On Saturday, Feb. 24, the Brassworks Building at the Goodman Community Center on Madison’s East Side will be a sea of red as women from throughout the area will converge for the 2024 Wear Red Day celebration. Hosted by the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, the annual event is a day of education, awareness, and time spent together learning how to identify, prevent, and survive heart disease.
“I love to see all of the women in red all together. I love to see that sea of faces and to feel that energy and to leave the event excited to live our best lives for ourselves on a daily basis,” Lisa Peyton-Caire, founder and president of the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, tells Madison365.
“I love that we come together in all of our beauty and all of our power and all of our sisterhood with the understanding that it is through coming together and learning together that our healing happens,” she adds. “We feel so good at this event. There’s so much positive action on Wear Read Day. There’s so much belief in healing,”
The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness is a Madison-area non-profit organization on Madison’s West Side committed to mobilizing African American women to pursue and sustain mind-body-spirit wellness, and to raise the visibility and support of Black women’s health as a community and public health priority. The organization’s annual Wear Red Day celebration was started by Peyton-Caire in honor of her mother, Roberta Peyton, who died of congestive heart failure in 2006 at the age of 64.
This will be the 13th annual event and the first in-person Wear Red Day celebration since the start of the pandemic. Peyton-Caire can still remember hosting that very first Wear Red Day event 13 years ago in the Evjue Community Room of the Urban League of Greater Madison with just 10-15 women in the room.
“It was at that moment 13 years ago that I started on this journey to do the education and outreach around heart disease because I’ve been so deeply impacted by the loss of my mother and so many women in my family community,” Peyton-Caire says. “That’s what spurred the beginning of this event.
“It’s exciting to see Wear Red Day grow to the point it has today, sold out with 150 women registered who are going to come and partake in this beautiful day of education and awareness dressed in red for the sole purpose of learning how to preserve their hearts and their health. That’s why we do the work that we do.”
Opening remarks at Saturday’s Wear Red Day will given by Peyton-Caire The keynote will be delivered by Bridgett Wilder, founder of the Perseverance Health & Wellness Coaching. The featured speakers will be Shemeka Campbell, a heart health advocate and entrepreneur, and Dana Pellebon, the executive director of RCC Sexual Violence Resource Center and a current candidate for Dane County executive.
“Heart disease is not only an elderly woman’s disease and we’ve been pushing and driving this message for over the years that we can’t wait until we’re at midlife and older to begin to think about our heart health or our health, in general. We are at risk earlier than our counterparts. Statistically, when we talk about any chronic illness, [Black women] are younger and more at risk of not only living with the disease but succumbing to the disease,” Peyton-Caire says. “So we’ve got to talk about it as younger women and talk about it intergenerationally so that we’re prepared to do the preventative work and so we are reducing our risk in order to overcome heart disease once and for all.
“So we’re so excited about the stories that will be told on Saturday because we know through the stories that women understand most immediately how to begin their journey towards changing and improving their health,” she adds.
Women are encouraged to come dressed in red for Saturday’s event which begins at 11 a.m..
“We’ve planned another beautiful event at the Goodman Community Center again this year to equip women with the knowledge, the information and the support to launch new behaviors and new approaches to really knowing and understanding how to protect their heart health as we face this number-one medical risks to Black women’s health … heart disease,” Peyton-Caire says.
“It’s never an old message to share. There are always new ways to share this information. There are always new stories to tell that help women to really understand what the risk is in their personal lives and to our community and what steps they can take to prevent their risk and to improve their overall health.”
Sponsors of Wear Red Day include UW Health, American Family Insurance Institute, Pearl Milling, and ASHRO. Peyton-Caire is excited that the event has been sold out for a little while now.
“We are expecting some new women this year, so that will be fun,” she says, “But there are also women that will have attended all 13 years!”
Wear Red Day is a day of camaraderie and sisterhood while raising awareness and educating women about heart disease and learning tips and strategies to protect heart health from expert guest speakers and presenters.
“We know that transformation and change are so possible when we come into that spirit of positive energy, uplift and discuss answers and solutions,” Peyton-Caire says. “We hear from women every year that when they come into the space of Wear Red Day, dressed in their best red, it’s just inspirational. Personally, I love to see these smiling faces and to hear the accounts of women who are helping us save our own lives.”
