Built from lived experience, clinical practice, and the belief that access should not depend on who knows how to navigate the system.

From Humble Beginnings

Brittney D. Reed grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta, in a region shaped by agriculture and by what happens when access to food and access to good medical care depend on geography. Her mother is a hospitalist who served as executive director of a hospital clinic in their hometown before supporting the opening of a specialty hospital in Texas. Her father spent the bulk of his career in engineering and machinery. Brittney came up understanding land, food, labor, and care as questions the public system is supposed to answer, and as questions a community has to answer for itself when the public system does not.

Shamea L. Price grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, in a city shaped by community and by what happens when substance use, gun violence, health systems, and public institutions collide in the same neighborhoods. She came up understanding caregiving as both a daily practice and a public health question.

Gun violence touched both of their families. Loss, caregiving, and the realities of public systems were part of their formation long before either of them had the professional language for the work they would eventually do.

Why Place Matters

Pine Bluff and Wilmington are not background details. They are part of the public health story. Pine Bluff sits in the Mississippi Delta region, an area with documented rural and Delta health-access disparities, chronic-disease burden, and elevated firearm mortality. Wilmington has been examined publicly as a city where firearm violence has reached crisis levels, with measurable impact on youth, families, and community trust in institutions.

JSPHI's work begins from that kind of place-based understanding. Where someone grows up shapes what they learn to expect from a system, and which seams they learn to bridge alone.

Loved Alma Mater, God Bless Thee and Thine

Brittney and Shamea met in 2007 as Resident Assistants in Jenkins Hall at Delaware State University. Less than three months into the academic year, on September 21, two seventeen-year-old freshmen were shot on campus. One of them was a resident in their hall. She died of her injuries thirty-two days later, on October 23, without regaining consciousness. The shooting came roughly five months after the Virginia Tech massacre and put Delaware State at the center of a national conversation about gun violence on college campuses, including on the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities. CNN and the major networks were on campus by morning.

For Brittney and Shamea, it was not a news cycle. It was a young woman they were responsible for and could not protect. They did not turn the loss into a campus story or a public talking point. They held it privately, between them, and it became part of their shared formation.

In the months that followed, Brittney lived with private symptoms of post-traumatic stress and almost no campus-level mental health infrastructure to meet what she was carrying. The absence pushed both of them, then and over the years that followed, to look for what mental health support could look like for their peers when institutions did not have it on offer.

They served as Resident Assistants for the next two years, holding the dorm life of younger students through the long aftermath of what had happened. Brittney served as Class President and was active in Student Government, learning early what it meant to carry a room and shape what a place was building. Shamea was active with Young Democrats and engaged in off-campus advocacy work focused on women and reproductive health, where the public health questions she would carry into her career first started forming.

Different Sides of the Same System

After college, their paths separated in form and converged in substance. Brittney's work spanned bioterrorism preparedness with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, education, workforce development, and ultimately organizational strategy at the intersection of public, private, and social-impact leadership. Each domain was different. The question underneath did not change. Where do public systems hold, where do they fail, and who pays the cost of those gaps.

Shamea moved into nursing and stayed there. Over the next decade she practiced in triage, women's health, urology, gynecology, dialysis, family planning, patient education, and community health. She saw the gap from the clinical side every day. A patient who would not return after the first visit. A referral that would never be picked up. A treatment plan the system would not hold long enough to work.

They had been watching the same gap from different angles for more than a decade before either of them gave it a name.

When the Gap Became Personal

For both of them, the gap stopped being something they observed in other people's lives.

Over the next decade, Brittney lived through ongoing gun violence in her community, the sudden deaths of close family and close friends, and her own aggressive stomach cancer diagnosis and the long treatment that followed. She moved through surgery, recovery, and the aftermath of being a patient inside the system she had been writing about. The seams she had named for clients and at conference tables were now the seams she was being asked to bridge on her own behalf, while still doing the work.

In the same years, Shamea was raising two children, caring for her aging grandmother, and supporting extended family through illness, loss, and the long ordinary demands of caregiving. She practiced nursing through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, holding patients and her own family through a public health emergency that strained every part of the system at once. The clinical view of the gap stopped being a vantage point. It became the texture of every week, every shift, and every late-night phone call from a family member who needed help moving through a system that was not designed to move with them.

The system they had each studied was now the system they had to live inside, alongside the families they were responsible for. The seam was costing both of them. The work they had been doing separately had to become something they could carry together.

JSPHI Becomes the Work

JSPHI is the work that emerged when both perspectives finally needed shared institutional form. One of them had learned the system from inside the patient experience. One had learned it from inside the clinical practice. Both had spent years quietly navigating the same system on behalf of the people in their own networks, helping family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues find their way through institutions that were not built to find them back.

The organization is not a clinic, a campaign, a referral list, or a service program. It is the institutional form of a conversation Brittney and Shamea have been holding for more than twenty years, and the formal extension of work they had already been doing personally, for the people who came to them when the system would not show up.

They have intentionally founded JSPHI to be connective tissue for communities like Pine Bluff and Wilmington. The places where care, coverage, and public systems often live too far apart to reach the people who need them most. The work that holds them together, made durable, replicable, and capable of scale.