Esarrah Hopkins serves as the operations and health equity manager of Black Mental Health Village. Prior to joining this North Nashville organization, she worked in the public health sector, most recently at Meharry Medical College.
Hopkins holds a master’s in public health and is a certified health education specialist, which she feels is a great fit to help develop and build out the model of Black Mental Health Village.
Even though she said she never expected to be in the nonprofit field, she enjoys learning and serving the community from this grassroots level. Hopkins joined Black Mental Health Village in 2024, after being recruited by Benaias Esayeas, founder and executive director of Black Mental Health Village.
With her history in program management, development, leading teams and as a health education specialist, it made Hopkins a great fit. She has not looked back.
What is the Black Mental Health Village, and how did it come to be?
Black Mental Health Village is a nonprofit organization based here in Nashville, Tennessee. We work to increase mental health education, awareness and access for black and minority communities specifically, but we create spaces for all to receive the care and support that they need in regard to mental health.
We also support advocacy and policy work as it pertains to health justice. We do a lot of community engagement and outreach to provide community members with free educational opportunities as well as some free resources related to mental health or harm reduction, sexual health. And we partner with organizations and individuals to create spaces that are culturally affirming because cultural wellness coincides with our overall well-being, and we recognize that. Especially for black and minority communities in a place like Nashville, it’s very important that those strengths are focused on and are nurtured to better support our communities in health and overall well-being.
You are the Operations and Health Equity Manager for the Black Mental Health Village. What does your work include?
On the operations side, I help and support our HR and our people management. I’m making sure that our interns, our staff and our contractors are aware of their deliverables. They have the resources to complete those deliverables and they are making that impact in the community.
I also support the coordination of our community engagement program, as well as our health equity program. Under our health equity program, I support our Health Justice Coalition, which works to build our policy and advocacy education knowledge as it pertains to tobacco and menthol. In addition, I support stakeholder engagement, making sure that we are out in the community building and sustaining relationships, making sure that we are mission aligned with organizations wanting to get in on this amazing work that we do, and just making sure that we are building our ecosystem of support for the community.
I also support our marketing and communication. I make sure that we are letting people know what’s going on with Black Mental Health Village, making sure our social media is up to date with all the amazing work that we’re doing, making sure that we are getting those regularly scheduled communications and meetings on the book with people involved in our work and making sure that our data collection is up to date and that our evaluations are being managed to make sure that the programs are running smoothly.
How do people go about finding your services?
We have a few avenues. We have an online intake form. Once that intake form is completed, whether for adults or youth, we have our case management intern who connects you with our in-house clinicians or our master level interns, or we can support you with an external referral to a provider that can meet your needs.
One thing that Black Mental Health Village is able to do is provide free therapy services for individuals who do not have insurance. And so, if you do not have insurance, we can make sure that we can connect you with one of our clinical interns so that you can get the mental health support and care that you need. And if you do have insurance, we make sure to work with you. A lot of people who come to us are looking for providers who look like us, though, black providers who kind of understand more about what they’re going through. And so we make sure we support them in connecting them with what they need.
Let’s talk a little about the gap in access to mental health for minority populations. What are some of the biggest hurdles the Black Mental Health Village is working to overcome?
The gap in mental health access for minority populations includes a range of things: not having people who look like us in the field providing that care, the cost for the mental health care, as well as accessibility, transportation or anything like that. Also having major distrust for medical institutions because of things that have happened in history. There’s a lot of stigma as it relates to mental health care, especially in the black community, [including from] people who are experiencing mental health issues being criminalized.
At Black Mental Health Village, we are definitely working to make sure that we’re operating from a trauma-informed approach, but also a healing-centered approach. We know about the negative things the communities that we are in have gone through historically. But we are also building on their strengths.
We’re working to make sure people know about the free care that we’re able to provide. But we’ve also taken it a step further, and we have implemented a better case management and referral system. We know that a lot of times people struggling in mental health, they come and they get the therapy services, but when they walk out their door, it’s a whole list of other things that they may be struggling with — whether it’s rent, whether it’s taking care of their children, things like that.
