Barbershop Conversations Promote Health and Wellness

The Confess Project of America’s Harvard-reviewed Mental Health Advocacy Training is coming to Florida for the first time! This powerful program brings mental health and wellness awareness, training, and support into trusted barbershop spaces across our community. MidPoint explored this innovative new program, Barbershop Conversations in Tampa, which is the first site in Florida to train barbers to be mental health and wellness advocates for their barbershop clients. With our guests Antionette Davis, founder and CEO of EnVision Resolution and the EnVision Resolution Foundation, Genet Stewart, Dir. of strategic initiatives for the Hillsborough County  Children’s Board, and Jarvis El Amin, the community engagement specialist for the Barbershop Conversations program, we discussed how they hope to spread this program throughout the state of Florida with a training and information session on June 23 for advocates from around Florida. Social service providers and barbers will learn how our local barbers are being trained to serve as advocates for health and wellness in communities where medical and mental health providers are scarce, and where barbershop clients are often reluctant to seek out services from those that exist. The program is funded by the Children’s Board through their OneHillsborough Initiative and led by EnVision Resolutions to provide training for barbers as mental health and wellness advocates with the hope of expanding the program throughout the state.

Loneliness is a public health crisis and men, particularly Black and Brown men, are not receiving the emotional support they need to be healthy members of society. The suicide rate among Black young boys is too high. This program aims to address these problems. The Barbershop Conversations program hosts meetings in barbershops twice a month with mental health and medical professionals available for consultation, healthy heart information, and basic screenings for blood pressure, A1c numbers, and other basic health indicators and, where appropriate, counseling the attendees on what services to seek out from the providers in their area.  They’ve tackled topics like healthy eating and screening for certain cancers unique to the Black community. The most recent presentation had 26 men in a local barbershop in conversation about fatherhood. As Jarvis El Amin described it, “It was great talking about fatherhood. The joys and challenges of fatherhood had a couple of young brothers in there, and at the end, when they said, I learned so much from listening to the older brothers talking about what fatherhood is, what it looked like, how we should deal with it, how we deal with child custody.” The program was so successful that another one is planned soon. The program also trains barbers themselves to be mental health advocates to discuss opportunities for therapy and medical wellness checks with their clients who are already in the shop for haircuts.

The program is also collecting data, feedback, and information from the barbershop clients in an effort to increase their utilization of health resources. As Genet Stewart noted “There are resources, though, that certain of our residents are not comfortable reaching out, for whatever reason. So some of it is just maybe the help doesn’t feel as helpful. Maybe they feel judged it could be. Maybe a man would prefer to talk to someone who looks like him. So, there’s a variety of reasons. So, this is an opportunity for those of us who are in this space where we provide services to listen, to listen to our men, and challenge ourselves to figure out is there a way that we could pivot, maybe to address their needs. Because we do have men in our community who, for whatever reason, they’re not utilizing the great, wonderful resources that we have available. So, this is this is really going to help us listen and figure out what we need to do collectively.”

EnVision’s Antionette Davis is encouraged about the future success of this program. “One of the things that we have as an organization in terms of our core values, is listening. Those who are closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and we can figure it out. And I’m hopeful about that.”

More information about Barbershop Conversations can be found on EnVision Resolution’s website.  The official kick-off event is Sunday, June 22, 2025, from 4 to 6 pm, at The Skills Center,
5107 N. 22nd St. Tampa, FL 33610. All are welcome.

This entire show is available for listening on demand from the MidPoint archives, on the WMNF app, or as a WMNF MidPoint podcast from Spotify or Apple Music.