Lisa Mitchell-Bennett was born in Mexico City but has lived all over the world including Peru, Costa Rica, California and Chiapas. In 1991, where Mexico and the United States collide, she finally found a place to call home: Brownsville.
“Now, I’ve lived here 30 years. The longest place I’ve ever lived, in my whole life,” she said. “And this definitely feels more like home than anywhere else. I love that it’s both countries and cultures and I see so much potential here.”
Mitchell-Bennett welcomed us to her office located at the UTRGV Brownsville campus. With black and white photographs of her family near the window, research and paperwork on her desk, the Brownsville resident who has been the project manager with UT Public Health for 17 years, said while the first half of her life she did not want to have anything to do with health or medicine, now she knows that health encompasses everything she is passionate about: social justice, community organizing and equity.
“In our community, we have so many assets, so much beauty, but we also have a lot of poverty and people face a lot of barriers. There’s a lot of inequity, and I would say that, to me, the two things go together. I think we have to address social injustice and things that create poverty, but at the same time, try to build something beautiful and better that everyone can enjoy,” she said.
“Before, I was more interested in journalism, political science, community organizing, social justice, but I started to realize that health really encompasses everything. If you have a broader definition of health, it encompasses everything that I was passionate about. It gives you an opportunity, and kinda in a way an excuse, to work on those types of economic and social justice issues in the name of health and making people healthier.”
Passionate about improving health and economic opportunities in the community, Mitchell-Bennett has been part of several projects that have impacted Brownsville in a good way, such as the campaign “Tu salud sí cuenta” which started years ago as a small media campaign and ended up becoming so big that it has now been replicated in 12 communities throughout the Rio Grande Valley. This project, intends to create opportunities for everyone to make healthier choices and become more active.
“I’ve been lucky in my role here at the School of Public Health because I managed all of the community-based projects, so, we do a lot of research here in the lab and we have students. But, we also get a lot of funding to do projects in the community and that’s kind of my passion,” she said.
“We started a while back with ‘Tu salud sí cuenta’ and it started as a media campaign. And, as we collected data and found the problems with diabetes and obesity, and all of the chronic diseases, we wanted to use local role models to tell their stories about how they’re becoming healthier and just share their stories, because I think stories are super powerful.”
