Brian Swann

Okay, my name and where I'm from and my current role. My name is Dr. Brian Jeffrey Swan, and I am I'm a resident now of a little town in Tennessee called Greenback, and my role, which brings me to Boston periodically, is as an assistant professor in oral health policy and epidemiology. I am a consultant for Cambridge Health Alliance Oral Health Division. I am a consultant and an oral health specialist for Job Corps of America.

I'm the PI and faculty director for the Wampanoag program on Martha's Vineyard Island and soon to be on New Bedford as well. And I'm a farmer. I work on a farm, live on a farm in East Tennessee. I'm a father of 6 daughters.

I am a grandfather of 9 children, and I am a great-grandfather of 6 great-grandchildren. I'm a bad man.

The problems that I'm working towards addressing are problems around integration and cross-training within healthcare disciplines. I'm working on problems of diversity and inclusion across health and healthcare.

I'm working on building capacity in resource-poor settings, whether it's, you know, local, national, or international. I'm working on admissions to make sure that there is a wider cross-section and representation of students at Harvard School of Dental Medicine, as well as general practice residents at the Cambridge Health Alliance that represent populations that are served and those that might be also underserved, but students with a heart.

To build health across disciplines and to build capacity for early detection.

Capacity, inclusion, health, interdisciplinary, training, education. I'll stop there.

This problem is important because people's lives are at stake. This is a human problem. I've recently started working with a group of people called— and who study the philosophy of Ubuntu, which comes out of South Africa. It was It's a philosophy that Mandela used and Bishop Tutu.

And it says that I am because you are. Because you are what? Because you are human. And with humanness, we need to talk about people's feelings and their spirit and their mental health and their physical health and how we as promoters of health can work together to be able to make a positive difference.

So it's to save lives. You can be a walking dead person as well as you can be a person buried in the ground. We'd like to be able to get all of ourselves, myself included, in that same spectrum to work at the peak of my capacity. So I am a spirit-led individual trying to make a positive difference.

I address this problem by teaching, by being a role model, both as a parent and a grandfather, as a representative in my community, my association with my neighbors, wherever I go. I don't believe that I go by any place by mistake or by accident, mostly, but places where I'm called to go. So I pray a lot about that to try to make sure that I am carrying the spiritual part of myself and the Creator with me to impact people. I'm a motivator, I'm an encourager, and I'm a doer.

And so with those things in mind, you know, I go to wherever I'm called to go. It doesn't matter how big or how small. I might be nervous as hell, but I'll show up late maybe, but I'll still show up. To try to make a positive difference and to continue promoting humanness and, you know, working with people.

We can do better.

The skills that help me to address this problem are, one, I believe my natural spiritual gifts. are as a hard worker and a motivator. The training that I've received over the years, having these various degrees, the one that I found that was most insightful is getting a master's in public health.

That's what brought me to Harvard, and I really am grateful for that. I wish I'd done it a few years earlier, but, you know, I don't question the timing because I believe in God's timing, not necessarily necessarily my own. But I'm grateful for that, thankful for it, and I think that was a great tool. And then the other tools are the tools that we learn by engaging with people from all over the world and taking some of those hard tasks, jobs that may not be as appealing to others.

They may not pay a lot, they may not pay anything, but the experience that you get in working with individuals shows up. People can recognize that in you, and it builds credibility, it builds trust. And to me, that's the beginning of promoting healing.

Well, I can probably suggest a couple of books that most people already know about, but I would suggest that when we read materials We read materials across the board. You know, it's not all one thing. You know, as an oral physician, what I choose to call myself rather than a dentist, I certainly read articles about the latest technology around oral health, but also read articles about mental health and spiritual health and how they're interrelated. And they're all there together.

I like reading materials that are from Indigenous people. that are closer to the earth. These are the things that I like.

There's a book by Paul Farmer that a lot of people like to read. I think it has a lot of depth, mountains. I can't think of the whole title. And then there's another one by the creator of the Remote Area Medical nonprofit health team, and it's called All the Indians— All the Cowboys Were Indians.

And it tells a story about being on the largest, one of the largest cattle ranches in the country of Guyana. Again, you know, bringing perspectives, because to me, that's really the important part of that.

Okay. The other, I want to go back to the former question. Can I do that? So going back to the former question about what I read, I like reading spiritual quotes and books.

I read the Bible occasionally. I read the Quran occasionally.

I read the Daily Word occasionally, and I read quotes that come from my daughters occasionally because they have positive messages. I don't watch the news very often. because I think that it's pretty polluted and very, very negative. And I don't have enough time to get down and depressed. I have to spend my time towards being productive and believing that there is hope and people can be saved, including myself.

