HJNO Jan/Feb 2026

DIALOGUE 14 JAN / FEB 2026 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS our pregnant and postpartum moms with great results. We’d love to expand that. We’ve done market matches for our WIC program. We’ve done nutrition classes and cooking education and just trying to tackle funding places like Sankofa who has fresh food in the Lower Ninth Ward where there isn’t a grocery store. It’s really working in those deserts or those swamps to figure out how do we make it easier, more accessible, and cheaper? Editor God, I hope you succeed. Avegno Yeah, me too. Editor You have the ear of the state’s health leadership at the moment. What do you think healthcare leaders most misunderstand about violence? Avegno Honestly, if you’d asked me that question five years ago, I think it would’ve been a different story. I think they understand. I think the health department leaders do understand that anything that is the leading cause of death in children should be [treated] as a public health crisis. And there are opportunities to do that without getting into the rhetoric of you’re going to take away all the guns. And I’ll give you an example. And this is something we actually were just talking to the state about. We used some federal funding to do a safe storage campaign. The state had worked on customizing a national campaign about how to keep guns stored safely, customizing it for Louisiana. We took that, we paired that with high quality biometric gun safes. You can give a million cable locks and nobody wants one. What they do want is a sophisticated box that they can store their gun, but at a touch of their thumbprint, and only theirs, they can have access to it, right? Editor Right. Avegno We have paired with Manning Family Children's and given out thousands of gun safes. And we’ve done some evaluation of the impact of that program. And people, when they would come to us, we would say, “Well, how do you keep your guns? Do you have kids in your house?” And it was astounding how many people had guns, largely unsecured, in houses with children. When you give them a little bit of education and give them something that they really value and you survey them again six months later, the vast majority, close to 100% say, “I now feel safer. I feel safer about