It is the final week of April, and on the campus of Morgan State University — a Baltimore proud HBCU and one of the fastest-growing universities on the East Coast — Dr. Robin Butler is in motion. There are graduating seniors to hood, final exams to oversee, community partnerships to nurture, and a class of student health ambassadors who are just now finding their voices. For Dr. Butler, an Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) in Morgan’s School of Community Health and Policy, this is not chaos. This is the work.

As we close out National Minority Health Month — a time designated each April to raise awareness of health disparities affecting racial and ethnic minorities — it feels entirely fitting to spotlight the work Dr. Butler is doing in Baltimore’s own backyard. Through a powerful collaboration with RnD Associates and their Sexual Health Ambassador network, she is widening the reach of community sexual health education by bringing it directly into the university classroom.

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Dr. Butler’s path to Morgan State is not a straight line — it is a road built over more than twenty years of showing up for communities that have been left behind by traditional health systems. She began her career in Baltimore in the early 2000s with the Maryland Cancer Restitution Fund and the Health Education Resource Organization (HERO), where she worked with individuals living with — and affected by — HIV and AIDS. She later moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, managing Ryan White Title funding and the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), overseeing data systems as electronic health records were still coming online.

“I am a proud Baltimorean,” she said with warmth. When the 2008 recession brought her home, she landed at Coppin State University, where she worked as a professor, placing students in health information management practicum sites. She eventually earned her doctorate from the University of Maryland Global Campus in 2017 and joined the faculty at Morgan State shortly thereafter. This is now her fourth semester teaching the university’s health education practicum course — and the class keeps growing. This semester alone, 36 students enrolled, representing three concentration areas: generalist health education, community health, and health administration.

From the beginning, Dr. Butler envisioned her practicum course as more than an academic exercise. She began inviting partners into the classroom — career services staff, representatives from the Baltimore City Health Department, and Narcan training facilitators — to give students real-world exposure to what public health careers actually look like on the ground. But it was a chance introduction through a colleague that opened the door to one of her most meaningful collaborations yet.

A colleague connected Dr. Butler with Rebkha, the executive director of RnD Associates, who was seeking a co-principal investigator for an HPV ambassador grant through Johns Hopkins. That relationship blossomed into a full-fledged partnership. RnD’s Sexual Health Ambassadors began visiting Morgan’s campus — not to lecture, but to mentor. And that distinction, Dr. Butler says, changed everything.

“Many people who take on our students look at them through a different lens,” she explained. “But RnD — they just got right in, and the students just felt at home.” She paused, as if still marveling at it. “That’s golden.”

Currently, five of her students serve as ambassadors in partnership with RnD, and two additional students work as HPV ambassadors. The assignments are as varied as the students themselves. One ambassador, Tanisha, is conducting a period justice project with a global scope — researching menstrual health disparities across multiple countries and presenting her findings to the class. Another student, Esther, co-organized a women’s empowerment event with one of the RnD ambassadors and served as the event’s moderator — a role she performed, by all accounts, as if she had been doing it for years. Some students have gone on to establish their own LLCs since engaging with the ambassador program.

When asked why it is so important for college students specifically to be engaged in sexual health advocacy, Dr. Butler does not hesitate. Morgan draws students from California, Florida, Atlanta, and beyond. Many live in campus dormitories, forming their own peer communities where health conversations do not always happen organically, and where isolation can be a quiet threat to wellbeing.

“Wellness is a huge issue,” she said. “As big as Morgan is, it can be isolated. Students who are not part of organizations, who are kind of just here on their own — it can be a detriment.” She also serves as advisor to My Sister’s Keeper, the campus chapter of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, which focuses heavily on reproductive justice and peer-to-peer education — what Dr. Butler calls “street outreach.”

“I think that in some of our spaces, we’re afraid to mix and mingle,” she said. “But this is actually what’s needed.” Her approach is one of radical accessibility. She has recently begun placing condoms in campus bathrooms — a small but significant act of visibility. She believes that making sexual health resources present and normalized is itself the first step toward better outcomes. “It needs to be a priority,” she said simply.

The campus also hosts an annual AIDS Lock-In during World AIDS Day every fall, and Dr. Butler has made it her mission to have her health education students fully engaged. Last semester, sixteen of them participated — some meeting RnD’s Rebkha Atnafou for the first time through a podcast session recorded at the event.

Perhaps what strikes Dr. Butler most is watching students she has known since their freshman year — students she affectionately calls “babies” blossom in ways she couldn’t have scripted. Public speaking confidence. The ability to walk into a room and belong there. A willingness to share their own perspectives on sexual health, which she finds consistently more nuanced and thoughtful than outsiders might expect.

“Many of them don’t think they belong in the spaces they are in,” she said quietly. “And RnD — they not only motivate these students. They give them a safe space to execute their creativity and knowledge.”

This is the work Dr. Butler has always wanted to do. She builds it one semester at a time, one student at a time, in a place she has always called home. Morgan State is on an extraordinary trajectory — working toward R1 research institution status, enrolling over 11,000 students in a single semester, and bursting, as she puts it, at the seams. That growth means more students in need of the kind of grounded, real-world health education she provides.

“For them and me,” she said, “it’s transformative. That’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Michelle Petties is aTEDx speaker, Food Story coach, and the award-winning memoirist ofLeaving Large: The Stories of a Food Addict. After gaining and losing 700 pounds, Michelle discovered the secret to overcoming stress and emotional overeating. Her free workbook,Mind Over Meals, reveals her core principles for losing weight and keeping it off.