The path that led me to where I am now, not to be too wordy about it, but, you know, just being born. You know, I was born to a woman, my mother, who was 15. And right when she turned 16, a month later, I was in the world.

That was in rural Tennessee. And I was the firstborn of her children.

I was raised those first 5 or 6 years by my grandparents, who knew how to take care of a baby, because my mother went back and finished high school. And then she got married after that. And so I was a baby that was a community baby. All of her friends, all of her teenage friends, I was everybody's baby for a while.

So I didn't get tossed around in a negative way. I got handed around in a positive way where people cared about me. And I've always had that type of, how would I say, sense of belonging.

And my grandparents were always important to me. I knew both sides of my family's grandparents. I knew my great-grandparents, and I even had the pleasure of meeting some of my great-great-grandparents. And they would tell stories, and those stories resonated with me.

And my grandparents were movers and shakers. They liked to travel. So they would throw me in the back of that old Rocket 88 Oldsmobile, and we would go to Detroit. We'd go to the Cherokee Indian Reservation.

We would go everywhere— Chicago, all kinds of places. Where really got into my cloth. So I traveled a lot.

So growing up, we left Tennessee, we migrated to California, we went to Northern California, and that's where we— I went from a segregated society where all Black people and white people were separated to an integrated society in California to see people I'd never seen before in person. Asian people I'd never seen before. Hispanic people I had never seen before. And going to school in that environment was interesting to me, and I learned a lot from that in terms of having sort of a cosmopolitan, or at least developing sort of a cosmopolitan approach to people and being interested in various cultures.

And that has carried on. And my mother and my grandparents And my dad were always people and community-oriented people. So they did a lot in the community, a lot through their churches and things like that. So I had that kind of exposure, and I didn't have an imposter syndrome as a child.

I mean, you have some of that when you're in an integrated situation because you don't get necessarily voted to be in the top. You're always going to be put in the middle somewhere, if not the bottom. But my mother was a real go-getter, and she trained me to not take no for an answer. She trained me with that.

Her favorite quote was, where there's a will, there's a way. And so I learned to speak up for myself, even though it would make me nervous sometimes. But, and if I couldn't do it, she'd come to the school and do it for me. So she pushed me to take college prep classes.

I didn't want to. It was too much homework, and most of my friends weren't. She pushed me to say, you're going to have to go to college. She introduced dentistry to me when she stopped cleaning houses and got a job and went to school to become a dental assistant and eventually an office manager.

And my mother was a community person. Her sister, my aunt, were that way. And so I was always around people who were working in the community hands-on.

When my mother died, she was— there was a proclamation in the state Capitol building in California on that day celebrating her life. So, hmm.

So the point is, is that those examples are what give me courage today. All right.

Well, I think I jumped to that question already. I think that, you know, my parents and grandparents, they were all hardworking people.

My grandmother worked as a maid and a cook for one of the wealthiest families in the area. a family that, you know, owned department stores throughout the South. My grandfathers and uncles worked for Alcoa Aluminum 30-plus years. One of them worked in what they call the pot room, and that's where you'd melt aluminum. He would lose 10 pounds every day just in fluids.

And these were strong people that all worked. So that encouraged me to understand that if I can't do anything else, if I'm not smart, enough, because you don't know if you are, that I can at least work.

And those work ethics were always with us. I started working in the 7th grade, working for the people that I went to church with. If they needed a young person coming into their homes to wash down the walls or to cut the lawn or to do a newspaper route, any of those things, I worked. I didn't like the clothes that my father was buying me.

He was out of style. I didn't like the haircuts that he was giving me because they were out of style. So I started saying, look, I'm going to get a job so I can buy my own clothes and I can go to the barbershop and get my own haircut in the style that I want. So I started working in grade 7, and I've been working ever since.

And so my motto is that if I have to work to make a living, work hard, I don't mind working hard. And And that's what I grew up seeing. My people were blue-collar workers. I'm the first one that has gotten a graduate degree, but they were good-hearted people with good work ethics, and they knew how to also celebrate.

And being able to celebrate is just as important as everything else because you need to be able to release the pressures. You need to be able to laugh at your problems to a degree, and I was around people who could do that. So for my trajectory, I continue to want to be around strong people. I want to be around people who are strong in hopes that some of that will rub off on me.

So many places that I've worked in the world are associated with people who live on the land. They're associated with indigenous people and also associated with people who physically and spiritually and mentally work hard.

