CINCINNATI — Phil Cunningham stops before he starts.
“Unfortunately,” Cunningham said. “No, not even unfortunately.”
He takes a breath.
“Because you and I have a saying that nothing is wasted,” Cunningham said. “You don’t really understand joy until you’ve felt some level of pain.”
He begins again. He’s looking directly at Phyllis Jeffers-Coly, sitting in almost the exact same place where they first met.
“It wasn’t hopelessness,” Cunningham said. “It was a feeling of helplessness.”
In 2019, he was excited to become a father. His wife was giving a presentation in Indianapolis when she felt something on stage. They rushed to the hospital.
Cunningham soon became a dad, many weeks ahead of schedule. But his son died a short time later. His father died the next week.
“I don’t always like to lead with this particular story,” Cunningham said, "but my father and my son were buried on the same day."
See how Cunningham found peace in the video below:
His father’s name was Phil, and his son’s name was going to be Phil.
“It felt lonely to be the last Phil in my family,” Cunningham said.
That's the grief he was dealing with when he met Jeffers-Coly, a yoga instructor and co-founder of Diasporic Soul. She tells me Cunningham was in disbelief when she suggested yoga could help.
But on the balcony at the Cincinnati Art Museum, he tried it.
“We want it to feel like you’re coming into the barbershop, except there are yoga mats,” Jeffers-Coly said.
Cunningham was there because he needed to do something with all of his emotions. Still stung by the way he was treated during his son’s birth, he created a database of Black medical professionals.
“I was trying to get in to see the birth of my son," Cunningham said. "And the doctors said baby daddies aren’t allowed in here.”
But he quickly realized a database by itself wouldn’t solve these systemic problems. Because of all the doctors in America, African Americans only make up about 5% of them, according to research from the Association of American Medical Colleges. African Americans make up about 14% of the population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“There just isn’t a big enough pool,” Cunningham said.
That’s why he and Jeffers-Coly started meeting with Black men themselves. To create safe places to talk about mental health — or just take a deep breath.
They call it the Peace of Mind Project, and they say it’s working. They’ve spent more than a year meeting regularly with 50 men. And they say the results are clear: Being part of a community who can understand you helps tremendously.
“I’m in awe,” Jeffers-Coly said. “And I haven’t been in awe since I was six.”
On Friday, Cunningham and Jeffers-Coly will speak at a Black mental health summit, organized by Black Women Cultivating Change. The free event focuses on educating medical professionals about working with Black patients, while also trying to diversify the health field.
Cunningham says he started this work for himself. And he's happy to help anyone else he can.
“I am a different man than I was when I first sat down here," he said.
Want to hear more stories like this?
To register for the free Black mental health summit, you can click on this link. You can also sign up for the Peace of Mind project by clicking on this link.
Here is more information:
Black Mental Health Summit
5600 Chappell Crossing Boulevard
West Chester Township, OH 45069
Friday, July 18 // 9 a.m. - 3 p.m.
Doors open at 8:30 a.m.
