Budding Black Dentists
Budding Black Dentists is a platform founded by Elizabeth Fynn-Famodun, a dental student at the University of Plymouth, who not only noticed the alarming lack of black representation in the field of dentistry, but also the need to target this issue.
This finding became more evident after herself and her colleagues, Vivienne Onamusi and El-Eden Biney, attended a dental-student conference and found that they were amongst only a handful of black dental students present. This was not the case for those of Asian and Caucasian backgrounds. This lack of representation is clearly reflected in the dental professional as a whole – the three students found that only 3% of dentists in the world identify as black. This ultimately meant that finding mentorship as a young black dental professional in the hands of someone that looked like them would be near impossible, which would create a domino effect as there would be few black professionals to look up to.
In aims to combat this, the three dental students launched a non-profit organisation to equip aspiring dental applicants with the necessary tools needed for each stage of their dental journey, to help to educate the black community on the importance of oral health and what dentistry entails, via outreach programmes, and to establish a strong support network of aspiring and qualified black dentists for the facilitation of mentoring schemes.
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