Well, I work for several organizations. One of them is Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and I like to also include the Harvard Medical School because it was— I worked with both of those entities.

What we do here at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and Harvard Medical School. Part of that work has to do with coming up with some solutions for how to integrate oral health and medicine. This is a perfect scenario to do that, and it hasn't been done to the extent that it should have. And I can't answer the question exactly why.

We all have a hypothesis about perhaps why, you know, But we need to be able to get beyond that because people's lives and quality of care are at stake. I think that it is important to know that health is not getting any better. We're creating a lot of tools, but we're not actually getting them to the people, and the distance between people and providers, that gap seems to be getting greater. I mean, I love telehealth and teledentistry, but that's really not going to solve the problem for healthcare.

It may help to access it, but it's not going to take that human touch away from it. You need to be able to sit down with a person just like we're doing today and have a conversation and watch body language, you know, see emotions and understand the heart behind the words. I think that that's part of it. So it's teaching students to start looking at themselves, you know, as change agents, to see themselves more than just the model that they've seen, that they have to, you know, get these interviews and shadow people.

It's more than that. It's that you have special gifts and you need to be able to employ those gifts in the way that you choose to do this work, not just the way someone else has done it. I mean, that's a good lesson. It's going to give you perspective.

But you have to go after that and start creating your own way, your own path based on your uniqueness. Working as a consultant for Job Corps of America is another job. These are young people ages 16 to 25. Many of them have been lost.

Many of them don't have the opportunity to go to college. Many of them are just strayed. Many of them are coming from difficult family situations, whether it's poverty, whether it's immigration, whether it's you know, disease, whether it's abuse, whether it's addictions, who want to go back and reinvent themselves at a young age. So, these Job Corps programs are federally funded.

There's 123 campuses across the United States that takes these young people and trains them in a vocation. And so, we provide oral health component to that, and I advise them on some of the ways in which they start looking at these students, to look at all parts of their being, not just the oral cavity. And consequently, as an oral physician, that model is basically just that, that you're looking at a person holistically, specializing in the oral cavity, but with, with the intuition to know that everything in the body somehow or another it's gonna find its way to connect itself. And so you have to be able to look at all parts of that.

And if people in the oral health field, dentists, would raise the level of what we do, not just how we're getting paid today, but how we're gonna get paid tomorrow, to work on developing a different approach, we'd be better off as a profession and we would help more people. The work that I do with the Wampanoag Tribe is also through Harvard. to a degree, and that is taking the Native American tribe that, you know, met the Pilgrims on Cape Cod at Provincetown and at Plymouth, taking these people who have regrets sometimes about saving the Pilgrims because it led to disease and massacres and all types of abuse. But this is where we are today. And because Harvard started an Indian school in the mid-1600s, and that John Harvard wanted to educate indigenous people as well as the European immigrants, we thought we would revisit that, which we have done.

And we're now trying to create an intervention that would help them to be able to be more self-sufficient and to have a handle on their overall health as well as their oral health. And now I'm also looking at working with the Wampanoag, the Cherokee tribe, in North Carolina to do something similar, but there they have a hospital already, and we're looking at seeing how we might work together in Cherokee, North Carolina, which is not far from where I live. The other job that I have is as the co-chair of the National Dental Association's Committee on Global Oral Health Outreach. And there we had targeted Haiti.

We're now looking at other sites, but trying to improve the quality of care and the quality of training by providing, you know, presentations, by providing tools and instruments and supplies to try to help them keep stuff going in Haiti. We learned that after the earthquake, and some of the hurricanes, with only 300 dentists in the country and a population of over 10 million, and most of those dentists are concentrated, as they are here, in the more affluent and/or crowded areas, urban areas, that when the earthquake hit, the dentists didn't know what to do, at least those who survived. And we also believe that dentists and oral physicians should be a part and play a role in emergency preparedness.

So, part of the work that this committee is doing is to try to push that agenda forward. I also work with the University of West Indies in Jamaica, you know, and some of the past work that I'm still proud of that I need to go back and visit is that Harvard, we participated working together to help formed the first dental school in the country of Rwanda, another country that had 25 dentists for a population of 11 million. And then with the National Dental Association, we went to Ethiopia and helped to start one of their first dental schools. That one, when we started there, had a population of 48 dentists with a total population of 76 million people.

So these are catastrophic kinds of situations, but you can play a role. That role will make a difference because it's not just what you do today, it's also what's going to happen tomorrow and going forward. And sometimes that's just a seed that's planted. Once it's planted, it basically can grow on its own.

