Season 4, Episode 12: Kitsap County Panel on Health, Wellbeing and Racism i

 

 

 

 

Danielle (00:00:37):

Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, healing, and justice. And I wanna welcome you to this panel conversation. I'm about to have, uh, just stunning women doing wonderful work in this community and in the areas of justice in government. Listen in,

Kali (00:01:07):

All right. I am Kali Jensen. I am a licensed mental health counselor in the state of Washington. Grew up in Washington. Um, I am obvious I'm a white American. I am German, native American, and French Canadian. And, and yeah, coming to you on the land of the Suquamish as we enter today.

(00:01:33):

My name is Jessica Guidry. I'm the Equity Program manager at the Kids at Public Health District. I also like Kaylee, um, joined this meeting from the land of the Suquamish. I actually live, um, and what was, which is still the, the Port Madison Reservation. So closer to Indianola. Um, and I, I guess ethnic ethnically I am, um, Asian, English, scotch Irish, and maybe some other British isles there. But, uh, um, I actually grew up in Bangkok, Thailand, and I've been in the US though for a long time. And I was born in the States

(00:02:08):

Next, um, Maria Fergus. I'm the community en Engagement specialist at, uh, Kita Public Health District. I've been in this role for, um, a little bit over a month. And one of the reasons why I applied for this job is because I, uh, I know that last year the Kita Public Health District declared racism at public health crisis. Um, and I wanted to be part of what they were doing. I, my pronouns are her, and she, I was born in Mexico, but I grew up in California. English is my second language, and I've been in Washington state for about seven years and working with our communities, um, our Spanish speaking communities as a volunteer for different organizations since the end of 2015.

Well, good morning everyone. Um, I stepped away cause you know what I was doing, but, um, , uh, just bring, kinda bring me up to speed. We just doing our introductions.

Just so you are, where you're located, um, what you're up to, and, um, yeah. And then we'll jump in.

(00:03:34):

Okay. Well, good morning everyone. Good afternoon now. Um, my name is Karen Vargas and, um, I am on Bainbridge Island, um, working with our kids across Kitsap County. I am, um, one of, uh, the co-founders, um, for Latch, uh, living Life Leadership and Kitsap Black Student Union. Um, we have been working over 30 plus years with our school districts, um, with our multicultural advisory council here on Bainbridge Island, working on equity issues, uh, really since I, um, moved here from the East Coast. So, um, what we're working on now with Kitsap Race Coalition is to, um, to have our, our county have a commission on Truth and Reconciliation that would, uh, actually deal with some of the issues that we see manifesting here in our county, um, with our bipo communities and with our students of color, uh, within the school districts and in the community.

Um, and, and hoping that we, we would be able to, um, move our communities forward in a healthier way, to be able to address some of the, the issues that have been, um, you know, uh, showing up, whether it's in our churches or whether it's in our, our communities or on our jobs or, or in our school districts, even in our health districts. You know, how do we move forward when there has been, um, these type of, of issues that continue to manifest, you know? And I think that when we can move forward doing intervention and prevention, um, to address these issues, it would help us to reconcile them more in, in a healthy way. Um, and so, um, that's kind of the work that we've been working on. And so,

Danielle (00:05:49):

Thanks. Um, well, welcome everybody. I, I know we kind of all have connected and collaborated around, um, what is happening in Kitsap County. And perhaps if you're listening, you're not in Kitsap County, but you are in a county or a, a town or a section of a town, even a larger town. We, we all have these, like, there's like the 30,000 foot view of like the larger area where we're at. And we have these smaller cultural microcosms I think that happen in the areas where we actually physically root our bodies in housing and, um, business and life and school and our raise our children. And so we're coming to you from one location. Um, it's not, it's not gonna be the same as every location, but hopefully what we talk about can be something that we can, we can learn from you if you reach out and we hope you can learn just from us as we have a conversation.

But Kaylee and I, like, we've been really close since the pandemic. She helped me survive the pandemic. She had her office next to mine and we would yell at each other down the hall or, um, check in, especially when all of our clients were online. And we had started these groups. One of the first g