Erica Ahmed’s journey into entrepreneurship began more than a decade ago with the birth of a new baby. Her daughter had sensitive skin that nothing could fix. “There was a paucity of resources available, and what was there just didn’t work,” she said.

Ms. Ahmed, who works in public health, set out to make something that would cure her daughter’s skin issues completely.

Like countless Black woman before her, she began in her kitchen. “I started researching and experimenting until I came up with the right combination of natural, non-toxic ingredients,” Ahmed told For Harriet.

The process wasn’t easy. The budding businesswoman wasn’t a trained chemist, so testing and trials took time. But once she succeeded, the first products, that would later become her natural cleaning brand The Green Laundress were born.

Ms. Ahmed’s ingenuity came right on time. The marketplace is now ripe for natural cleaning brands. We’re witnessing a societal shift toward personal wellness and environmental protection that makes the benefits of a greener lifestyle clear.

Most consumers have no idea how many toxins we encounter every day or how much harm they do to our bodies. Exposure to unsafe chemicals carries great risk to women and children, in particular.

 In 2015, the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics stated that “widespread exposure to toxic environmental chemicals threatens healthy human reproduction.”

The American Lung Association warns that a host of products; including aerosol sprays, ammonia, bleach, detergent, as well as kitchen and bathroom cleaners, can cause an array of respiratory illnesses and even cancer.

And according to the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit organization focused on raising awareness on environmental and public health, many of the most harmful products rarely list all their ingredients on their labels, thus denying consumers of the ability to make an informed purchasing decision. They tested cleaning products and found that 53% contained products that harm your lungs.

Green Laundress products aim to be safe and effective. They contain pure essential oils to scent scrubs and sprays instead of fragrances that are often the culprit of respiratory issues. Gone are the days of having to air out a freshly cleaned room because of overpowering fumes. “You can actually inhale deeply without choking or fainting,” Ms. Ahmed said.

Switching your cleaning products is an essential part of living a healthy life, according to her. “I think it’s important for people to understand the importance of comprehensive wellness. You want to eat well. You want to clean greener. Exercise. Take care of yourself. It all goes together.”

But even when we know better, the transition to using new products can be difficult, and not just because of how well the harsher ingredients work. Ms. Ahmed knows how effective their branding is “I remember what my parents cleaned with when I was a child and how those messages and (commercial) jingles are forever entrenched in my mind.”

Ultimately, it all comes down to if Green Laundress products get the job done. If you’re used to harsh cleaning agents like Comet and Pinesol, you’re probably skeptical of the effectiveness of natural products.  Ahmed insists that hers is a better way. “We have been conditioned to believe that the only way to clean is with harsh chemicals.”

Surely, our ancestors didn’t use what many of us use now, yet their homes and clothing were immaculate. Nor did they eat what we eat—Again, comprehensive health—It all goes together.”

Growing a company is almost always an uphill climb, but she’s dedicated to making sure our communities can live and breathe well.

“Cleaning greener isn’t super sexy or exciting, yet it is so critical to our health and overall quality of life.”

by Shaneda Destine

August 2016 will mark a year since I decided to engage in a consistent practice of Bikram Yoga. Over the years I have tried countless diets and exercise regimens ranging from counting calories on My Fitness Pal, buying gym memberships, and lifting weights at home off and on. Though, I still struggle with reaching my goal weight and being consistent throughout my daily life as Ph.D. student, wife and provider—yoga is more than exercise to me.

