversity, technology, public health, environmental responsiveness, mental health recovery, faith-based, social and cultural sensibility, corporate-social responsibility, multiculturalism, diversity, cultural competency and social entrepreneurship, community reinvestment, and student mentoring. Our efforts focus on intervening to end health disparities while promoting an action-oriented framework centered in community and for community. We are the premiere community-based alliance of excellence with a sustainable infrastructure integrating health equity and social justice.

Guide Right: Interdisciplinary Health Equity Civic Engagement Project

Building Ethics, Leadership, and Civic Responsibility. This program was started in 2005 by Dr. Mount. Dr. Mount proposes a novel opportunity for students to create collaborative teams to learn about health disparities in their local community. This opportunity is carried out through a community engagement partnership. All students participate in directed service learning, working with non-profits and faith-based organizations, supporting community outreach initiatives. Trainees learn how grassroots organizations serve and protect community. The learner-scholar develops skills in research design, data acquisition platforms, data analysis, and communicating research results at monthly seminars structured to support learning while promoting analytical reasoning. The health equity ambassadors rotate through a health care clinic learning about community health and participating multiple psycho-educational groups centered about mental health aspects of chronic disease management. They have the opportunity to shadow other health professionals. When participating in community health events the scholars learn how to appropriately and culturally competently educate our local community about research and serviced being conducted to reduce and/or eliminate health disparities; collect consent forms, and administer survey instruments.

“Building the Dream” Award Nomination

Every year, Wake Forest and Winston Salem State University through the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Programming Committee present the “Building the Dream” award to one professor or administrator and one student from each of the university. This year, Dr. Mount was officially nominated as an individual possessing Dr. King’s qualities and characteristics in the community.

Maya Angelou Center’s Dr. David Mount to Lead Human Services Integration Movement

Special to The Chronicle

Dr. David L. Mount Dr. David Mount of the Maya Angelou Center in Winston-Salem has been selected to lead a new movement: a human services integration movement.

Directed by Mount, the N.C. Network for Human Services Integration to Prosperity is designed to address diversely expressed social justice concerns and community insecurity based upon decades of adverse psychosocial and behavioral health outcomes.

“Prosperity and holistic health equity through human services integration. We owe it to the nation and future generations to address integrated human service systems optimization that a decade ago seemed completely inaccessible,” Mount said.

Stakeholders from across North Carolina are calling for integrated human services with both service users and taxpayers firmly in mind.

Mary Annecelli, a longtime community advocate, stated: “Taxpayers want the public systems they finance to be responsive to concerns regarding systemic barriers to services as well as implementing strategies to address our concerns.”

“Vulnerable people want a chance at prosperity but fragmented human services delivery remains a losing social policy proposition in great need of redesign,” said Michael D. Connor, a professor of Theatre Arts, professional actor, playwright and director.

“This movement is essential as we must continue to remind ourselves that integrative health and healthcare is uniquely tied to the psychosocial determinants of health,” said William O. Ntim, MD, Cardiologist and Cardio-Oncology Program director, Novant Health Heart and Vascular Institute Charlotte.

“An objective for the N.C. Network for Human Services Integration to Prosperity is to focus on transforming views and opportunities through radical public interest engagement,” said Dr. Thomas Coaxum, a longtime higher education administrator who chairs the board of directors at the Carter G. Woodson School in Winston-Salem.

Michael Wittenberg, a board director for CenterPoint Human Services Manage Care Organization that oversees mental health, substance abuse and intellectual/development disabilities services in Davie, Forsyth, Rockingham and Stokes counties pointed out: “The network’s objectives are more closely aligned with a strategic vision for generating new ideas for improving human services integration, fostering data-driven decision making, growing taxpayers engagement and championing innovative public policy.”

The Rev. Dr. Carton Eversley, a community organizing expert, speaks about Mount’s qualifications.

“Dr. David L. Mount brings a diverse set of community engagement and leadership talents as an ordained Elder, a fellowship trained neuropsychologist, a National Institutes of Health designated health disparities scholar, certified foster parent, researcher, elected healthcare liaison to the Minister’s Conference of Winston-Salem & Vicinity, and the past recipient of the Dr. Maya Angelou Service Appreciation Award at Wake Forest University School of Medicine,” Eversley said.


Published in the Winston-Salem Chronicle on .