And so what we’ve done now is better integrate a referral system and partnerships with [other] organizations to make sure that individuals’ needs across the board are being met.
So working with our ecosystem definitely is important, to avoid working in a silo, and to make sure that we’re connecting not only ourselves but also the people we serve with other organizations doing amazing work as well.
Are there enough African American mental health care providers in our community?
No, unfortunately, there aren’t enough African American mental health providers or health care providers in general in our community. It’s definitely why Black Mental Health Village has been extremely intentional about supporting black master-level interns with completing their practicum requirements and getting the experience with us to make sure that they go on to get their license and to make sure that they’re developing into amazing professionals and getting all of the tools and educational experiences while they’re here.
We really are striving to continue building that clinical intern program to make sure that we’re supporting as many black students reaching those goals because there definitely is a need for more of us in the field who look like us, and more of us who understand the intricate experiences that we face as black people.
There is still a huge stigma attached to mental health care. How do you work to overcome those?
I think for Black Mental Health Village specifically, we create so many spaces where we make people feel comfortable talking about their experiences. Stigmas are held because not enough people are talking about their experiences and not enough people are being validated in their experiences.
So whether it is a webinar, whether it’s a community engagement event, whether it’s a wellness program, or anything that we have going on in the community, we make people feel seen and we make them feel heard. But beyond that, we’re making sure that they are getting connected to the health care that they need.
But also Black Mental Health Village, we have a diverse team. We have people who are LGBTQ, people who work with the justice system, people who work with youth, the homeless population as well. So we have a team that understands the diverse needs of different communities and the things that they may be afraid to talk about in regard to mental health. So we’re definitely making sure that our team is adept and embraces a lot of those things to make sure that all communities are comfortable talking about their experiences.
What are the biggest goals for Black Mental Health Village?
[One of the goals is] creating that self-sustaining ecosystem of care, making sure that clients and community members are supported through clinical care, through communal engagement, on the policy and advocacy side, and as well as the cultural side. We want to make sure those four domains are working together efficiently because all of them intersect in regard to well-being.
We also want to continue expanding our network and the model that we have here in Nashville to other regions. Right now, we have just completed the creation of our Memphis chapter, and they now have confirmed leadership, so they’re getting ready to launch. We want to continue spreading the Black Mental Health Village model across regions, especially within regions with a black population that are not having their needs met.
We also want to continue to develop the skills of our interns and our employees because we know that they won’t be here at Black Mental Health Village forever. But when they go out in the community or they go out beyond in their professional careers, they have learned a good fundamental knowledge about the things that are affecting the community and the ways to better serve the community.
You are a chapter chair for an organization called Sisters in Public Health. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and why it is important, also important to you?
The founder, Angela Frazier, was a public health student in Texas, and she found that there was a need for the women in public health to have a space where they could gather and empower each other and make sure that their overall wellness was being nurtured as they were doing public health work. It grew into this national thing where there are chapters in a bunch of major cities.
I noticed that there was [no chapter] here in Nashville. I knew that here in Nashville, there is an amazing network of women in public health that I had met along the way or that I just have been admiring from the work that they do in the community. And so I applied to usher in the Nashville chapter, and I got the opportunity to do so. Our first event went really well. We got to meet a lot of women in public health, and we are connected and we’re looking forward to implementing more events throughout the year for even more women in public health to come and connect with each other and just pour into themselves.
As a young leader working for a nonprofit organization that serves minority populations in Nashville, are there any barriers you observe and experiences that make it difficult to serve at the grassroots level?
I will say the lack of funding as well as the harmful policies that are being implemented have impacted organizations that serve minority populations. It made it more difficult for us to have the resources and the capacity to do the work.
Those are really the main barriers, but we come across so many individuals and organizations who are really passionate about their work, especially here in North Nashville. We work with so many organizational leaders who are very adamant about persisting in light of a lot of the attacks on organizations that serve these populations. That has been a big motivator for us to continue doing the work that we do. And as long as there is a need in the community, we will continue to work to meet those needs of the community.