A sample of my day-to-day work is, wow, a little bit of everything. I'm on the phone a lot, I'm on the computer a lot.

You know, there's various committees that I talk to about, so I have meetings usually every day. I have presentations to prepare for. every day if I'm smart.

Oftentimes I will see patients with the remote area medical team, which goes all over the country and volunteers to see emergency cases. You know, I interact with a lot of people. I try to talk to my children, at least one of them per day, or grandchildren, and stay in communication with them. We have prayer every Sunday together to try to keep track of where people are and to motivate them and encourage them.

We do that for each other. You know, my day is always full.

You know, I mentor students a lot as well. I mentor other dentists and doctors and colleagues a lot. Again, because of the fact that, you know, everybody is going through rough times here and there. and you need to be able to motivate them. I deal with a lot of people who are on an international basis, people from the Middle East, people from Africa, people from the Caribbean, Central America, as well as around the Mediterranean, not only Lebanon but also Morocco, Spain, and Greece.

These are programs that are working with refugee camps, And we have meetings and things like that in order to make sure that we continue to move the agenda forward. We call it paying it forward rather than paying it back. We call it paying it forward. So my life is— I feel like I'm more of a psychologist sometimes than someone practicing oral medicine, but it keeps me going.

And, you know, I got a compliment the other day. Somebody told me that I looked like I was 50. I said, well, I'll take it, but I'm actually 75. And so how do you stay encouraged?

How do you stay fit? How do you keep a youthful sort of disposition? You do that by staying engaged, keeping your feet on the ground, and involving yourself with real people who are trying to make a real positive difference.

Well, I think I create value where I work because I value myself and I value the work that we are doing. The work that I involve myself with is work that needs to be done. The reason why you get very busy, because there's tons and tons of work that needs to be done.

So if it's something that appeals to you, That appeal will cause you to bring what you bring with you, and that is your passion. And your passion is what I think starts that wheel turning in terms of giving it value. I do not measure value by monetary worth. I measure value by compassion and empathy, benevolence.

Ethical things is what I think gives gives it value. And the reward for that is long-lasting. The reward for that is sustainable. The reward for that continues to motivate other people who see it and witness it and feel it.

You know, we sometimes dismiss our feelings, but soul power is important. And so my expression, my daughters and I use it, we say peace, love, joy, and soul, because Whether it comes from the melanin in your skin or what's in your heart or your soul, it's important. And working with the indigenous people, they believe in that. And I do believe in it too.

And what's important in all of our work is that we reconnect with that side of ourselves. We have become very robotic. We depend on machines too much, but machines can't do this. And it's something that's deep inside and you need quiet time.

You need to be able to go off somewhere occasionally and replenish yourself with the value of your spirituality, the value— and I'm not talking about religion, I'm talking about being spiritual and understanding that soul power is something that will bring you something, will cause you to take action, cause you to bring a different kind of value to the table. And when people are giving up hope, you can motivate them. When people want to quit, you can encourage them to stay because you are a person who's in the trenches working. You have lived long enough to have various stories to tell that people resonate with, to understand it's not the product that you're looking at right now today, but how did I get here?

How did you get here? There's a trajectory. There's a path that we've taken. And that path is full of stories and examples of what you had to overcome.

And oftentimes the biggest obstacle is ourselves.

My first collaborator is my only boss, and to me that's the Creator. I don't have any other bosses in my life.

And I've always felt that way. And so I continue to work that way. I work with people, but I don't work for them. And so that's my consultation.

And I start every morning that way, giving thanks and, you know, being grateful for what I have and what I've experienced and, and the hope for the things to come. So that's what I do. I consult with people. I will consult with family, my children.

My children are very honest with me, and they will tell me exactly what they think about me, and they'll tell me exactly what they think and hope for me as well. I have surrounded myself with some people, you know, who are intelligent and who care. They don't have to all have a college degree. I live in a farming community, and it's made up of all kinds of people, and some of the best ones are the people who've lived and worked the land their entire lives.

They have just good common sense, and I really like to be around people that are strong and who have good common sense. I also look for signs.

I remember once being in Ethiopia, and I got off the plane, and by the time I got to my hotel and went to bed, it was 1 or 2 in the morning. I had to be up at 7 for a meeting, so I brushed my teeth and Probably didn't floss, and I went to sleep. And I got up the next morning without thinking about it. I looked in my toothpaste and it was gone.

I said, man, you didn't think that you had to brush your teeth in the morning before you go to this meeting. But I squeezed out and it was just enough in that tube to get it done. What did that say to me? Well, being a dentist and an oral physician, it said to me, God is on your side today because you just— you didn't even think about it.

