Social Determinants of Health: Sharea and Paige

• By:  Emily Laubham
• Posted:  January 12, 2022
•   Share This

Entrepreneur and single mother Sharea Carpenter was in a dark place when she met Paige Kuntz, MSW, LSW, a social worker with Allegheny Health Network (AHN) Pediatric Institute. It was the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She had just given birth to her third child, wasn’t able to work, and was grieving the loss of her mother and her niece. Bills were piling up and her water was in jeopardy of being shut off.

“My mom was my only support,” Sharea says. “After she passed, I was fending for myself and my kids on my own.”

When her children’s pediatrician asked how she was doing, Sharea says that, “God put it on my heart to be honest.” She explained that she was struggling, and the doctor offered to connect her with a social worker.

“I didn’t think much would come of it,” she says. “But while I was waiting for my daughter to get her shots, before I even left the office, Paige called me.”

Paige is part of AHN’s team-based care approach that assigns social workers to primary care providers to help identify and respond to issues involving social determinants of health, including economic stability, safe housing, and transportation.

When I spoke with the women to learn more about their time together, each insisted that the other doesn’t give themselves enough credit, but there is plenty of credit to go around in this inspiring story.

Initial referral from the Pediatric Institute

Before meeting Paige, Sharea says she often felt “like a magician that had nothing left to pull out of the hat.” Deep in the throes of grief, she tried to put those feelings aside in order to focus on taking care of her three children, including a newborn.

“That time in my life was a blur,” she says. “There were days when I struggled just to get out of bed.”

Paige, a mother herself, explains that the doctor’s initial referral cited Sharea’s postpartum depression screening. When they initially talked on the phone, she could tell that Sharea was exhausted. In addition to everything else she was facing, she had recently received a notice from her landlord that she owed $1,400 on a sewage bill she had never received.

“We talked about making some phone calls then, but she was too overwhelmed,” Paige recalls. “So I started doing regular check-ins with her instead. I would call just to see how she was doing, and over the next few weeks we built a great rapport.”

Mutual trust, practical support, and regaining health and purpose

Developing a relationship based on mutual trust was an important first step before tackling the practical challenges together. Sharea says that the moral and emotional support she got from Paige was like “the string that pulled everything back together. She took my stress onto her shoulders until I was strong enough to take it back.”

As Sharea gained back her confidence, the two women started making phone calls, reaching out to community resources, and addressing challenges one at a time.

“At first, I didn’t know how I was going to pay my bills or my rent, or even buy groceries,” Sharea admits. “I could barely stay present, let alone do any self-care or soul-care.”

One turning point was Paige finding reliable daycare for Sharea’s kids. With that piece of the puzzle in place, Sharea decided to go back to work. She notes that she could have continued to receive unemployment, but she wanted to regain her sense of purpose.

With Paige there to back her up, Sharea found that she was able to start opening some doors. “Pretty soon, I was getting bills taken care of and was in a position to get my life back together and focus on my business, Evolve Butterfly,” she says. “I was able to take care of my own health, too, and do simple things like get a physical exam.”

Ongoing transformation

The time and energy to reflect on one’s life, or fully process grief, are a kind of privilege that we don’t all have. In Sharea’s case, once daycare and other support helped free up a bit of time and energy, she made the most of it. In addition to building Evolve Butterfly, her health-related products business, she has written self-help essays that have been published in “Scenes from a Single Mom,” volumes 2 and 3.

Just as important as the external accomplishments, she says that she has been doing the ongoing internal work to continue improving life for her and her children.

“It’s not enough to wake up, eat, and sleep; you have to educate yourself on your feelings and emotions if you want to be able to handle what life throws at you,” she explains.

She acknowledges that looking inside oneself can be intense and uncomfortable, but over time she says she has gained the ability to analyze her “patterns and pathologies,” while keeping a firm grasp on her self-worth. She also says that her grief has transformed into a kind of constant celebration of, and learning from, her mother’s life.

All that self-work has helped her remain resilient as new challenges arise. For example, although Sharea and Paige researched and proposed various solutions for handling the sewage bill, her landlord wasn’t cooperative. That could have been the start of a downward spiral. Instead, with Paige’s help, Sharea was able to move the whole family into a hotel temporarily. Before long, she and the kids were back in a house, with no disruptions in work or daycare along the way.

“There are always going to be challenges,” says Paige. “There’s never going to be a point that’s perfect — and I mean that for everyone. But Sharea has really been able to embrace the positive parts of her life and deal with each challenge as it comes. She’s amazing — an inspiration to moms everywhere.”

Sharea calls Paige a “superwoman” and “angel in disguise.” Together, the two women have shown just how much can be accomplished when health systems put resources into identifying and addressing social determinants of health — a very tangible way to fulfill the mission to “create a remarkable health experience, freeing people to be their best.”