A University of Rhode Island alumnus donated a $50,000 endowment to the Robert and Berdie Lawrence Endowed Scholarship for Black students in the College of Pharmacy.
The scholarship is named after the parents of the alumnus, Kenneth Lawrence, who were born in the South during the 1940s, where segregation and racial issues were prevalent.
Lawrence said that he created the endowment as an homage to his parents’ hard work and the sacrifices that they made for him, as well as the importance that his parents put on education while he was growing up.
“Really [the endowment is] about giving kids, particularly Black kids, an opportunity to really be able to go to URI, to the College of Pharmacy,” Lawrence said. “When I graduated, actually when I attended and subsequently graduated both times, there were no other Black kids there in the program.”
Lawrence said that he could not remember many or any Black students that attended the College of Pharmacy in the recent past after speaking to students and professors from his time at the University, between 1983 and 1988.
Today, according to Dean of the College of Pharmacy Paul Larrat, minorities represent 9.6 percent of the Doctor of Pharmacy program and 25.9 percent of the Bachelor of Science in Pharmaceutical Sciences program.
The field of pharmacy is predominantly white and Asian, according to Larrat, with Black students only representing a small percentage of pharmacists nationally.
“It’s been too white for too long and I think there has certainly been a negative impact,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence and Larrat hope that through this endowment more Black students will have the opportunity to attend URI for pharmacy.
With the Doctorate of Pharmacy program being a six-year program, Larrat said that many students are deterred by fiscal constraints. This endowment will hopefully allow a Black student from a disadvantaged background to complete the program, according to Larrat.
“We want our student body to reflect the communities that we serve, our patient communities that we serve,” Larrat said. “So if we have students that [are] of diverse backgrounds, no matter what it is, I think that’s a benefit to us as we try to heal and try to do the things that pharmacists do in the communities.”
Black clinicians in the workplace represent the patients they take care of Lawrence said. Having this representation helps both the patients and clinicians combat implicit and conscious bias in how patients are cared for by clinicians.
“Having a workforce representative of what this country looks like is really going to only help everybody, from the patient to the clinician,” Lawrence said. “There’s certainly research that shows this; there’s research in business that shows having diverse workplaces — the return on investment is actually substantial. I think health care is a little late to the party, so to speak.”
COVID-19 has exacerbated the disparities within health care, according to Lawrence. However, he is hopeful that after seeing these disparities, America can learn something by taking a look at the causes of systemic racism and putting solutions in place that have been needed.
The College of Pharmacy, according to Larrat, is looking at what it can do to improve diversity and inclusion of faculty, staff and students of many different backgrounds, but there is still a long way to go.
“We really have to make a concerted effort to be the best people we can be and be as inclusive as we can be, and as supportive as we can be,” Larrat said. “We want to help each other be successful.”