Contact NCC News Service: 212-870-2228  |  E-mail mailto:pjenks@ncccusa.org   |  Most Recent Stories   |  NCC Home


Aetna support of NCC racial and ethnic equality project
to be announced at June 14 'Circles of Names' reception

 

New York, June 10, 2011 -- When three prominent women are honored here June 14 in a National Council of Churches Circles of Names event, Aetna will announce support of a ministry close to the hearts of the honorees: racial and ethnic health care equity in the United States.

 

Representatives from Aetna will present the NCC with a check for $25,000 to help create tools NCC member communions can use to generate ideas and implement action plans to promote racial and ethnic health care equality in communities around the U.S.  These tools will target maternal health issues. 

 

Maternal health care in the USA is among the worst of the top 40 industrialized nations, even though the U.S. spends the most money on health care.

 

The program would be implemented in three NCC program areas: the NCC Health Task Force, the Justice for Women Working Group and the Racial Justice Program.

 

"The Circles of Names Campaign is a project to create a circle of support for women's ministries by asking a thousand persons to give $100 in the name of a woman who helped shape their faith," said the Rev. Ann Tiemeyer, director of the NCC program for women's ministry.  "I can't think of a more appropriate setting to announce a program related to women's health."

 

"We hope the Aetna grant will provide a strong platform to reach a broad base of our ecumenical network in addressing the racial disparities in health care," Tiemeyer said.  "Developing an education for advocacy resource within our member communions' context provides the sustained motivation to go beyond knowledge to advocacy actions that can make significant change."

 

Miguel A. Centeno, MPA, Aetna's regional director, Northeast, Community Relations & Urban Marketing, said Aetna was pleased to be working with the National Council of Churches. "Two of our goals at Aetna are work to help close the healthcare disparities gap and to create product solutions that enable people to obtain insurance who might not have had it before.  Over time, it is our hope to increase the number of people under the NCC umbrella who are insured," Centeno said.

  

In addition to scores of mentoring women who will be named to the circle as a part of the New York gathering, three special mentors will be honored:  Marge Christie, an Episcopal educator and communicator from Newark, N.J.; Lois McCullough Dauway, a Methodist activist, leader in the UMC's Division of Women's Ministries, and former assistant general secretary of the National Council of Churches for justice and liberation; and Peggy L. Shriver, a Presbyterian writer, researcher and a former assistant general secretary of the NCC.

 

The New York City Area Circles of Names Gathering will take place June 14, 2011, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in The Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Drive in Manhattan.  The event, one of several local events sponsored by the National Council of Churches Circles of Names campaign, will be hosted by Anne Hale Johnson, honorary chair of the campaign. The gathering will be webcast live at www.unitedmethodistwomen.org/live  from 4:45 to 5:45 p.m.

 

Persons planning on attending the gathering should RSVP to the Rev. Deborah DeWinter at 212-870-2513 or ddewinter@nccusa.org.

 


Since its founding in 1950, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA has been the leading force for shared ecumenical witness among Christians in the United States. The NCC's 37 member communions -- from a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches -- include 45 million persons in more than 100,000 local congregations in communities across the nation.


NCC News contact:  Philip E. Jenks, 212-870-2228 (office), 646-853-4212 (cell),
pjenks@ncccusa.org

 

Return to NCC Home Page