Cone Health community care program manager Jamilla Pinder left N.C. A&T to work and raise her son. Last year, she came back to earn her degree in agribusiness management. “I had the know-how through my job; now I have the degree to back it up,” she said.
Jamilla Pinder is a dedicated health care professional, a tireless community care advocate and an involved single mother. Now, the 22-year Cone Health system veteran can add “graduate of N.C. A&T” to her lengthy list of accomplishments.
Pinder’s academic story is one of perseverance. She enrolled at A&T in 1996, but motherhood and work interrupted her studies. Nevertheless, she never gave up the dream of completing her degree. In December, she walked across the stage at the Greensboro Coliseum and received her bachelor’s degree in agribusiness management.
As a young mother and a student, Pinder intended to work part-time and go to school full time. But as the years went by, those roles reversed, until she slowly stopped taking classes altogether.
“I got caught up in working and trying to take care of a child,” she said. “My family helped, but I felt that I should do most of the work of taking care of my son.”
Pinder’s son Darius also graduated in December, from Fayetteville State. Darius was born in the second semester of Pinder’s freshman year.
During her freshman year, with an infant, she took a third-shift job checking patients into the emergency room at Moses Cone Hospital. In the years that followed, she added responsibilities and moved from part-time to full-time at the HealthServe Community Health Clinic, which provided medical services to low-income community residents.
When HealthServe closed, she worked with Cone Urgent Care to create the Adult Care Center, a program designed to meet the needs of the thousands of patients left without a primary care provider. Currently, as a Community Care Program manager, she is the assistant director of the Healthy Communities department, helping connect people in need with services.
Pinder’s time at the HealthServe Clinic ignited her love of helping others. She started volunteering, intaking and assessing the needs of visitors at Greensboro Urban Ministries; and teaching classes and mentoring at the Women’s Resource Center.
“I’ve always been one to give back and volunteer; my father was in the military, that’s just the way we were raised,” she said. “Those roles strengthened the work I was doing at Cone, and Cone saw the potential in me and gave me opportunities. Now, whenever there’s a community-related need, their response is, ‘Get Jamilla.’”
As the years went by, Pinder’s work brought her back into connection with A&T. In 2018, she served as a panelist for a discussion on achieving better health outcomes for at-risk communities, part of the Grassroots Leadership Conference sponsored by N.C. A&T Cooperative Extension. With A&T’s biology department, she also participated in a study on undiagnosed kidney injury in uninsured and underinsured African American men. Type 2 diabetes, a leading cause of kidney disease, is linked to poor nutrition and a sedentary lifestyle, issues that Pinder’s work deals with also.
Those connections helped Pinder to reinvigorate the idea of obtaining her degree. Last year, she re-enrolled at A&T and took a few classes each semester and in the summer until she had finished her agribusiness management major, a degree that relates well to the practical work that Pinder is doing in the community.
“Agriculture is the backbone for everything, as far as basic needs,” she said. “There is a trend in health care now to look at social determinants – your environment, access to health care, access to fresh food. Agricultural economics deals with optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber. My classes were so relevant to my community work that I could go from class back into meetings and use what I had learned right away.”
Obed Quaicoe, Ph.D., an assistant agribusiness professor who taught Pinder’s agricultural prices and forecasting class, became a special mentor for her, meeting with her before and after class to go over concepts and math that her long absence from school had made rusty.
“He knew what type of work I did, and he would say, ‘You know this, stop doubting yourself,” she said.
“She was already applying most of the concepts at her work place but couldn't connect the theory in class to what she was already doing,” Quaicoe said.
Planning how many meals that students would need at one of the summer programs she works with, for example, is forecasting, Pinder learned. Figuring out how to budget and negotiate the cost of those meals is pricing.
“I helped her connect the two and that helped her tremendously in her understanding of the course,” Quaicoe said. “She is very hard working.”
Now that she has her degree, Pinder said, it’s even easier for her to be part of the solution for people in underserved communities.
“I had the heart to help people, and now, I also have the business know-how,” she said. “That’s where A&T came in.”
