When Priscilla Agnew-Hines lost her son, Larry Agnew, on March 26, 2020, she knew she wanted to turn his passing into something positive. On March 26, 2025, she got her wish.
The date marked the first conference sponsored by Priscilla’s nonprofit, Healthy 2 Connections, aimed at raising awareness about mental illness and substance abuse in the Black community. The event, held at the historic Frauenthal Center in her hometown of Muskegon, Michigan, hosted more than 150 attendees who interacted with about 20 vendors such as churches, community counseling centers, local businesses and Gift of Life Michigan, the organ donation nonprofit that facilitated the donation of Larry’s brain to the Lieber Institute.
Attendees included young people—a major focus of Healthy 2 Connections is educating and empowering Black youth to better understand mental health and substance abuse—community counselors, local pastors, educators and scientists. The keynote speaker was Dr. Alvin C. Hathaway Sr., retired pastor of the Union Baptist Church in Baltimore and co-founder of the African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative, the Institute’s project to study and understand brains of African ancestry.
When Larry passed away from an overdose, Priscilla hoped that donating his brain to the Lieber Institute’s Brain Repository—at about 5,000 donated brains, it’s the world’s largest collection for the study of mental illness—would help other families like her own. The Black community has differing rates of mental illness compared to people of other ancestral backgrounds, but scientists don’t really understand why. The vast majority of samples used for research come from people of European ancestry.
Priscilla is comforted that Larry’s brain—one of about 500 donated to the Lieber Institute from people of African ancestry—is helping scientists find answers.
“This is where Larry has been placed—in the center of empowering the community,” Priscilla said about her March 26 event. To promote the conference, she put up billboards featuring Larry’s photo. Larry’s nieces were in awe when they saw their uncle’s face displayed in such a prominent way.
“They said, ‘That’s my uncle on that billboard and that’s who we’re doing this for,” Priscilla says, fighting tears. “He’s looking down and he’s like, ‘Mom, you have to do this work.’”