“All that may be needed is that the injustice in the world be mentioned so that nobody can ever say, ‘Nobody told me.’” – Lucille Clifton

 In this issue, we find inspiration in stories from our community. Select stories you are about to read were written as part of a Worcester Clemente course, “Storytelling Our Way to Sal Health Equity,” funded by Mass Humanities. Clemente is an award-winning program that offers free college-level courses to highly motivated low-income adults committed to improving their own lives as well as their families and communities. This project brought together a group of Clemente students to share stories of their experiences of illness, disability, caregiving, and healthcare.  It also brought together a group of medical professionals willing to tell stories of their experiences working with members of historically marginalized communities.

 On this page, you will read stories from this project that will take you places you may never have been before: a porch where a teenage girl tries to shelter her hungry baby from snowstorms, an encampment where a doctor moves from tent to tent to attend to homeless patients, a shelter where a man is having a heart attack, a home where two sisters are being sexually abused by a foster parent.  It took courage for many of these authors to share such intimate and difficult moments from their lives with people they do not know—and sometimes have no reason to trust. Too often, these writers have felt unseen and unheard. Sometimes they have avoided going to doctors or hospitals because they fear how they will be received.  But these authors write in the radically optimistic hope that if they tell their stories you will listen, empathize with their suffering, and respect their humanity.  And that, after all, is the foundation of health equity.

Lucia Z. Knoles, Ph.D.

Professor of English, Assumption University