 My first time trying yoga was on my winter break as a first year Ph.D. student at Howard University. The workload and commute caused stress on my relationships, overall ability to time-manage and my own self-care that I require as a self-proclaimed introvert. My first year of graduate school consisted of me waking up early to read for class, traveling an hour from Baltimore County to Washington, D.C., reading some more and taking night classes. There were times that I forgot to eat or didn’t have time to hydrate while chugging up Howard’s infamous hills from my parking space, blocks away. So, investing in yoga was about meditation and caring for myself for just an hour or more. Though my first encounter with yoga didn’t yield a consistent practice after school was back in session, it left an lasting impression.  When I moved closer to school, I tried Bikram Yoga in my second year at Howard and by my third year I was determined to put myself first and make it a consistent practice.
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." - Audre Lorde

Yoga works for me because I had an injury years ago that left me with metal in my right ankle, and it strengthens these muscles. It is my time to acknowledge the divine from within, appreciate myself and heighten my self-awareness. Yoga has become my sanctuary, my space to pray, meditate and be gentle with myself in a world that is often hostile to my being and everything I embody. I am a Black queer woman, married, academic struggling to breathe in many spaces such as this academic climate, queer space, Black space, white space hat often doesn’t value all of the intersections of my identity at once. When I walk into my regular practice at my yoga studio, I am taking my health into my control, valuing myself and appreciating all that I embody for an hour or two. That often reverberates throughout my day and gives me a new sense of reverence for all those struggling to breathe around me and with me.

Though my yoga practice is more about my spiritual and emotional decompression, the health disparities we face as Black women are important to note. Black women’s health disparities are a source of systemic injustices, but with knowledge of this we can begin to shift this paradigm by applying an intersectional lens.

Now when I think about the power to transform our health and the effects of the compounding inequalities we face as Black women, I can’t help but contextualize it within the many obstacles black women have faced throughout American history and beyond. I think about how my activism and scholarship, the overlap of my work and my being, often leaves me overwhelmed and underappreciated. I think about the struggles to breathe and survive in capitalism, heteropatriarchy and under white supremacy. And although it is overwhelming at times, I know that Black women realized a long time ago we have to demand space and time for our humanity. Activists, scholars and regular folk already knew what the world has yet to realize, that we are mothers of the universe, powerful beyond measure.

Putting our health first is also putting our rights to live, breathe and exist first. Yoga has connected me with the indigenous and ancestral practices that we have lost over centuries, that doesn’t divide holistic health, but values our spiritual, physical, emotional being all at once.  I’m reminded of a talk last year with Angela Davis at University of Maryland, when she spoke about the fear of telling her comrades in the 60s that she had practiced yoga during her time in jail and continued when she was released. Davis expressed her shame to tell her community that she was taking time to care for her wellbeing. This highlighted to me the complexities of our oppression and the need for us to continue to demand space for our own self-care.

Photo: iStockPhoto

Shaneda Destine is a wife, aunt, god mommy a yogini, Ph.D. student and professor in the DMV area. Her research focus on Black women activism and self-care. She is a sociologists by trade and a kid from Long Island, NY that loves poetry, yoga and cooking.

by Breannah Alexander

In late 2014 I was living in Atlanta, Georgia when a friend sent me a story surrounding residents complaining about contaminated water in Flint, Michigan. At the time of this story, the key element was that residents were getting sick from their water and had been advised to boil or use bottled water to bathe, brush teeth, wash dishes, prepare food or general consumption. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in September 2014, stated that the water of residents and businesses in certain areas of the city tested positive “when given a total coliform test, suggesting there may be a pathway for pathogens and fecal contamination,” as reported by Ron Fonger of MLive Media Group. The response they were met with was an advisory to boil the water before drinking. Here’s a detailed timeline of the water crisis.


On January 23, 2015, in a story published by the Detroit Free Press’ Robin Erb – the author asked a single question, “who wants to drink Flint’s water?” In the story, they captured the ongoing concerns of residents who had been complaining about rashes and elevated concerns about the long-term damage being cause by water distributed to Flint residents. One resident recalled “throwing up like bleach water.”

Residents were met with the continued assurances of the City and State of Michigan that the water was safe.

