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Know Your Health

Know Your Health is a grassroots health literacy initiative founded by Logan Weston in 2022, when he was a fourteen-year-old sophomore at Edgewood High School. The program addresses health disparities and medical mistrust in Baltimore's communities of color through monthly educational panels featuring healthcare professionals—primarily physicians, nurses, and public health workers of color—who provide accessible, culturally responsive health education to youth.

Overview

Know Your Health brings healthcare knowledge into the Baltimore neighborhoods where systemic barriers have created the greatest need, operating on a rotating basis across community spaces. The initiative emerged from Logan's recognition that health inequity is not just about access to care but about access to knowledge—understanding symptoms, navigating insurance, recognizing medical gaslighting, and advocating for oneself in healthcare settings that often dismiss or harm Black and brown patients. By 2024, when Logan is a senior managing a schedule of dual enrollment courses at Community College of Baltimore County, debate team leadership, Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring, and college applications, Know Your Health has become an established monthly program with a consistent youth audience and a network of professional speakers who donate their time and expertise.

The program's significance within the Faultlines universe extends beyond its direct impact on participating youth. It demonstrates Logan's commitment to addressing the same systemic healthcare failures that are quietly shaping his classmate Jacob Keller's fate—though Logan does not yet know the full extent of Jacob's medical neglect. Know Your Health teaches youth to navigate systems that Jacob has no access to, creating a painful parallel between Logan's community organizing and his inability to reach the struggling student in his own TA class.

Founding and Origins

Logan Weston founded Know Your Health in 2022 at age fourteen, during his sophomore year at Edgewood High School. The initiative emerged from his growing awareness of health disparities in Baltimore and his own experiences navigating healthcare as a Black teenager with Type 1 diabetes. While Logan benefits from supportive parents—Julia Weston, a top neurologist at Johns Hopkins, and Nathan Weston, a BPD lieutenant—who advocate fiercely for his care, he recognized early that most Black and brown youth in Baltimore do not have those advantages.

The catalyst for Know Your Health drew from multiple sources: witnessing peers at Edgewood struggle with undiagnosed conditions, hearing community members' accounts of medical racism and dismissal, understanding from his mother's work how healthcare systems fail marginalized patients, and experiencing his own moments of having to prove his symptoms were real. At fourteen, Logan decided that if healthcare systems would not adequately serve Baltimore's youth of color, he would create a space where those youth could learn to protect themselves.

The program started small—a single panel held at a community center or church, with Logan coordinating one or two speakers and hoping the model would prove viable. Through his sophomore and junior years, Know Your Health transitioned from experiment to established program. Monthly panels became regular occurrences, venues committed to recurring hosting, and a network of professional speakers developed with some returning for multiple sessions. By 2024, three years after its founding, Know Your Health had name recognition in Baltimore's community health landscape, a consistent youth audience, and professionals who continued volunteering their expertise.

Mission and Approach

Know Your Health's mission centers on health literacy, empowerment, and equity. The program operates from a foundational conviction that knowledge is power and protection: youth who understand their bodies, recognize symptoms, and know when to seek care are better equipped to survive in healthcare systems designed to dismiss them. Health literacy, in this framing, is not merely educational—it is a survival skill.

Representation is central to the program's design. By featuring primarily healthcare professionals of color, Know Your Health demonstrates to Baltimore's youth that people who look like them belong in medicine, succeed in medicine, and can be trusted to care both competently and compassionately. Speakers model possibility while bringing specific understanding of the barriers their communities face.

The program refuses to treat healthcare as a privilege rather than a right. Monthly panels are provided free of charge in accessible community locations, rejecting the model where health education remains available only to those with institutional access. Know Your Health goes to where youth are rather than demanding they navigate unfamiliar institutional spaces. Just as critically, the program does not limit itself to practical tools while skirting systemic critique. Discussions address medical racism directly—the legacy of exploitation including the Tuskegee experiment and Henrietta Lacks, contemporary maternal mortality disparities, and how to recognize and push back against gaslighting and dismissal. Naming broken systems is treated as inseparable from teaching youth to navigate them.

Community-based and culturally responsive programming forms the third pillar. Holding panels in churches and community centers rather than hospitals or schools signals that this knowledge belongs to the community, not to institutions, and that the program takes seriously the historical harm those institutions have done.

Programs and Initiatives

Know Your Health operates primarily through its monthly panel format, with rotating topics that ensure youth attending multiple panels receive comprehensive health education rather than repeated information. Each panel features guest speakers with relevant expertise and lived experience, creating space for honest discussion about navigating healthcare while Black or brown in America.

Health Literacy and Navigation

Panels addressing practical healthcare navigation cover understanding symptoms, knowing when to seek care, how insurance works, finding providers, accessing prescriptions, and interpreting medical bills. These sessions address the practical knowledge that healthcare systems assume everyone possesses but systematically deny to marginalized communities.

Chronic Disease Management

Given the disproportionate burden of conditions including diabetes, asthma, hypertension, and sickle cell disease in Black and brown communities, Know Your Health dedicates regular programming to chronic disease management. These panels teach youth to advocate for proper treatment, recognize complications, manage medications, and demand comprehensive care rather than dismissal.

