Dr. Bahby Banks builds capacity, encourages innovation and fosters change

What’s your role in public health?

I am the founder and CEO of Pillar Consulting, a global research consulting firm headquartered in Durham. For the past ten years, we’ve partnered with nonprofit, academic, corporate and philanthropic organizations to provide consultation on the development, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of their efforts.

Our work is rooted in equity, and we offer a portfolio of services including contract management, needs assessments, equity audits, employee surveys and membership surveys.

I currently serve as the co-chair of the Health and Human Services Committee for Leadership North Carolina and recently was nominated for membership to the N.C. Institute of Medicine. And of course, I’m still connected to the Gillings School, serving as an adjunct assistant professor in public health leadership and practice.

Can you describe your focus area in one sentence?

I guess that “sentence” would be our mission at Pillar Consulting: Build capacity, encourage innovation and foster change.

What brought you to public health?

I spent much of my childhood volunteering with my mother at local community events and saw this work as a responsibility. A duty. It was meaningful and rewarding in so many ways. My mother learned this responsibility from her mother, and her mother learned it from her mother.

In fact, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather built the first Black-owned convalescent center in Miami, Florida, in the 1930s because no one else would serve Black people. Imagine that. A carpenter and midwife with little to no resources decided they could meet this need. The City of Miami dedicated a building, the Rosie Lee Wesley Health Center, in my great-grandmother’s honor in 1990.

My mother, Dorothy Gaines Banks, served (and created) community everywhere we lived as a military family and ultimately went on to found the First Coast Black Nurses Association in Jacksonville, Fla., after my father retired from the Air Force.

That’s my foundation. That’s our legacy.

I chose to major in biology/pre-medicine at Florida A&M University with aspirations of becoming a physician. While I loved science, medicine wasn’t the fit for me; I was in search of a career that would afford an opportunity to create and engage with the very communities I used to serve with my mom.

Lo and behold, that career was public health. So, I began my “formal” public health training at Boston University School of Public Health, where I earned a Master of Public Health degree in epidemiology and biostatistics. Next, I came to the Gillings School to pursue a doctorate in health behavior.

Can you describe a time when you have pivoted in your public health career?

When the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, I created a public health campaign, Not A Host™ (NAH), that has reached more than 500,000 people. The Pillar team already led education, instructional design and curriculum design in the virtual space long before the pandemic, but this form of engagement was amplified during COVID-19.

In developing the #NAH Junior Ambassador STEM and Media Engagement training, it was important to our team to equip youth with the knowledge and tools to understand root causes, social determinants of health, medical distrust, informed decision-making, mass communication, health messaging, health literacy and COVID-19.

In 2022, the Pillar team led bilingual virtual educational sessions titled “Drop-in Hours” to provide a forum for the community to stay abreast of the frequent changes that happened throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We are a multilingual, multigenerational team, and this opportunity served as a way to leverage our training and expertise in an innovative way.

Last — but certainly not least — we were invited to partner with AfroPunk as part of their Sound Therapy Sessions in Los Angeles. So, in brief, the pandemic, while very tragic and painful, offered our team an opportunity to innovate with and serve the most marginalized in our communities.

Who are you when you’re at home?

I’m Dorothy’s child. I am a free, loving spirit.

I love dancing and playing drums. You likely will catch me doing either, or both, of these things at home. I’m also a pup mom to two very silly cocker spaniels, Clover and Mango, who keep me on my toes.