In September 2015 we learned that not only were the concerns of the residents justified but that, in a city where economic instability has already had a lasting impact on the outcomes of many residents, the future of the city’s children had been forever altered. When information was released by Hurley Medical Center, in Flint, that the proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood had nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River, a state of emergency should’ve been declared then.

Flint residents were met with a silence so deafening that one cannot ignore the glaring truths unveiled by this man-made disaster: a city met with economic strife was stripped of its rights by the most detrimental form of privilege, indifference.

For those of us who do anti-racism work, it’s easy for us to say that we have a race problem in every area of society – we are trained to look for it. However, if we had a race problem in 2015, the Flint crisis just made it an emergency.



As best said by the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board, “It’s not just derelict – it invokes inglorious comparison to other callous and insensitive official responses to tragedy. Think of the shameful federal response to Hurricane Katrina, where the same lack of urgency delayed life-saving aid. The poverty rate in Flint is 40%; 52% of Flint residents are African-American. And so we are prompted to ask: How would the state have responded to a crisis of such proportions in a community with more wealth and power?”

That statement appropriately frames why this places Michigan in a particular state of crisis as it relates to race. A state where the source of the Flint disaster can be pin pointed to the passage of legislation that evokes a selective notion of self-governance, the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act. A piece of legislation that empowers the Governor’s Office to “take over” any municipality or school district it deems as irresponsible. A piece of legislation that no one truly paid attention to – a law that authorizes selective disenfranchisement facilitated by the State of Michigan.

This legislative remedy to fiscal “irresponsibility” is racism baked in a beautiful cake that has an aftertaste reaching across color lines. Public Act 4 of 2011 (the actual legislation being referenced minus the assumption inducing name) should have been applied to countless municipalities whose financial woes hit the ceiling during economic downturns because recouping lost revenue while trying to maintain an infrastructure that was created to accommodate residents who sprawled and developed the now dwindling cities is actually quite complex. However, the cities where this maneuver was used had one key variable in common: communities with large minority populations.

Public Act 4 of 2011 empowers an individual (Emergency Financial Manager), who is not accountable to the public, to make decisions that elected officials are generally empowered to make by virtue of their election to represent the interests of the people they serve. The autocratic nature of Emergency Financial Managers is what opens the door to disasters like the one in Flint: one individual making decisions for a community he or she does not have a vested interest in. Gross negligence is why the concerns of residents voiced to a state that stood silent when asked to lead in cleaning up a mess they created were never heard.

Apathy is the reason it took a year and a half for the rest of us to pay attention. The type of apathy that our internalized bias evokes is what allows a Flint water crisis to exist in the first place. The summarily disregarded concerns of a largely minority community forces us to face the fact that racism was a culprit in this public health crisis. Racism is what causes the concerns of a city to go unnoticed in the public eye (with the exception of Rachel Maddow) when screaming about the concerns they have for their health. Racism is the reason thousands of children sat in school while being served poisoned water. Racism is what prevents the state from pouring resources into a community that is experiencing a form of trauma in which the state was the sole architect of.


Racism is what makes the aforementioned paragraph hard to swallow. I have a career rooted in deconstructing the ways in which racism plays out in our communities, within our institutions and amongst people. I write about what is happening in Flint as the outcome of a larger problem; people. We have a people problem when the immediate response to this crisis is the assumption that it was a disaster brought on by “their own” poor management. We have a people problem when we’ve passively allowed for the execution of legislation that has very publicly been disparately applied to communities in the state. We have a people problem when it takes a year and a half for us to hear our neighbors. We have a people problem because our hearing problem has everything to do with race. Our assumptions continue to shape the way we even discuss the crisis in Flint and our role in facilitating it. The answer here is simple, we are all accountable for this crisis but will we pretend to see fifty shades of nothing or get real about the problem?

We have a race emergency and kids had to be poisoned for us to see it.

The conversation surrounding Flint is first and foremost about the disenfranchisement of a city of people. Disenfranchisement is 100 percent about power. A deconstruction of racism is what should inform this conversation in looking at power and its use.