Mental Health and Wellness

Addressing stigma around mental health in communities of color, these panels cover recognizing depression and anxiety, accessing therapy and psychiatric care, and understanding that mental health is health. Sessions address the particular ways healthcare systems pathologize Black emotion while ignoring genuine suffering.

Reproductive Health

Comprehensive coverage includes contraception, STI prevention and treatment, pregnancy and prenatal care, and the urgent reality of maternal health disparities. Given that Black women die from pregnancy-related complications at three to four times the rate of white women, Logan treats this programming as essential rather than supplementary.

Medical Racism and Self-Advocacy

These sessions name systemic racism in healthcare directly, teach youth to recognize gaslighting and dismissal, provide language for advocating for oneself, and discuss historical exploitation alongside contemporary disparities. Building skills to demand respectful, competent care is treated as a core educational priority.

Preventive Care and Emergency Response

Rounding out the curriculum, panels cover routine checkups, vaccinations, screenings, and healthy lifestyle foundations alongside emergency response—recognizing medical emergencies, knowing when and how to call for help, and how to communicate symptoms effectively in high-pressure situations.

Leadership and Staff

Founding Leadership

Logan created Know Your Health at fourteen and sustained it through his sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school. He handles all aspects of program coordination: booking venues, recruiting and scheduling speakers, promoting panels through community networks and schools, facilitating events, and maintaining relationships with community partners. This work runs alongside a full course load at Edgewood, four dual enrollment classes at CCBC Catonsville, debate team leadership, Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring, hospital volunteering, and college applications. Logan brings both personal experience navigating healthcare as a Black teenager with Type 1 diabetes and familial access to medical expertise through his mother Julia. His motivation stems from genuine commitment to health equity alongside the pressure of being "twice as good"—the unspoken expectation that Black youth must prove their worth through exceptional achievement.

By senior year, Know Your Health has become another weight in Logan's unsustainable schedule. He cannot step back without feeling he has abandoned his community. He cannot delegate because he built the entire infrastructure himself. The monthly panels continue even as Logan deteriorates under the combined pressure of everything he has taken on.

Program Staff and Community Workers

Know Your Health operates without formal paid staff. A rotating network of Baltimore healthcare professionals of color—physicians, nurses, public health workers, mental health providers—volunteer their time and expertise for panel sessions. Logan recruits through his mother Julia's professional network, CCBC Catonsville connections, community organizations, and direct outreach. Some professionals return for multiple sessions across different topics, becoming informal program anchors.

Julia Weston, as a prominent Black neurologist at Johns Hopkins, serves as both sounding board for Logan's work and occasional panel speaker. Her professional network provides Logan with access to potential speakers and models the kind of medical excellence and community commitment that shaped his values. Julia's participation connects the program to institutional medicine while Know Your Health itself maintains its community-based independence.

Community and Constituency

Know Your Health serves Baltimore youth, especially youth of color from middle school through college age. Attendance is free, open, and requires no registration or prior commitment—a design choice reflecting Logan's understanding that marginalized youth often navigate chaotic lives with unpredictable schedules and family responsibilities that preclude formal program membership.

By holding panels in churches, community centers, and recreation centers rather than hospitals, schools, or universities, the program signals that health knowledge belongs to the community rather than to institutions. Venues donate space, reflecting genuine community investment in the program's mission. Youth attend as needed, sometimes bringing friends and siblings, building informal networks around health literacy.

The program centers cultural responsiveness as a structural principle rather than an aspiration. Featuring speakers of color who share participants' backgrounds creates space for honest conversation about medical racism, community-specific health challenges, and the particular barriers Black and brown patients face. Know Your Health does not pretend healthcare is race-neutral; naming that reality is part of the curriculum.

Physical accessibility considerations remain partially unresolved. Whether Logan consistently ensures venues are wheelchair accessible, provides materials in multiple formats, or accommodates other access needs reflects both his commitment and the limits of what a teenager running a program alone can fully address.

Funding and Sustainability

Know Your Health operates on a lean informal model, relying on community donations, donated venue space, and volunteer speaker participation rather than formal grants or institutional funding. Logan has not pursued formal nonprofit status or organized fundraising infrastructure, reflecting both limited individual capacity and a deliberate resistance to institutional entanglement that might compromise the program's community-controlled character.

The absence of formal funding structures means the program operates without financial resilience. There is no buffer for materials, promotion, or technology. There is no backup if Logan cannot coordinate a given month's panel. The grassroots nature is simultaneously the program's strength—community-controlled, not beholden to funders with competing interests—and its most significant structural vulnerability.

Partnerships and Alliances

Know Your Health's partnerships are informal and relational rather than institutional. Community venues across Baltimore—churches, recreation centers, community centers—provide donated space, representing genuine community endorsement of the program's mission. Healthcare professionals who speak at panels contribute expertise and credibility while deepening the network of professionals of color invested in community health equity.

