About
About Us
Tomeka & Brandon
Jace’s Journey Inc, a non-profit organization, was founded in 2019 to address racial disparities in maternal health outcomes. The US is the only industrialized nation with rising maternal mortality rates and the increase disproportionately affects women of color. African-American mothers are dying at 3-4 times the rate of non- Hispanic whites. Infants born to African-American mothers are dying at twice the rate as infants born to
non- Hispanic white mothers. In May of 2018, Brandon Isaac sat in a hospital room with his son, Jace Alexander, due in a month with no fetal heartbeat and his wife, Tomeka, unconscious, diagnosed with the life-threatening H.E.L.L.P (Hemolysis Elevated Liver Enzymes Low Platelet) Syndrome and fighting for her life. Forty-five (45) hospital days and 7 surgeries later, thanks to prayers and an amazing surgical team, Tomeka and Brandon Isaac left the hospital together. The couple learned Tomeka’s sickness and Jace’s death could have been prevented. “50,000 women each year almost die as a result of childbirth. That’s one mother every 10 minutes in the US. The causes of most near death emergencies are preventable. However, the risk of having complications is much greater for black women. If you are black and highly-educated, you still have a higher probability of pregnancy-related death than the least educated white woman.” In honor of their son, the Isaacs created Jace’s Journey to raise awareness and contribute to improving maternal/fetal healthcare disparities through education, advocacy and community engagement.
Tomeka James Isaac
Tomeka is from Kenansville, a small town in Eastern North Carolina, where everyone is family and everyone knows someone who knows someone who is related to someone. In 2017, She set out to find decent healthcare for her pregnancy with her son Jace. This journey would set her stranded in uncharted territory.
Losing Jace caused Tomeka to re-examine the facts of their medical diagnosis to see what happened, what needed to change, and what could be done to prevent this from happening to anyone ever again.
The tragic, yet preventable death of Jace and almost losing her life in the process birthed an unbridled passion and purpose to spread awareness and to be a catalyst for change as it relates to racial and implicit biases faced by African American women and infants on a daily basis.
Tomeka’s ambition for Jace’s Journey, a nonprofit organization she co-founded in 2019 with her husband Brandon and serves as Executive Director, is to work towards eliminating the disparities in maternal and infant health through education, advocacy and community engagement.
If she can save at least one life on her quest to change the hearts and minds of the people responsible for providing African American mothers proper healthcare, she will have made an impact. She intends to save many more lives than that. It’s her promise to all the mothers and children out there and to the one that made this all possible, Jace Alexander Isaac.