St. Luke Legacy Center: How Black and Brown Led Organizations Follow the Footsteps of Maggie L. Walker
Partner Spotlights are a platform for Robins Foundation grantees to highlight their important work and for Robins Foundation to recognize the incredible efforts and successes of our partners. This month, our Administrative and Operations Coordinator, Annaliese Santana, interviewed Korinn Y. Carter, Co-Founder, President, and CEO of the St. Luke Legacy Center. Following the footsteps of Maggie L. Walker, the St. Luke Legacy Center provides culturally conscious wraparound services to underrepresented communities in Richmond. In 2024 alone, this essential organization served hundreds of individuals in collaboration with at least 40 local organizations and businesses. Throughout her interview, Korinn provided poignant insights on the importance of culturally informed care, uplifting underrepresented communities, and improving capacity building resources for Black and Brown led organizations and businesses.
Can you please explain, at a high level, what St. Luke Legacy Center does?
The St. Luke Legacy Center is a community development center and organization with the goal of providing wraparound programs and resources that meet an entire family’s needs – from birth until death. We are built on the legacy of Ms. Maggie Walker. We are really trying to fill those huge footsteps and create a generational impact like her and advance our community in a variety of ways.
At the St. Luke Legacy Center, our pillars of health are physical, mental, financial, social-emotional; all of which ultimately changes our community’s health. Our offerings are culturally competent, relevant, informed in nature, and holistic. We’re working to introduce practices to our community that may not be accessible, affordable, or even something that they knew existed, because these resources can help them build and create a new legacy for themselves and their community.
What inspired the creation of the St. Luke Legacy Center?
I’ve been a business owner of a for-profit company, A New Legacy Family Services, in mental and behavioral health for about 10 years now. My goal has always been to provide wraparound services that meet the needs of an entire family. In doing that, I noticed that families and individuals have so many other needs outside of just mental health. Although important, there’s also housing instability, food insecurity, workforce development, and all of these other layers that come into play.
During the pandemic, Nikki Shaw – my cousin and Chief Clinical Officer at the St. Luke Legacy Center – and I were shopping for commercial space for our mental health agency. That was when Ms. Wanda Stallings, a Black woman that owns the St. Luke Building, mentioned that she would love to have an organization in Jackson Ward that does something good for the community. It just felt ancestrally divine for Nikki and I. We thought, “Wow, this can be where our community center is located. Let’s create a robust network of community partners that can build their organization’s capacity and meet the needs of the community.” A lot of small grassroots organizations and small businesses don’t know how to build their infrastructure and expand their impact and workforce, so our goal is to help the community and other organizations build their capacity so they can continue serving the community with bigger impact.
One of your programs is your Fourth Trimester program, which was funded, in part, by Robins Foundation. Can you please walk me through what the program does?
Our Fourth Trimester program is a postpartum maternal mental health program focused on that period of time when parents first bring their baby home. Through this program, we’ve been able to provide 24 hours of postpartum doula support for families. In general, going into a hospital space and not feeling heard or seen can be isolating for families, and even have drastic effects on mothers and their babies. Doulas can help families navigate the healthcare system, advocate for them, and provide them with culturally relevant information and care.
We also offer mental health screenings for postpartum depression and anxiety for both parents. These screenings actually occur every 3 months that individuals and families are with us. One of the reasons we included dads in our Fourth Trimester program is due to some alarming statistics that show that mortality rates post pregnancy were often due to domestic violence. If parents of a new baby didn’t already have healthy conflict resolution and communication skills prior to the baby coming, that can lead to some explosive things. That research helped us realize that partners and fathers are also going through a big shift when there’s a new baby. Oftentimes, there’s no space for them to express their feelings when everybody’s focused on the baby and the mom.
Also, as part of our monthly initiatives – this isn’t through our Fourth Trimester program- also host an event called Wellness Wednesday on the fourth Wednesday of every month. At this event, we offer free community acupuncture, which is part of our holistic approach to physical and mental health. Caring for our mental health is not something that many of us were taught to do or something that has been embraced or introduced to us. It’s wonderful to bring people in from the community and watch them float out of here after experiencing acupuncture. One woman comes in on Wellness Wednesdays and her job is to knit and teach kids how to knit. For the past nine years, she’s had a carpal tunnel like pain. One month, she came in for acupuncture and she didn’t feel any pain in her hands for 9 days after her session. Now, she’s here every Wellness Wednesday for treatment.
How can people sign up for the Fourth Trimester program?
