My name is Dr. Kim Rhoads. I am the director of community engagement for the UC San Francisco Cancer Center, I am the founder of Umoja Health Partners in the California Bay Area and I am a co-investigator on the National Cancer Institute and cancer research UK project team PROMINENT. I mention all these roles because all of them are somehow tied to Baba Gerald and his impact on my life and so many others in the research and advocacy circles that stretch from the City of Oakland to the whole of Alameda County, and across the globe through the national and international cancer research advocacy community.
I met Baba Gerald at the kickoff of the San Francisco Cancer initiative in 2015. It was at City Hall in San Francisco. The Dean of UCSF medical school, the cancer center director at UCSF and the late Mayor of San Francisco all made passionate speeches about the need to focus on reducing the burden and impact of cancer on marginalized communities and to address disparities. I had been invited by some colleagues and looked forward to attending because I could feel that my role leading community engagement for Stanford’s cancer institute was coming to a close.
Of all the people I knew at the event, I ended up at a stand-up reception table with Baba Gerald and he immediately struck up a conversation. He explained his role as a patient advocate with the UCSF cancer center and then he invited me to meet him in Oakland at a cafe. I had no idea that this meeting would lead to my next job nor to the successes in health equity we have achieved by working together.
After our meeting at the cafe, Baba Gerald communicated his enthusiasm for having me come to UCSF to another community leader and cancer advocate, Baba Arnold Perkins. They were friends, colleagues, cancer survivors and wise elders in the Brotherhood of Elders Network, this the reason I call them both Baba, which is an honorific meaning Father. At the time Baba Arnold was the leader of the community advisory board for the UCSF cancer center. After meeting with Baba Arnold, he and Baba Gerald joined forces, penning a letter to ask, or rather, demand that the cancer center at UCSF bring me on to lead a new version of community engagement. Instead of focusing on cancer “disparities,” they wanted a focus on equity. In other words, they were demanding that the work be focused on taking action to interfere or intervene on the differences in cancer survival by race and acknowledge the need for increasing access to information for our people and ultimately getting a better quality of care to improve survival. The cancer center director agreed to bring me on, and I always credit the Babas for my current employment and livelihood. That was the first step in the chain reaction of positive health outcomes to follow.
The recruitment to UCSF took 2 years and in 2018, I started working closely with the men’s health committee where Baba Gerald was a force to be reckoned with. He was often pushing on the idea that the committee should focus on black men specifically because prostate cancer is more common in black men and more deadly in Black men and was a place where we could take action. I offered to the committee that my office of community engagement could sponsor an annual event.
In the discussion about what we could do for that annual event, they decided they wanted to do a prostate cancer awareness walk and develop and train a core of patient advocates from the Black men support group for prostate cancer, which was started in 2016 and for which Baba Gerald was a recognized anchor. That group, we believe, now 8 years old is the longest running support group for Black men with prostate cancer in the state of California and possibly in the country.
