Roots Community Health, South Bay: Culturally Sensitive and Effective Health Care for the African/African Ancestry Community in Silicon Valley

Alma Burrell is the Chief Administrative Officer of Roots Community Health, a successful community based organization serving the African/African Ancestry community that expanded from Oakland to Santa Clara County in 2017. The African/African Ancestry community of Silicon Valley fought to create a health center dedicated to African centered health. It is so much more than a health clinic; Roots South Bay is a sanctuary for individuals historically marginalized by public health services. Roots was established as a first step to reduce the growing health disparities of the African/African Ancestry population of Silicon Valley compared to other racial/ethnic populations. Due to the success of the clinic and programmatic services, the local county, Santa Clara County, was curious as to whether the process Roots used to develop their clinic and programs could be used to successfully design clinics and programs to serve other communities. Was the success of Roots translatable to other marginalized communities in Silicon Valley such as the Vietnamese? Was the model scalable and reproducible? These were among the questions Santa Clara County officials had for Alma and her African/African Ancestry leader colleagues