J. Nelson-Weaver, director of Health Partners.   Photo: Urban News

Staff reports

J. Nelson-Weaver is director of Health Partners, a non-profit community health coalition that serves Asheville and Buncombe County. J., who goes by her first initial, calls herself a community health organizer.

“I am SO glad that President Obama was a community organizer,” she says. “Now people have a better idea of what we do!”

As a community health organizer, Nelson-Weaver engages volunteers from throughout our community and helps them find ways to improve health in their own lives and in their neighborhoods.

“Health really is about more than the individual choices we each make,” she asserts. “It is about the opportunities — or lack of opportunities — that we all have to make healthy choices for ourselves and our families.”

Nelson-Weaver has been involved is fighting health disparities for many years. Health equity and parity is the idea that all Americans should have an equal chance for good health, no matter what part of town they live in or what color their skin. Every analysis, without exception, shows that health parity does NOT exist in America today, and many Asheville residents suffer disparities as extreme as those in cities around the country. Low-income people and people of color are more likely to have significant health problems and to die early than are upper-income white people. As a community health organizer, Nelson-Weaver recognizes that these disparities are just not right.

She is excited to be working with a wide variety of volunteers in the Health Equity and Parity Action team that she coordinates through Health Partners. She also serves on the board of the Asheville Buncombe Institute of Parity Achievement (ABIPA) and is co-chair of the board of the Institute for Dismantling Racism, based in Winston-Salem, NC.

Nelson-Weaver is a wife and mother of two young children. “If we don’t work together to improve our community for our children,” she asks, “who will?”

For more information about Health Partners, the Health Equity and Parity Team, and other community health initiatives at www.healthpartnerswnc.org .