Success Stories
Mario Browne presents at APHA
Mario Browne, project director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Minority Health (CMH), is a member of the Adventure Cycling Association and a recent APHA presenter on "Underground Railroad Bicycle Route: Using Cultural Tailoring to Increase Physical Activity Among African Americans" and "Nurses and Barbers United: A Community-Based Approach To Prostate Screening of African-American Men."
Adventure Cycling Association
The unique partnership between the Adventure Cycling Association and the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Minority Health was recognized during the 19th National Trails Symposium in Little Rock, Arkansas. The partnership won an American Trails Partnership Award for their successful development of a 2,028-mile bicycle route memorializing the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses by which freedom seekers attempted to escape slavery before and during the Civil War. The Underground Railroad Bicycle Route passes points of interest and historic sites from Mobile, Alabama, a busy port for slavery during the pre-civil war era, north to Owen Sound, Ontario, a town founded by free blacks in 1857.
In a National Public Radio interview, Mario Browne, founding president of the Pittsburgh Major Taylor Cycling Club and a CMH project director, described in visceral detail what it was like for him, as a Black man, to dip the wheels of his bike in the Gulf of Mexico where the last slave ships arrived in Alabama, “…I looked back and just imagined those human beings stuffed in ships like sardines, and the waste, the degradation and the humiliation that they went through. There is no rational reason I should be standing here today,” he said. The objectives of the research and presentation were to discuss the relevance of history in developing culturally relevant health promotion activities, to highlight lessons learned in creating an innovative culturally tailored strategy to engage people in physical activity and to raise awareness about racial and ethnic health disparities and to illustrate concrete examples of how the route has made an impact on minority health in the Pittsburgh area and how this might be replicated.
Learn more about the Underground Railroad Bicycle Route project.
Nurses and Barbers United: A Community-Based Approach To Prostate Screening of African-American Men
Although deaths from prostate cancer have been on the decline, prostate cancer remains the leading cancer among men and the second leading cause of cancer mortality among men in the United States. The prostate cancer incidence rate among African American men is 66% higher than the rate is in Caucasian men, and the prostate cancer death rate is two or more times as high among African Americans as in any other racial or ethnic group. The objectives of the research and the presentation were to describe an innovative approach to reaching and engaging African-American men in a conversation about prostate cancer screening, detection, and treatment, to discuss strategies used to get men screened for prostate cancer and to identify barriers and facilitators to providing community-based prostate screening in the African-American community.