Opening the Dialogue
Dr. Quinyatta Mumford said she understands creating open dialogue among teens and young adults about sex education will not come easy.
Such, however, remains her goal. Through Village Public Health, the Little Rock agency she founded in 2018 as Mumford and Associates and rebranded last year, Mumford seeks to help reverse the rising rate of sexually transmitted infections among Arkansans ages 13 to 24.
Although STIs are on the decline overall nationally, a November report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Arkansas is home to some of the highest STI rates, especially among the 13-to-24 age group.
Public health has been a career-long journey for Mumford, and she knows her stuff. She received her Doctor of Public Health from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock and a Master of Public Health from Walden University. Mumford is the former director of the Arkansas Department of Health Rural Health & Primary Care program, and she also served ADH in several roles as an epidemiologist. In addition, she is MPH program director and assistant professor at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine in Jonesboro, as well as an adjunct professor of epidemiology at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia.
Mumford is taking her expertise on the road in Arkansas as part of Village Public Health Vibe Check Tour, through which health educators visit schools, churches and other organizations to speak with students and young adults in partnership with ADH. She said the program is designed to empower Arkansas youth and families to take charge of their sexual health and noted a positive response to its launch. The tour’s first stop was Focus Academy in Pine Bluff.
Mumford said she understands the cultural reluctance to talk openly about STIs. After all, she grew up in rural Alabama and sees many similarities between her native and adoptive states.
“Part of the problem is the lack of sex education in schools, and so no open dialogue,” she said. “Our goals are to normalize the conversation and remove the stigma. If we can just create an open dialogue, we can get people to think about it in a different way. We want to hear them say, ‘I never thought about it that way.’”
Mumford has trained hundreds of people to receive Youth Mental Health First Aid certification from the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. The health educators speak with and listen to students and young adults at tour stops. Mumford, the only certified trainer in the state, calls them the first line of defense.
“Young people are missing that sense of community that we used to enjoy,” she said, “so we focus in on a village mentality.”
That village mentality was the motivation behind her firm’s rebrand as Village Public Health.
“We shifted the name to make it more relatable,” she said. “We offer a nonclinical, holistic wellness place to go to discuss public health issues.”
Mumford & Associates was founded to provide in-office health education in collaboration with local physicians, but Mumford said she began noticing how more teens and young adults were dealing with mental health issues, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. She said she knew something was missing.
“We had a mental health crisis going on,” she said. “I realized there was a different population I needed to focus on because they were struggling.”
The rebrand also brought a new approach, she added — community-based participatory research using a peer-to-peer model to help resonate with youth.
Mumford said she is looking to take the tour to those counties in Arkansas with the highest rates of STIs.
“We go to schools, churches, after-school programs,” she said. “You bring the audience; we’ll bring the open dialogue and health professionals.”
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