Welcome Message
Welcome to the new iask, Inc. world-wide website.
We are a group of professional women (and some men) of all races, colors and creeds dedicated to empowering and uplifting today’s Professional Black Woman.
Some may wonder why such an organization is needed in the 21st Century when black women, particularly professional black women, seem to be doing very well. After all, our nation’s two most powerful women, Secretary of State, Dr. Condoleezza Rice & media superstar Oprah Winfrey are professional black women. It is true, in just one 40 years since the 1960s Civil Rights & Women's Rights movements, a new generation of black women have become doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, corporate executives and the like. However, despite these wonderful achievements and successes, we as a unique demographic of women are in crisis.
Over the past decade there has been an alarming trend relative to the health & wellness of black women in the United States. And these trends are no longer just focused on poor and middle class black women. Health & wellness indices released by the Centers for Disease Control, NIH Office of Minority Health, Department of Health & Human Services, Boston University Black Women’s Health Study, and the U.S. Census Bureau through 2006 paint a picture of black women in serious decline relative to what we at iask call the five (5) core areas of our lives. Those five areas are as follows: our health (physical and emotional), our relationships, our careers, our finances, and our spirituality/faith:
To give you a sense of what the collective data reveals, consider these findings below:
The more education and money a black woman has, the less likely she is to marry and have children.
Currently in America, 42.3% of all black women have never been married, that number is reported to be as high as 70% for PBW as of 2007
Black women are 5 times more likely to be single at age 40 than are their white female counterparts.
There are more black women than black men (24 percent compared with 17 percent) who have ascended to the professional-managerial class in America.
More black women than black men are enrolled in colleges and universities, including historically black colleges and universities.
Black women earned 67 percent of bachelor's degrees awarded to blacks in 2006. Black women earned 69 percent of master's degrees and 66 percent of doctoral degrees awarded to blacks in 2006. And, we earned 58 percent of all professional degrees awarded to blacks, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Research Council.
HIV/AIDS is now the number one killer of black women ages 25-44 in America. In 2003, the rate of new AIDS cases for black women was 20 times that of white women and five times greater than the infection rate for Latinos.
According to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bethesda-based National Institutes of Health and other government agencies, black women are twice as likely to be overweight, have heart attacks, develop diabetes (high blood sugar), lupus (an autoimmune disease) uterine fibroids, and hepatitis C (a liver disease). They also have a significantly higher risk of asthma, stroke, arthritis, cancer and the sexually transmitted disease Chlamydia.
Depression and suicide rates are fairly high among the black professional class.
Moreover, black women still find themselves lagging behind whites and other women in health and mental health indices. For example, the depression rate among African American women is estimated to be almost 50% higher than that of Caucasian women.
Given these serious and disproportionate challenges facing professional black women, we at iask are committed to providing a safe haven, a place of rest, and a place of fellowship where we can take off the "strong black" woman cape, and lay down our burdens.
iask is place where the caretakers, get taken care of.
How do we do this? By incorporating the spiritual principles of asking God, our community, our nation, and each other to help us walk in love, relationship, forgiveness, unity, fellowship, friendship, confession, and cooperation so that we might begin the emotional healing process so many of us so desperately want and need.
It is time for us to collectively "ask" God and each other for a better way to live.
Finally, we are different from most organizations, in that we want to teach women to focus on caring for and about ourselves first. Our motto is service-self-success, with SELF anchored in the middle as the core of being able to give service to others and to achieve success. It is our primary goal to empower women to focus on emotional healing and wellness that tie in directly to our physical health and wellness. We have helped many women in the past 3 years by creating an organization abundant in action and resources that nurtures us, and blesses others through its membership. We want professional women to care for themselves more and increase in health, education, spirit, finance, career, relationships and overall well being, so that they can be their best at work, with family, and in life.
