Collections by Michelle Brown WSG For the Love of HER's Famika Edmund

Famika Edmond is a Senior Public Health Educator for the HIV/STI Prevention Division of Detroit Health Department.

As a child, her mother brought Famika and her siblings to Michigan from New York. When her family found themselves homeless, Famika signed out of high school and went to work to help take care of the family. Six months later, after her family was able to get housing, she went back to school and received her GED. One of her goals was to attend a four-year college. She ended up getting accepted to four different colleges. Famika attended Eastern Michigan University, where she completed her Bachelor of Science degree in Health Administration. She also earned her Master’s in Health Administration and is returning for a second Masters in Public Health.

Famika realized the need for women to have a safe space to be able to express themselves and be supported by other women. She founded and created ‘For the Love of H.E.R. (Healing, Empowerment, Resilience), which is a five-week workshop in which participants are given the opportunity to examine their journey and its rising themes in order to identify experiences that have potentially blocked or slowed personal and or professional growth.

In February 2019 she was accepted into Black AIDS Institutes, Black AIDS Ambassador program. The program’s purpose will is to build engagement and movement around HIV and sexual health for Black women in the Metro Detroit Area.  She was also part of a Detroit based team scheduled to present an NGO Parallel event as part of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The panel was canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis but Famika and her team hope to present the panel at other venues later in the year.