He's taking care of you when you don't even think about taking care of yourself. And there's just enough toothpaste in this tube for you to make it through the day. Now, that meant something to me. And for a lot of people, it wouldn't mean jack, but it meant something to me.

And so I look for signs when I'm running late and all the lights line up green. That's— I'm grateful for that. I believe in synchronicity and synchronicity. I read somewhere a long time ago when I was going through some really hard times To expect it every day.

How can you expect things to go your way every day? Well, it's about looking at the glass being half full rather than half empty. It means that even when things don't necessarily go my way right now, I just need to pause and give it a moment, and usually it reveals itself. The reason you didn't go down that path is because that's not the path for you, or there may have been something waiting for you on that path that you did not need to encounter.

So you are looking at things being from a positive perspective. And since that day, since that day, more than 20-plus years ago, I can almost say that every day of my life is in sync. And every day has been a good day. And that's how I roll.

The enjoyable parts of my work are working with people and doing just what we're doing today, solving problems. And the enjoyable part of my work is also getting my own selfishness and biases out of the way. That becomes an exercise so I can become a better listener and I can be more inclusive. When you overcome those types of internal barriers, it opens you up to a whole new world and it encourages the people around you to go forward and to use their talents just like we're doing today.

And the most— less enjoyable parts of my work are the gatekeepers, the people who are being paid Or who have been influenced to try to hold you back. They will get in your claw and they will make you have to work even harder to get around them, to get under them, to go over them.

But I have found that I pray for them. I pray for them to be convicted, to be convicted with love, and that hopefully something will happen in their lives that will help them move aside. Or let me sneak past them without them noticing.

One major obstacle— I mean, I've had several obstacles that I faced in my life, you know, deaths of relatives and people that you love. But one of them, which was a career change for me, has to do with the fact that when I started to reinvent myself again at age 58 and go back to school, which included the Harvard School of Public Health, I had gotten into an issue with the IRS, with the government, in terms of payroll taxes to the tune of $500,000.

And so how was I going to pay that? So I had 2 dental practices, so I sold them. And after selling them, I thought that I was free. And then I found out, no, you still owed another $60,000.

So I went to work after I finished the program here and saved money up. And I remember still owing them another $50,000 and then paying them back.

And I remember standing in this corner of a street in Somerville because folks saw me and thought that everything was just rosy. They didn't know that you had to go through something like that.

You had to buy your way out. And it was penalties and interest and it was crazy stuff. My accountant died. So there were reasons for this. to happen.

But the point was that I had to give them this money. And when I paid them and I called the lady, the agent, she said, you're— you are done. You don't owe us anything else. You're free.

And when she said that, that resonated with me. How valuable is freedom? And at that junction, not because she said it, but because of what I felt is that I felt and understood then that my freedom was worth everything.

And to be in bondage in any way, you know, was just the worst that you could be. And letting monetary things hold you back, having fear for debt— I lost that. I lost respect for the IRS. I lost respect for debt.

I lost anything that was going to try to hinder me from being a free person. And it didn't matter anymore at that junction how much money I had to give them, whether it was half a million or $3 million. The point that matters the most is that I was free. And that, you know, I won't forget.

And it ended up being more of a blessing because you realize that you can overcome things. And that there's something more valuable than what people often place value in. And so that internal value and being free spiritually and physically and mentally was worth its weight, literally and figuratively, in gold.

Other activities that I do outside of work is work. I work a lot, and when I'm not working, it's very seldom.

But I do enjoy being outdoors, and I realized after moving to this farm that I live on— and I didn't quite understand why I was there other than, you know, from a distance I always wanted to do this— because when I was going to college, I was thinking about engineering and I was thinking about dentistry, and I was also thinking about either agriculture or geology. And so being outdoors helps me. It releases a lot of the pressures and the anxiety of sitting behind a computer all day or encountering those gatekeepers that I talked about earlier. But being outdoors— I plant, I have a garden, I like horses and I ride them.

And I try to take care of them. You know, I enjoy travel and understanding new cultures and learning and being a better listener.

These are the things that I enjoy. Just give me something outdoors and I'm in good shape.

No. I think that I can't recommend a name. You know, I'm not an avid reader, but the books that have helped me, I can give you a couple. One was just a book that I learned about synchronicity. I don't have a name for it, but I was going through a divorce and this guy gave me this book.

