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.