Photo: Linda Parton / Shutterstock.com

Breannah currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan working as a Program Administrator with Partners for a Racism-Free Community and is Founder of the think tank women reVamped. She is also Co-Chair of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network Grand Rapids board and a Leader with Opportunity Nation, a national campaign to increase economic mobility for young people in the United States.

I’ve been overweight as long as I can remember. Well, that’s not true. I was home for the holidays and on Christmas, I went to a couple of my aunts’ houses and saw pictures of myself when I was younger. I was surprised to see that I wasn’t overweight back then because that’s what I remember. But the reality is, the kindergarten enrollment cut off date in Memphis is September 1st. My birthday is in November, so I was almost six when school started, making me one of the older kids. This compounded by the fact that my siblings and I were naturally really solid and tall children, made me feel like a giant among my peers. Hence, I never noticed when I actually started abusing food and gaining weight at an excessive rate.

by Anna Gibson


A few months after her son’s birth, Starlisha Brim was diagnosed with lupus. The mother of a three year old lives in Detroit, Michigan and studied Broadcasting at Specs Howard School of Media Arts. The 24 year old explains that before she was diagnosed with lupus, she knew something was wrong. “I was like a robot waking up without oil,” she says. “My joints would be so achy I couldn’t extend my arms.”

Chronic illness is not always apparent in those who live with it. Millions of people each year deal with chronic illnesses that are both visible and invisible. One such illness is a disease that affects hundreds of thousands of individuals in the United States alone: sickle cell disease. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, sickle cell disease affects 90,000 to 100,000 Americans. Far from being a “black disease,” as it’s most commonly thought of being, it occurs across a number of different ethnicities.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, sickle cell anemia—the most common form of the sickle cell disease—is “a serious disorder in which the body makes sickle-shaped red blood cells.” Sickle-shaped means that the red blood cells are shaped like a crescent. The disease causes pain in various places in the body, at times causing hospitalization. In order to better understand sickle cell, I had the opportunity to speak to Adrianne Locke, a 42-year-old woman that’s suffered from sickle cell disease since her diagnosis at age 6. She’s had a number of things to say about the disorder, various obstacles she’s encountered, as well as personal triumphs on the road to recovery.
Adrianne recounted a number of challenges she’s faced in dealing with her illness—specifically the way her pain has progressed over the years. She explains that she went through a period of remission from 6th to 11th grade, before the disease came back. “During the 12th grade, I suddenly was just sick, it just hit me. I remember going to a ceremony after school and all of a sudden being overcome with pain. I remember not being able walk from the church, I was so sick. My friends almost had to carry me. The pain became worse as the disease progressed. As you become an adult the disease may cause more serious issues. The pain was bad, but got more severe after the remission.”

For black women, it can be extremely hard to take our limitations into consideration; especially when it comes to illness. In this manner, we are our own worst critics, chastising ourselves for “feeling weak.” Taking advantage of public services like social security, disability, and various other programs are sometimes shunned. However, Adrianne has embraced a number of these services, relinquishing herself of the “strong black woman” myth. Far from making her weak in the process, she’s been able to approach her experience with pragmatism. She knows what she can and cannot do, and acts accordingly. By detailing her own health problems, she hopes that black women everywhere will learn to take their chronic illness—no matter the form—more seriously

To emphasize that point, Adrianne explained that hospital visits weren’t just the result of the pain that comes with sickle cell disease: “Sickle cell can cause additional issues, especially with the joints. I’ve had to deal with numerous hip replacements, and my shoulders are also deteriorating. I’ve also had to get my gallbladder removed and I’ve had a number of blood transfusions. I’ve dealt with pneumonia numerous times in my journey. Not a lot of people are aware that sickle cell can cause those problems.”

