MLK Jr. Steward of the Dream Award winner Denise Rodgers explains how social determinants, including racism, are fueling a health crisis in New Jersey's Black communities
Denise Rodgers, Rutgers Health vice chancellor for interprofessional programs, has spent her career fighting health disparities that disproportionately affect African American communities. In recognition for her work, Rodgers was recently named the 2025 MLK Jr. Steward of the Dream Award recipient by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and the Newark chapter of the NAACP.
"Martin Luther King Jr. has been a hero for most of my life," Rodgers said. "To receive an award in his name is particularly meaningful."
The Steward of the Dream Award is presented annually to leaders for their contributions to the African American community and community members of the greater Newark area. Past recipients include the late New Jersey state senator Ronald L. Rice; A. Zachary Yamba, former president of Essex County College; and former Newark councilwoman Mamie Bridgeforth.
Rodgers explains her approach to solving health inequities - and how she uses anger as a secret weapon.
How did you get into family medicine?
I'm fortunate to have grown up with a father who was a Ph.D. psychologist and a mother who was a nurse. I came from a very solid, highly educated, middleclass family, with parents who had real commitments to giving back. They instilled that in me, and it's part of why I went into family medicine.
I believed that, as a family doctor, if I could get people to understand what was adversely impacting their health, we could create the revolution and make the world better. Maybe that was somewhat naïve, but it was the motivation.
What's been your biggest contribution to improving health outcomes in Newark?
My proudest accomplishment is playing a role in preventing an outbreak of COVID in homeless shelters. In 2019, I became chair of the Newark Homelessness Commission. My role, while obviously never anticipating COVID, was to think about meeting some of the health care needs of people experiencing homelessness in the city.
Then COVID came along, and it became clear, given the mechanisms of contagion, that shelters were going to be very high-risk places. It also became very clear that we needed to try to get as many people experiencing homelessness as possible off the streets.
At our urging, the city rented out a Holiday Inn, and we were able to house many people who had been very reluctant to go to a shelter because of their high levels of substance use disorder and persistent mental illness. The beauty of this work was that at 8 o'clock every Friday morning for two years, representatives from the shelters, the city health department, the state health department, mental health agencies, drug treatment organizations and other community-based organizations came together to talk about what the program needed. What are the supplies we need to procure? How do we get N95 masks? To protect people living in shelters we wondered, for example, if we should change the orientation of how beds were arranged: head-to-foot, rather than head-to-head?
This was in the early days of this pandemic, when we were seeing a significant number of deaths. I was having nightmares about what we were going to do if we got a major outbreak in a shelter. Fortunately, in part because of our efforts, we never did.
if you can't access fresh food, if you can't buy medicines, if you don't have adequate housing or a safe neighborhood where you can walk, you're at a distinct health disadvantage.
Denise Rodgers
In some ways then the pandemic was an opportunity to help a historically underserved population, right?
People came together because this is an incredibly vulnerable population. If you are experiencing homelessness in the United States, in general, you have a significantly reduced life expectancy. You often have a higher burden of chronic illnesses. And then, of course, you have on top of that the issues related to substance use disorder and severe, persistent mental illness in many people living on the streets. The opportunity it gave us was to just do a better job of taking care of this population.
Of course, while we did some wonderful work, when the acute problem went away, the federal money also went away and many of those same people were back on the street again. That said, we did learn many lessons from that experience.
You've focused your career on so-called social determinants of health: nonmedical factors influencing health outcomes. Explain what these are.
Social determinants have far more impact on people's overall health outcomes than what I do as a physician. Sure, physicians are important; we sometimes save lives and we help people manage disease. But if you can't access fresh food, if you can't buy medicines, if you don't have adequate housing or a safe neighborhood where you can walk, you're at a distinct health disadvantage.
There is another element of health disparities that must be mentioned, and that's racism. Racism is a foundational contributor to many of the problems that result in the health disparities that we see, particularly among African Americans in this country, and certainly in our own backyard here in New Jersey and in Newark.
I recently gave grand rounds (meetings for physicians to learn about specific topics) to the emergency medicine department at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where I discussed the connection between health, social determinants and racism. At the end of talk, I told those in attendance that one of the saddest realities for me today, in 2025, is that there are now states where I can't give that talk, where I can't talk about racism and what it has done to discriminate and lead to disparities in all kinds of things. That's tragic to me and a disservice to learners.
There is another element of health disparities that must be mentioned, and that's racism. Racism is a foundational contributor to many of the problems that result in the health disparities that we see, particularly among African Americans in this country.
Denise Rodgers
How do you not get angry?
Oh, I'm angry. I'm not afraid of being angry. But it's what I do with that anger. That anger fuels my passion to continue to speak out, to continue to find ways to try to make this better. Take my asthma work and the Rutgers Student Asthma Corps. Who dies from asthma? Black and brown children. You don't find white kids in the suburbs dying from asthma. I don't want any children dying from asthma.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming years in terms of health care and health professions education. There are concerns that access to care for the poor may be reduced. Over the last decade, more and more universities have been willing to look at things like social determinants and racism as they relate to health outcomes. But now, we're seeing major pushback. In Florida, for example, people aren't giving these lectures, or if they are, they're being creative in how they talk about it. The University of Michigan is backtracking on its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Even Harvard has backed off on a lot of its DEI work. We'll have to wait and see what the overall impact of this pushback will be.
