Achieving Health Equity for Latine Families
On a recent afternoon in the Baltimore neighborhood of Fells Point, Rachel Aylor chatted with her friend, a street vendor, who told her that he had recently paid thousands to smuggle his son into the U.S. from El Salvador.
But soon the child became sick, prompting an expensive visit to a hospital emergency department and placing the family under enormous financial stress. “The father said, ‘Rachel, please help me. What can we do?’”
“I want Latine children and families to live their lives to the fullest potential, without the barriers of a particular immigration or socioeconomic status.”
Aylor’s life mission is improving health outcomes and equity for Latine children and families, a calling that began in her childhood. She frequently traveled with her family to visit communities in the U.S. and Latin America, with whom she shared a language and culture, but experienced different day-to-day social, economic, and political realities. Shaped by her mother’s job leading Urban Strategies—an organization that helps Latine children and families thrive—Aylor began volunteering for a nonprofit near her family home in Arlington, Virginia, tutoring immigrant elementary school children.
After graduating from Baylor University, she went to work for Urban Strategies herself, starting a new Early Head Start program in Houston, Texas. Two years later, she relaunched the National Alliance for Hispanic Families: a nonprofit that had been dormant for over a decade. There, she directed a three-year, $1.5 million federally funded grant focused on teen pregnancy prevention in Latine youth, as well as a $100,000 program focused on increasing access to COVID-19 vaccines.
At the Bloomberg School, Aylor plans to focus on better understanding how social determinants of health affect the U.S. Latine community. “Everyone should be able to access whatever they need to stay healthy, regardless of whether they’re documented or earning minimum wage,” she says.