And I took a trip to Belize and ended up in Costa Rica. And I was reading these 2-page passages and I like little short passages like that. And, uh, and it helped me when I started to incorporate that. Another great book that helped me at a time where I doubted whether I should be a dentist after my first patient fainted on me in Mexico, Tijuana to be exact.

And I thought, man, you invest all this time and all this money in this particular career that you're developing, you don't even know if you're going to be any good at it. And so I had this book that someone had given me, and it was called Siddhartha. And it was a story of Siddhartha who found his nirvana, but he found it in sort of an unorthodox way. Rather than following the monks and doing all the things that they said to do, he ended up meeting an oarsman who would take people across the river.

And he realized that the oarsman— and this is right when Siddhartha was trying to kill himself— and the river spoke to him and said the word Om, and he saved him. And so he started fellowshipping with the oarsman that had taken him across the river. And he realized then that the oarsman had found his nirvana. And after months or whatever it was that they shared and talked, one day the oarsman got— packed his stuff and left.

And Siddhartha said, well, where are you going? He says, I've done my job. It's time for you to take over. And he left.

And in that time that Siddhartha was there, he found his nirvana. And at age 14 or 15, he had run away with his best friend, and they were following the monks. And his best friend was still following the monks. Siddhartha had become the oarsman, had found his nirvana.

And one day, this man with a beard who was a monk had come and wanted to cross the river. And he felt something strange about Siddhartha. And they sat there and they talked. And then he realized— they both realized that they were those 2 same best friends.

Siddhartha knew all the time, but the other guy realized that Siddhartha had also found his nirvana. And I read that and it made me get back on the horse. So the next day I came in to see a patient at this clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, and it was a person who needed 3 teeth taken out. I got 2 of them out, but I couldn't get the 3rd one out.

The Mexican dentist who was facilitating and supervising us came over. He took it out, he threw it up in the air, and he caught it in his hand, and he said, one of these days you might be that good. Well, that day came. I left dental school and graduated.

I worked for a year, and then I went to Jamaica and helped set up a clinic and train dental assistants. And every day, after a while, people would come to my house every day wanting emergency dental treatment. Long story short, we converted one of the bedrooms of the house to an operatory. Somebody gave me a reclining car seat that we used for a dental chair, and I saw 600 emergency extraction cases in that room with just anesthesia.

My sterilization was a coffee percolator, no handpieces, mallet and chisel, and we were successful in all but 2 cases, and they didn't come back. So that's my story.

Um, my advice for people in the early stages of exploring is to continue exploring. Don't stop exploring and start using your explorations as an action, And allowing those actions to grow you in what we call faith. And then you will continue living a life where you're always exploring, which means you're always reinventing yourself. It means that you're always gonna be a good listener and you're gonna have tons and tons of stories to tell.

Keep exploring.

The advice that I would give to a person interested in working on a specific problem that you are working to address is to— That you're working to address. That I'm working to address. Okay. What advice do I— do you give to someone interested in working on a specific problem that you are working to address?

Well, I think if a person, if I understand this question correctly, You know, is to ask and to be— if they're interested, to ask. To ask how you can help us, to join us. What we see a lot of times is that people who want to work on a specific problem will not consult with you, but they'll go and work on it somewhere else rather than collaborating to see if we can have more power together.

Nobody is going to be able to reinvent the wheel by themselves. It's only going to be through teams. and being able to be unselfish about being a team player is part of solving the problem because the problem wouldn't be a problem if it were being solved or if it wasn't something that was affecting a lot of people. So therefore, being able to be inclusive and understand that that is part of the solution to the problem, bringing more people on board, working together as teams, and people split up after that, then so be it. But they have information and you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

So I think that communication is part of the, the answer to that question is to be able to communicate effectively. And for those of us who are already working on a problem, to be more and more transparent so that people can feel included.

My vision for the problem, you know, is that it's solvable. I would like to see it solved, be solved in a common-sense approach, a human approach. And how do we get there? We get there by actually identifying the problem to say that, okay, for instance, we don't have enough capacity in oral health. to say that we're not training medical students, pharmacy students, nursing students, and medical students about the significance of oral health being included in their core curriculum is one of the problems.

How do you do that? Well, you would think that it would be simple. It seems like the mouth is part of the body. Let's just incorporate it into your core curriculum.

But no, there's hierarchy, there's classism, there is are people who weren't trained that way, who don't see the value in it, and they're— they weren't trained in it, so they can't see the value in it. They're not taking a deeper dive into it. One of the problems that we just worked on was Oral Health Day just last week, and rather than me lecturing and another medical doctor lecturing about why we think it's important, sort of talking down to students, this year we tried something different. What the difference was, someone who came to me and said, I'm interested in helping you solve this problem.