Adrianne also spoke extensively about her experiences with strangers who assume she isn’t ill. “Because sickle cell isn’t a ‘visible’ disorder, if I parked in the handicap section and hopped out of car without my cane, I would get strange stares from people. One time I got pulled over by a police officer and had to show my license and the card that shows that I’m handicapped… Another time, a woman shouted at me that I didn’t belong in the handicapped space I’d parked in.”
Studies have shown that police officers are far more suspicious of black people compared to other races, even on a subconscious level. This discrimination and mistrust leads to unfair judgment and scrutiny. Surely if Adrianne was white, she wouldn’t be confronted in such a manner, disabled or not.

Despite all these obstacles, Adrianne’s life serves as an example that no matter what the circumstance you find yourself in, you can still beat the odds and living a fulfilling life. She describes her greatest triumph: “When I think of what I’m most proud of, it’s getting my master’s degree in internet marketing.” Though many people assume that chronic illness is a handicap, people can still lead full lives; it’s just a matter of determination and the will to succeed.

Adrianne’s journey is an example of a woman who’s struggled with a chronic disease, but living life on her own terms. She’s set firm boundaries and moved steadily towards her goals—no matter how challenging. Her life is proof that one can thrive, despite a chronic illness. She demonstrates that even with a chronic illness, it’s how you react to the challenges you face that makes all the difference.

Photo: Shutterstock

by Makeda Vaughn


There are many reasons why working out at home can be more efficient (and beneficial) than going to the gym or exercising outdoors. The winter weather, busy schedules, and malaise caused by “that time of the month” can all make us reluctant to leave home for physical activity. However, this doesn’t mean that one cannot still work on their fitness. If you read my recent post titled “7 Fitness and Health Hacks for Busy People”, I mentioned the at-home workout as a particularly helpful hack. Well, here are some easy home workout videos targeting specific exercises or muscles groups, that you can use as a resource when your desire for exercise is at odds with your busy schedule, budget, or reluctance to leave the house.

by Nneka M. Okona


Black women have been committed to the well-being, prosperity, and advancement of communities all throughout history. For many of us, this has been currently realized by the Black women who are at the forefront of the #BlackLivesMatter movement which continues to unfold across the country. But still, there are millions of other Black women organizing to create, ensure, and protect opportunities for their sisters. From public policy, education, social justice, economic development, and health and wellness, many organizations founded by and for Black women—whether national or local in scope—have erected spaces to carry out that work. Here are just a few of these organizations that you should know about. Visit their websites to find out more about their work, as well as research how you can become involved or donate to keep to their efforts for their continued success and sustainability.

There are just a few days left in 2014, so many of us have already turned our sights on the New Year. While many people criticize New Year’s Resolutions, it is natural to reflect upon the previous year and to have general hopes or goals for the year ahead. And so often, Black women are discouraged from focusing on their own dreams and wellbeing. Thus, we’ve created a list of “resolutions” that every Black woman should think about adopting this year, as a way of affirming our self-worth.

by Elizabeth Cohen for CNN

It can be exhausting nursing a child through a nasty bout with the flu, so imagine how 22-year-old Fatu Kekula felt nursing her entire family through Ebola.

Uterine fibroid tumors are one of the leading causes of hysterectomies in African-American woman. Throughout the years, my doctor had diagnosed and treated mine with a ‘don’t bother them unless they’re bothering you’ mindset.  Approximately four years ago, I woke up bothered. A large fibroid had interfered with the flow of blood to my left leg, causing a blood clot.  A clot that, had left undetected, could’ve traveled to my heart and killed me.

A new study shows that black women tend to have higher rates of high blood pressure than any other group.

According to a new study out of Vanderbilt University, black women are much more likely to have high blood pressure than black men, white women or white men.

In a new study by Kaiser Permanente, published in Neurology, it was discovered that Multiple Sclerosis is more common in African-American Women than Caucasian, Asian and Hispanic Women. Multiple Sclerosis is now added to the long list of diseases that affect the African-American race more than others.