Violence, Epigenetics, and the Building Blocks for Revolutionary Acts in Medicine Mindful on Purpose

Welcome to the Mindful on Purpose Podcast. This month we have two amazing interviewees: 

DR. CLEO SILVERS Cleo Silvers began her career as a community and labor organizer as a VISTA Volunteer and activist in the South Bronx starting in 1966. Her training as an organizer was based on the Saul Alinsky organizing method of door-to-door meetings and listening to people in the community. She was co-founder of the Trinity Avenue Block Association, the Jackson Avenue Block Association and the Kelly Street Block Association, Lincoln Detox, and the Think Lincoln Committee, TLC (a coalition of members of the community, interns and doctors, Young Lords, and Black Panthers and hospital workers). 

Cleo, as co-chairperson of HRUM (Health Revolutionary Unity Movement), which with the Think Lincoln Committee collectively penned the Patients Bill of Rights (a watered-down version is now seen in every hospital room across the country). In 2007, Dr. Steven Levin, Medical Director of the Mount Sinai Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, hired Cleo to be the Director of Outreach for the tragic 911 medical program from which she retired in 2014. In 2008 she was the recipient of the Purpose Prize Fellowship (for activists over 50 who changed careers in the second half of life), now titled the AARP Purpose Award.

Today Cleo works as a consultant for the Cossitt Library in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, and Crosstown High school. She is part of a mentoring program for sixth-graders and high school students. She will be helping youngsters design and implement a podcast on the need for protests and how to organize. The program is called Speak Your Truth: How to Stage a Protest. Black people in Memphis were NOT allowed to use Memphis Public Libraries in town until a sit-in of students from Southwestern University (now Rhodes College) at the Cossitt Library in 1961! Most recently, Cleo has received the 2022 honorary doctorate of Humane Letters - from the City University of New York/Lehman College. Cleo is also working and hoping for help to complete her memoirs within the next few years. 

LOIS MOSES, ESQ Lois Moses, a native of Philadelphia, is a professional Poet and trained Actress, Lawyer, Clinical Therapist, Director, Playwright, and Filmmaker. She graduated from Temple University School of Law, where she was the Political Social Awareness Committee Chair for the Black Student Law Association. She was also the founder and co-editor of BLSA Speaks, a newsletter that sought to give voice to and empower African American law students. Lois has a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from LaSalle University and has worked as a Clinician/Therapist with Human Service agencies and educational institutions. Lois was also the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of an African-Centered Charter school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, that operated from 2007 to 2016.


Mrs. Moses has toured and performed extensively throughout the United States, directing and performing in three Off-Broadway shows in New York. She has published three collections of poetry entitled “Not Just Another... Black/Woman”, “Missing Pages... (Women Behind the Glass Door)”, “A Timely Trinity”, and a Self-titled spoken word CD. Mrs. Moses is an executive member of the Sift Media 215, a Woman of Color Film Collective in Philadelphia. She is currently working on a miniseries entitled “Epistles of Love: The Gospels According to Edgar and Clara,” a love story based on the true story of her ancestors. She is also a Board member of the Big Picture Alliance, whose mission is to engage, educate and empower Philadelphia youth through filmmaking & digital media arts. She sits as Board President of Extended Play, a Non-Profit for film and media artists of Pennsylvania with a new focus on Women of Color. Websites: www.loismoses.com www.moseslineproductions.com https://siftmedia215.org/ https://extendedplay4sift.org/