Okay, fine. So what do you want to do about it? I'd like to participate in any way that you think I can. I can do research, I can put slides together, I can even talk if you want me to be on stage.

I said, okay, why don't you do all 3 of those things? Help me with my slides, help us do a little bit more research, and then when we do the presentation, I'm going to introduce you as a second-year student and let you have a say. And what you're more familiar with than I am is the anatomy. What happens when you get Ludwig's angina?

What happens when you have an avulsed tooth? What happens when you get pneumonia in the lungs that's associated with oral disease? What does the anatomy look like in that pathology? So we did that.

And then she had another suggestion. That suggestion was, I have my 6th grade teacher who had oral cancer.

She'd be a great person to talk to the students as from a patient's perspective. She said, because I've talked to many of my colleagues, student colleagues, who felt that they really love to see and have discussions with live patients who are dealing with real problems. problems that they're reading about in the books. So I said, well then let's do that too. And then another person came and they said, I'm working and doing research on facial recognition.

We're going to be doing tele— dentistry, telemedicine. What do we see when we look at this person? What do we see when we look at the way they walked into the room? How did they sit down?

I said, well then let's bring that in too. So working together and bringing in The people who are— have their finger on the pulse, the people that you are trying to impact. You need to bring a representative from those people into your camp, and they need to be able to give examples of how this information will resonate to all of us. And then how do we sustain it?

How do we keep it going? We can begin to discuss that. I've also found that in cases like this, students are gonna get more bandwidth than me as a faculty person. Faculty person, my peers, are not gonna respond to me as quickly and as openly as they will a student in many cases, not in all, but in many cases.

And I certainly find that to be a problem here at Harvard.

I think it's important. My mentors have shaped me in a positive way, and some mentors I've had to eliminate because they were naysayers. They were telling me how I should live my life. So I'm not looking for a mentor who is going to tell me how to live my life.

I'm looking for a mentor who's going to tell me to get out of the box, not to be a conformist in every case. I'm looking for a mentor who can tell me that because they are living that life themselves. They are an example of doing what people thought was impossible. So I want to be mentored by people who who are doers and visionaries, and I consider myself a visionary as well as a doer.

I don't have all of the technical skills, I don't have all of any of the skills, but I do believe that there are things that one can still bring to the table, and we need all of those entities in order to move the agenda forward and solve the problems that are at hand. The School of Public Health was another great example that showed me people who are actually doing that. How can we come to the table from various disciplines, various walks of life, people who may not be formally trained, and actually contribute to solving the problem? For many years, I sat on the Boston Health Care for the Homeless board, and what I liked about that board that I found more unique than any board I'd sat on is that there were homeless representatives on their board. people who were formerly homeless, who may not be currently homeless, but when they spoke, people listened, and they got the insight that they didn't have.

Christopher Reeves used to play Superman, got hit by a horse, and he was paralyzed all over. And he said that before that, he'd see people ravaging through a garbage can, and he would criticize them and say, well, you know, if you can walk, you can work, and I don't understand why you're searching for food and doing this and doing that. He says, but now I'm in this wheelchair. I can only talk through a trach tube for 20 minutes at a time.

My wife and family has to do everything, everything for me. He says, I would never judge another person ever again, because when people don't know who I am, because I don't look the same anymore, they look at me sometimes with disdain or pity or just whatever. Like, I don't want to be in the same elevator with you. You're just moaning and groaning.

And we as dentists, I see dentists do that in their waiting rooms. They don't want to see children. or adults who are disabled for the same reasons, but they won't admit it. We can't judge anybody. And what I've learned is that it's important to be able to find mentors that are going to encourage you to reach beyond, as they say in that movie that the lady was in who worked for NASA and putting the first man on the moon.

We have to go beyond what we know. I want people to encourage me to go beyond what I know. Because there's a lot of stuff out there that's really rich and really good, and I want a mentor who's going to encourage me. I want a mentor who's going to walk their talk and they're a role model and I can respect them.

I may not agree with them on everything, but I can be able to respect them.

Principles. and the value that I embody to navigate my life is to continue to focus on my mental, physical, and spiritual health and understand that just like oral health is connected to the body, those things are all intertwined as well. And so I have to take time to pray. I have to take time to exercise. And I have to take time to sometimes just take a chill pill and remove myself from all the hassles and hustles and bustles and go to the land.

