Maya McFadden Photo
Sharon Jones McCann, Malcolm Welfare, Jorge Lopez, Theodore Brooks, James Flaherty, and James Rawlings at Sunday’s event.
The corner of Chapel and Orchard streets is now furnished with a community reminder of the fight for awareness of sickle cell disease.
The reminder is in the form of a sign erected outside Michelle’s House, a first-of-its-kind community center offering a second home to those in the community with Sickle Cell Disease. The “Michelle” in the title refers to former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Members of the Michelle’s House Board of Directors gathered Sunday to celebrate the new sign, and the work of the center, which is focused on a disease that predominantly afflicts the Black community.
“When you bring awareness, you bring prevention,” said James Rawlings, the driving force behind the center, the executive director, and a retired Yale New Haven Hospital executive.
Since opening in 2019 the center has focused its programming on bringing awareness and prevention to the community and a “beacon of hope” to those affected.
The board is working to bring visibility to the disease and its needed support at home and beyond. “Sickle cell advocacy does not get funded like other diseases, there’s a stigma,” said Rawlings.
Board member Theodore Brooks has a niece with sickle cell, so he has learned firsthand what youth living with sickle cell need to avoid feeling left out from their community.
Board Chair Sharon Jones McCann grew up in the surrounding Dwight neighborhood. “Sickle cell is right here in our streets,” said Jones NcCann. “This tells them we’re here for our community.”
The center provides resources to the community and a “landing place” for those with sickle cell to feel comfortable, said Board secretary and Yale Patient Services Manager James Flaherty.
Flaherty is a nurse manager of a general medicine unit that specializes in sickle cell disease and oncology at Yale New Haven Hospital. “The community needs this just as much as the patients,” he said.
Board member and teacher Malcolm Welfare will help with the center’s tutoring program for students with sickle cell.
While a teen growing up in Rhode Island, board member Jorge Lopez recalled, he had a friend who he would chase around the neighborhood while playing. Until one day when his friend came home with crutches and told him she had sickle cell disease. “I didn’t want to ask any questions,” he said. That was Lopez’s first encounter with the disease.
“Most don’t know their trait status because they don’t know sickle cell is genetic,” said Rawlings.
During the pandemic the center has been meeting with its clients via Zoom.