By Gina Mayfield
About 20 years ago, Dr. Katherine Y. Brown launched a freestanding CPR company on the South Side of Chicago, knowing the underserved people living there were the least likely to get CPR. She thought, If you build it, they will come.
They didn’t come. So she went to them. At last count, she has taught more than 300,000 people to administer CPR in a safe, timely and efficient manner.
But all those years ago, Dr. Katherine, who holds a doctorate in education, had to go find people to teach. That meant showing up at churches on Easter Sunday, visiting sorority houses during rush week, and if a local store had weave on sale and a long line, she was there with her manikin. “Here’s my premise,” she says. “If you don’t come to me, I’m going to come to you, but I’m going to be strategic and go to places that I know you’re going to be at.” She started canvassing parks and housing projects, where she would find sometimes people playing basketball. “I would just go up to them and say, ‘Hey, if something happens out here, do y’all know what to do?’ They would just look at me like I was this crazy woman, and ask, ‘What do you mean?’ And there I was with my manikin, and I would teach them CPR,” she says.
At one point she was going door to door, sometimes with a baby on her hip, or standing on street corners with a sign that read: Honk if you know CPR. If you don’t, pull over and I’ll teach you. And she did. Eventually, she became known around town as The CPR Lady. Eventually, people did start coming to her. “What winded up happening was that I started getting calls from people in other states asking me to come. And I was like, This is not just training, it’s a movement,” Dr. Katherine says. “So I decided the name of my company should be a call to action: Learn CPR America. I felt like every household needs somebody trained.”
A mother of four, Dr. Brown founded the Roberta Baines-Wheeler Pulmonary Hypertension Awareness Group in honor of her own late mother and developed a leadership academy that bears her name, in part to train the next generation of global health care leaders. She’s a highly sought-after speaker, both in-person and in the media, and a consultant specializing in community engagement. She has taught for The Links Incorporated, the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority’s Boule event, the Kiwanis International, Lions Clubs International, among many other highly respected organizations. At one point, The Links Incorporated went to Jamaica, and Dr. Katherine went with them along with her manikin. “Any organization that had people, that’s where I went. That was my strategy. I was always very grass roots, and that’s how things grew.”
So what can we learn from her creativity, innovation and unstoppable spirit? Turns out, a lot. Please come back next week for Part 2 of Dr. Brown’s amazing story, in her own words. In the meantime, here is how to connect with her:
#LearnCPRAmerica
#DrKatherineYBrown
Instagram:
@DrKatherineYBrown
@LearnCPRAMERICA
Facebook:
@DrKatherineBrown
@LearnCPRAmerica
Twitter:
@KatherineYBrown
@LearnCPRAmerica