Every April, Minority Health Month calls us to reckon honestly with the health disparities that disproportionately affect Black and Brown communities. We talk about the diseases — diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular conditions that cut lives short. But this month, this series has been committed to shining a light on a dimension of health that rarely gets its own moment in these conversations: sexual health. And few people are doing more creative, courageous work in that space than Ciera Daniel.

There is a word that kept surfacing in my conversation with Ciera — one that captures everything she does, everything she stands for, and everything Baltimore desperately needs right now. That word is bridge.

Sign up for our free newsletter.

As a sexual health ambassador with RnD Associates and the founder of God Is Here Media, Daniel has spent years constructing passageways between worlds that have long existed in uneasy distance from one another: the Black church and public health, faith communities and sexual wellness education, spiritual identity and bodily stewardship. In a city still grappling with some of the most alarming sexual health statistics in the country, this bridge work is not metaphorical. It is urgent and lifesaving.

Daniel’s journey into this space began around 2019, when she started collaborating with RnD Associates Executive Director Rebkha Atnafou on adolescent youth development training. She contributed to a guidebook published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, TheTeen Years Explained: Second Edition, where she brought a critical lens to how sexualized media and digital messaging shape adolescent development. When Atnafou asked if she would be interested in leading sexual health trainings, Daniel said yes. But it was a subsequent call — one that would prove pivotal — that truly shaped the direction of her work.

Atnafou reached out again, this time alongside the late Bishop Douglas Miles, with an idea: to bring sexual health education directly into faith communities. For Daniel, the first reaction was honest and human. “My first thought was — what the heck?” she told me, laughing softly. “This is scary, unfamiliar territory.” But Bishop Miles said yes, and his blessing carried weight. “His yes stabilized my yes,” Daniel said. “Him being such a pillar in the faith community, having him alongside the work gave me the comfort and reassurance — alright, yeah, let’s do it.”

Why the Black Church?

The reasoning behind targeting faith communities was not arbitrary. At the time, Baltimore held the grim distinction of being the number one city in the United States for STD transmission. And Daniel, a Baltimore native, understood something essential about her city: that while trust in medical institutions — shaped in part by histories like that of Henrietta Lacks and the long shadow of Johns Hopkins in Black neighborhoods — has often been low, trust in the church has remained remarkably high.

“A lot of African Americans have historically, even to this day, held great trust within the church — for everything,” she said. “And so it just seemed to be this huge gap. There were people of faith and people of color suffering, lacking education, and yet this topic was so taboo and untouched within the Black church.”

The silence, Daniel explained, is layered. It is rooted in shame-based theology passed down through generations, in the trauma of sexual abuse within communities, and in household cultures where these topics simply were never discussed. The church, in many ways, was just extending what was already happening at home. Breaking through that silence meant starting not with congregations, but with faith leaders themselves — peeling back the veil, as she put it, and creating space where every voice at the table could be heard.

And the response? “We were overwhelmed by how many people were receptive,” she said. “When you present people with the reality of the situation — we were the number one city for STD transmission — that reality sobers people up and makes them open.”

God Is Here Media: Faith, Health, and Innovation

Out of this work, Daniel founded God Is Here Media, an organization that creates faith-based content targeting four critical areas: sexual health, adverse childhood experiences, literacy and education, and disease prevention. The organization’s mission — to  “change the world through the power of faith and media” — is rooted in a conviction Daniel came to through both professional experience and personal faith: that the church, properly engaged, can be one of public health’s most powerful allies.

Her reasoning is both spiritual and statistical. Roughly 80% of African Americans report that religion is very important in their lives. And yet, Daniel observes, our communities continue to experience deep health disparities, in literacy, in childhood adversity. “Faith should not mean a lack of education,” she said firmly. “It should mean quite the opposite. We should steward our bodies in a way that is in our best interest.”

For preventable, lifestyle-related diseases — and for STIs that could be avoided through education and behavior change — Daniel sees faith as a potentially more powerful intervention than dollars alone. Billions are spent annually on STD medical costs and prevention, she notes, distributed across funding streams like a game of “investment whack-a-mole.” But a changed mind, she argues, is more durable than the staggering direct medical costs of STIs. “Where funding and medical access are limited,” she said, “an investment in sexual health education is more powerful.”

Behind the PrEP PSA

Daniel also developed the script and produced  RnD Associates’ PrEP public service announcement — a beautifully produced video now seeking airtime on local media. The project began when Atnafou invited her to review research and interviews drawn from a collaboration involving Hopkins nursing school, care providers, and current users of PrEP and PEP. What struck Daniel most was a single story: a woman who asked her doctor about PrEP after hearing about it from friends, only to be asked if she was a sex worker.

“There was something about that line,” Daniel said quietly. “It encapsulates so many of our preconceived notions and misconceptions.” She built the entire script around that heart — advocating for Black heterosexual women, who remain disproportionately underrepresented in PrEP enrollment despite high rates of HIV in their communities, and calling on doctors and caregivers to broaden their vision of who this medication is for.

As our conversation drew to a close, Daniel offered a final thought that stayed with me: “Avoidance is one of the biggest enemies to healing. We can’t sit back and wish the world were the way we think it should be, while avoiding huge problems like sexual health.”

She is not sitting back. She is building bridges — between pews and public health, between silence and knowledge, between our communities and the healing they deserve.

Next week: Another RnD Associates ambassador shares their story from the frontlines of Baltimore’s sexual health movement.

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.