Our website is a great place to start. On the website, you can go to our programming tab. There’s a button to sign up and fill out an intake form for the Fourth Trimester program. Then, you’ll get a call from our intake coordinator who will walk you through the process and answer any questions you may have. From there, the intake coordinator will assign you a time for your mental health screening to check for postpartum depression, anxiety, or anything else. We actually conduct that mental health screening every three months while you’re in the program. From there, you’ll also be assigned a doula and identify if you want the doula to work nights, days, how many hours, all of those things. After your mental health screening, you’re able to sign up for outpatient therapy sessions.
There are three grant funded outpatient therapy sessions. These outpatient therapy sessions can be used by individuals, couples, parents, and families. This in turn makes therapy accessible and flexible for people. After your three free therapy sessions, you can continue sessions with us by signing up with your insurance.
You talk about your programs providing culturally informed care. Can you describe what that is and why it’s important?
There are a lot of larger organizations that come into communities that don’t look like them. Many people in these organizations don’t have the same lived experiences, and they only have a textbook understanding of the community’s situation. Oftentimes, these organizations have less of a positive impact because building rapport is much harder; especially in an area like Gilpin Court, where the community has experienced generational oppression in siloed out neighborhoods.
That cultural understanding, that connectivity, that trust is so important. If someone doesn’t trust you, they’re not going to receive the information that you’re giving. They’re not going to take heed to the resources. Whereas someone who comes from this community and is there to provide support and stability, can talk how you talk, and can really understand and speak to experiences you’ve experienced, can have a greater impact. For me, it’s always been important to create programs and services For Us, By Us.
Can you talk about some of the barriers Black and Brown folks experience when it comes to accessing support?
A huge barrier for community-led organizations providing support for Black and Brown folks is infrastructure and capacity building which affects the access for individuals. Many of the larger nonprofit organizations typically get a lot of funding and oftentimes can’t provide that culturally informed care we were talking about earlier. This makes it harder for smaller organizations to build their capacity and infrastructure, to really help communities. I wish there were more capacity building opportunities for smaller organizations and individuals who are really doing the work. There are a lot of individuals in the community that have ideas and programs they want to implement, and they want to know how they can get their ideas off the ground. Everybody is in some level of survival mode with everything that is happening now, but even more so within underrepresented communities. Black and Brown folks are actually the global majority. If we are the global majority, why aren’t we being serviced and protected? There are statistics for Richmond that show just how underfunded and under-resourced organizations that service Black and Brown communities are. The funding is there for others, but where’s the actual impact?
You talked about how the St. Luke Legacy Center helps smaller organizations build their capacity. Can you talk more about how the Fourth Trimester program helps other organizations build their capacity?
The Fourth Trimester program partners with the Diverse Birth Collective, which is founded and run by Nikiya Ellis-Chavis. Nikiya is currently a student midwife and she’s been in the birthing space for over a decade. She is phenomenal in birthing, postpartum, and training doulas to become state certified. Being part of our community partner network has helped her increase her business’s capacity and helped her continue her work with the help of grants from the Robins Foundation, the Richmond Health Equity Fund, and the Community Foundation. These grants have helped her continue her work and train doulas in the field. Seeing her build her business and create programs and initiatives that our community needs has been amazing. In general, being able to bring together these amazing organizations is great. By pulling our resources together in addition to our expertise, we’re able to have longer term, bigger projects that help sustain smaller organizations and increase their capacity and impact.
How have federal funding freezes and policy changes have impacted the work that you do?
I’m very nervous about what everything will look like if Medicaid cuts actually come down the pipe. My for-profit business is primarily funded by Medicaid, and that’s mainly the population that the St. Luke Legacy Center serves. About 70-75% of our revenue is through Medicaid. If Medicaid were to go away, that would change the landscape of our services and negatively impact the people that we serve. From a grant standpoint, federal funding will impact local grant dollars that we should receive. Right now, we are waiting to see how that will impact us, specifically when it comes to our grants with the city of Richmond and the Richmond Health Equity Fund. Prayerfully, we’ll be able to continue our Fourth Trimester program in addition to other programs.
Is there anything you would like to promote in this interview?
We’re really excited about our 5th annual Legacy Week in July. That’s when we celebrate Ms. Maggie L. Walker’s birthday, which is July 15th, and the inception of the St. Luke Legacy Center in the historic St. Luke Building. Between July 13th and July 19th, we will have seven days worth of community events that are free and focus on our organization’s 5 pillars: physical health, mental health, financial health, social, and emotional wellbeing. Our Eventbrite is up, and everyone can sign up and watch us roll out our events. Another PSA: anybody can volunteer during Legacy Week or throughout the year as well. If you’re interested in volunteering, sign up!
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To learn more about the St. Luke Legacy Center, please visit https://www.stlukelegacycenter.com/
