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In the early days of the COVID pandemic, a dozen grandparents raising their grandchildren reached out to the Central Massachusetts Agency on Aging for help with technology and homework; the generation gap and limited financial resources had left them struggling with the sudden shift to remote learning.
Under the leadership of CEO Moses Dixon, the agency secured local funding and provided the resources the grandparents needed — but also uncovered that some of the families needed help accessing food and health care benefits.
Dixon applied a global health delivery model championed by the late Paul Farmer, former head of the Harvard Medical School Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, that Dixon had learned about as a doctoral student at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
Dixon used community health workers to identify state benefits and federal tax credits and get the families the services they had been denied or didn’t know they were eligible for.
Word spread, and he and his team soon created the Grandparents Raising Grandkids Resource Center.
Now a master’s student in global health delivery at HMS, Dixon is continuing to absorb Farmer’s legacy and to infuse those principles into his work and career.
Harvard Medicine News spoke with Dixon about how he delivers global health-inspired solutions to older adults and Black people in Massachusetts for local benefit.
That includes Dixon’s appointment last year to the Massachusetts Governor’s Advisory Council on Black Empowerment, where he advocated not only for resources for Black communities but also for those communities to have an active role in identifying, voicing, and meeting their own needs.
HMNews: Please tell us about the grandparents resource center that you were instrumental in creating.
Dixon: Across the country there are about 2.8 million ‘grandfamilies,’ with over 33,000 in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, these children often end up in the care of their grandparents or other relatives because of opioid addiction or for some other unfortunate reasons.
These families don't have support. When word got out about how we were helping some families, it spread like wildfire. In eight months, we went from 12 families to 103 families.
That led to conversations with my congressman about the need to do something permanent. He got us $1.2 million to open up the resource center. Part of the center’s work is helping families understand how to navigate the system.
I truly believe that as the first of its kind in the country, this center is going to be a model for the nation. It was one of the reasons I was selected as one of the 2024 Presidential Leadership Scholars to look at how to scale this model of what we've built in Worcester.
HMNews: Why did you come to HMS for the master in global health delivery program?
Dixon: I have always followed Paul Farmer and have been fascinated by his emphasis on caring for the marginalized and the less fortunate, looking at how structural violence really is there, and understanding that we have the tools to fix it through research and advocacy.
When I found out about the HMS master of medical sciences in global health delivery, and that it was the brainchild of Paul Farmer, I said I want to do that program.
All of the work that he did throughout his life, I have seen it in the curriculum and in the faculty in the program.
Now that I'm on the tail end of the program, getting ready to graduate — and being the first in my family to graduate from high school and go to college — I am immensely proud that I will walk out of this program with new wings. I have it in me to go out and be the change agent that Paul Farmer envisioned for the program.
HMNews: How has your work on the governor’s Black empowerment council intersected with your studies at HMS?
Dixon: So my thesis research here focuses on how we can make Meals on Wheels more culturally and medically tailored for our elders in Worcester who are Black, Indigenous, or other people of color. It’s my hope that our research will catalyze state and federal policy changes for programs that ensure we are meeting people’s nutritional needs.
In my mind, the issue of food for older adults locally is actually global health. Many of these elders emigrated from different countries. They bring a global perspective on the type of food they want here in America. Global health means global, but it also has a local impact.
Hear more about how Dixon strives to achieve health equity through representation in this video:
Video: Rick Groleau and Bobbie Collins
