If there were a number of conversations that needed to take place to make future health providers, when would the thought from a parent about their child’s future career hold the most weight? Is it something the child needs to hear everyday or does it have to be accompanied with some sort of unique event or exposure to become embedded in a child’s mind? The NFL and NBA seem to have this model down to a science covering all the bases with Youth Sports and investments in media dwarfing other industries at $19.2 billion. It’s no surprise that our youth want to be entertainers at baseline, but what if the investment was just as strong for some of the other critical positions we need to sustain entire towns?

More black male applied to medical school in 1978 than in 2014, and the statistics are even more dire for Native American men and women. Nevertheless, the desire to entertain anecdotally seems highest amongst the population of youth who live in neighborhoods with and carry the highest burden of disease. Black mothers are 2.6X more likely to die during birth than their Hispanic and White counterparts. Considering the conversations that may occur as the result of a poor experience with the medical field, what are the odds that the family and community are encouraging their youth to enter a system that is portrayed as broken and been held solely responsible for claiming the lives of their loved ones rather than maximizing their vitality.

Before we can consider how to change health outcomes, we need to consider what conversations we are having at each level of society pertaining to health. If we can impact what is said at dinner tables or even figure out what families have a dinner table to talk and eat a nutritious meal in the comfort of their own home, we can make great strides in changing the narrative for entertainers to innovators.