When I incorporate those things and I am grateful for whatever I have experienced in life, I also use the principle of forgiveness. I have to be able to try to forgive myself and to forgive other people. I have to reach way back in my life and remember sometimes things that I have forgotten that I was guilty of, that I did in my life, and understand that before I point the finger at anybody else, as Michael Jackson would say, you got to look at the man in the mirror. And so looking at that person in the mirror and understanding though that there is a way out.

You may have made mistakes, you may have done some things that you regret, but you need to forgive yourself and ask for you know, the Creator to forgive you. If there's anybody that you have wronged in your life, I believe that you need to go to that person and ask them to forgive you and to say you're sorry. That cleans the slate in a spiritual way, and I can live with that.

Well, you know, my formal and informal education helped shape me as a person because First of all, the informal has a lot to do with your experiences in life and the people who were around you, who taught you, who motivated you, or the people who hurt you. That is still part of your education. Education is not always sweet. You have to take the bitter though with the sweet and use all the lessons learned in life to help form you, shape you as a person.

You cannot repeat some of the things that you've seen other people do. that hurt people, and then again, you may still fall victim to them. Don't give up on yourself, and you have to also be around people, therefore, who will encourage you not to give up on yourself.

Treat people the way you want to be treated. Go beyond race, go beyond ethnicity, go beyond cultures, and get to the heart and soul of where people are coming from. That will make your life rich and And it helps to shape you. And as you see that formulating in your life, you'll just only want more of it.

Having joy is what makes me happy. I'll leave it at that.

My name is Brian Jeffrey Swan, and I am here at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine today. I'm an instructor as well as a assistant professor in the dental school. And the type of work that I personally am doing, a couple things. One, I work with indigenous populations.

I work with refugee populations to provide healthcare and resources. And I also advocate for more inclusion in terms of diversity and inclusion here at the dental school and wherever else I am.

I work with youth in trying to motivate them, so I serve as a mentor, and I also do a lot of emergency dental treatment with various organizations. A personal story that paints a picture of the importance of the problem for me to address— you know, a lot of things are running through my mind because there are a lot of stories.

One of the stories has to do with the fact that A year and a half ago, I was the interim dean of diversity and inclusion here at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. And I had that position for a year. I lived in Tennessee. I live on a farm in East Tennessee.

And it was necessary for me to be on campus as much as possible. We were working hard to try to increase the number of underrepresented students here at the dental school. Its past history was very poor at best, and we wanted, at least under my watch and part of the admissions committee, we had all talked about it, we wanted to find some really good students to come here and be able to display that, you know, they could do this work and that when they graduated, they would actually continue to be able to work and treat people from all walks of life in the communities that they derive from.

And so I was told that, you know, we can give you a little bit of money to help you get here and that you really don't have to work with the faculty, just work with the students. And I could see right then and there that the barriers were going up. First of all, I needed to be here as often as possible, and I ended up just using my own money and getting here every single month for that year.

You can't deal with diversity inclusion and justice issues by just working with students because students' problems are sometimes their own, but they also have problems that they may have with faculty and vice versa. Faculty have problems as well. You know, there are people who are in graduate programs who already have their big degrees but are still going through problems of being treated without bias. And so I came here to do that work.

And when that year was over, you know, I was asked to just go back to one day a week, which was fine, but then I was told that we're just going to pay you for a half day a week, and that you, being working out of state and a half day a week, you can no longer use your title as an assistant professor. You have to— You have to— call yourself an instructor. And I had to weigh whether or not it was important for me to fight to call myself an assistant professor because I'd worked hard to get that, that degree level of title, or to quit, or to suck it up and just keep doing the work.

And then, you know, I thought about it for a few days and I kept debating with the people and the powers that be to think about the value added because at the time I was the only Black faculty in the dental school and there's not many more but at the time I was the only Black faculty and had been for several years and I asked the people who were making this decision, what about the value added? Does that mean anything to you?

What does it mean to you? And it proved not to mean much because the answer that I got was that the budget was more important than the value added. The people value, the value of being a role model, the value of helping the person who took my position to understand some of the work that had been done and coach them a little bit. Those types of values were dismissed.

But I made the decision that the work that we have started needs to be sustainable and I need to continue doing it. So whether I call myself a lecturer, a faculty, an instructor, you know, or, you know, behind the scenes call myself an assistant professor, that didn't really matter. It was important for me to reflect on the value that I bring and that that in itself Outweighs what people were trying to push down my throat. You have to be able to value yourself and know what you bring to the table.

And because I only have one boss, and it is the Creator, that validation is all I need to keep showing up.