Julia Weston's professional network at Johns Hopkins provides access to potential speakers and informal institutional support, though Know Your Health maintains independence from Johns Hopkins as an institution. Logan's connections through CCBC Catonsville and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Maryland have expanded the program's reach into additional community networks. Edgewood High School itself represents an informal partnership, as Logan promotes panels through school channels and recruits youth participants from the student body.

Public Presence and Communications

Within Baltimore's community health landscape, Know Your Health is recognized as a grassroots youth empowerment initiative doing necessary work with minimal resources. The program's reputation centers on accessibility, representative speaker composition, relevance to real health disparities, and its origins in youth leadership—a program created and sustained by a teenager, speaking to youth as peers rather than from institutional distance.

For Logan, Know Your Health functions simultaneously as genuine community service and as a component of his college application narrative. The program emerged from authentic commitment to health equity, but it also positions him as an exceptional applicant—dedicated, visionary, and proven. Adults praise his initiative and dedication. College application reviewers encounter a compelling story of youth activism. The boundary between authentic service and strategic self-presentation blurs uncomfortably, a tension Logan is not always positioned to examine honestly while he is still inside it.

Medical professionals view Know Your Health with appreciation tempered by awareness of its limitations. Monthly panels cannot solve systemic healthcare inequity. Some observe, quietly, that a fourteen-year-old felt compelled to create this program because institutions would not—and consider what that says about institutional failure. By 2024, community members who have watched Logan sustain this work through three years of an increasingly overwhelming schedule begin to worry. His collapse at CCBC that fall confirms those concerns.

Controversies and Internal Tensions

Know Your Health's primary challenge is structural unsustainability. Logan runs the entire program alone, without backup if he cannot coordinate a panel, without budget for materials or promotion, and without formal infrastructure to ensure continuity if his capacity fails. By senior year, this model reaches its breaking point. Logan's physical and emotional collapse in fall 2024 proves that the program's design—dependent entirely on one exhausted teenager—was never viable at scale.

The burden of representation compounds the structural problem. As a prominent Black student organizing health equity programming, Logan becomes a symbol: proof that Black youth are exceptional, that community problems can be solved through individual initiative, that systemic failures respond to working harder. This narrative obscures the reality that a fourteen-year-old should not have needed to create health literacy programs—and that no individual teenager's excellence can substitute for the institutional investment communities actually need.

A quieter tension concerns the relationship between Logan's genuine commitment and his college application strategy. Know Your Health does real good. It also positions Logan for elite admission. Both things are true simultaneously, and the impossibility of fully separating authentic service from strategic self-presentation creates an ethical murkiness that Logan cannot easily resolve while still inside the situation.

Finally, Know Your Health's reach remains limited relative to the need. Monthly panels serving dozens of youth cannot address Baltimore's structural health disparities. The program provides meaningful education to those who attend, but it cannot compel policy change, reform healthcare systems, or redistribute the resources that would actually solve the underlying problem.

Character-Specific Connections

Logan Weston

Know Your Health is Logan's creation and his most sustained commitment from age fourteen through his high school years and beyond. The program embodies his values—health equity, community accountability, the refusal to accept that systemic failures are inevitable—while also illustrating the danger of those values unchecked by structural support. Logan's relationship with Know Your Health traces the arc from idealism and genuine capacity through overextension and collapse, and ultimately toward whatever a more sustainable model of community leadership might look like. For Logan, the program is not separable from his identity: it is what he built, what he believed in, and what cost him more than he anticipated.

Julia Weston

Julia's relationship with Know Your Health is that of an enabling presence—her professional network, her occasional participation as a speaker, and the model of medical excellence and community commitment she embodied all shaped what Logan built. She is neither the program's founder nor its driver, but the infrastructure of her life made Logan's work possible in ways neither of them fully accounts for.

Legacy and Impact

As of 2024–2025, Know Your Health's legacy is still being written. The program has provided three years of health literacy education to Baltimore youth, with ripple effects that may not be immediately measurable: youth who recognize symptoms earlier, advocate for themselves more effectively in medical settings, pursue healthcare careers, or bring what they learned into their families and communities.

The initiative demonstrates that young people can identify community needs and organize meaningful responses without institutional permission or resources. Logan's work at fourteen through seventeen models youth activism and sustained commitment—and also illuminates how often that activism is made necessary by institutional failure rather than by genuine youth empowerment.

For Logan personally, Know Your Health represents both genuine achievement and cautionary tale. It proves his capacity for leadership, organization, and sustained commitment to equity. It also demonstrates the cost of excellence-driven self-sacrifice, the expectation that marginalized youth should fix systemic problems through individual exceptionalism, and what happens when someone cannot say no to what their community needs.

Whether Know Your Health continues beyond Logan's high school years, gets formalized through institutional partnerships, inspires successor programs, or dissolves when Logan lacks capacity to sustain it remains to be seen. Its ultimate significance may lie less in specific health literacy outcomes than in what it reveals: that need in Baltimore's communities of color is so profound that a fourteen-year-old felt compelled to address it, and that institutional failure is so thoroughgoing that his grassroots effort was genuinely necessary.

Organizations Nonprofits Health Initiatives Baltimore Know Your Health