Debra Fraser-Howze is the Founder and Board Chair of Choose Healthy Life, a non-profit organization focused on establishing a sustainable, scalable and transferable approach to address public health disparities through the Black Church. 

Ms. Fraser-Howze founded Choose Healthy Life (CHL) in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic after seeing the disproportionate death and inequitable health impact it was having on the Black community. She saw an opportunity to bring faith and medical science together by establishing a trusted health workforce within the Black church to connect hard-to-reach and underserved communities on the ground to much needed health services. 

To guide Choose Healthy Life, she established the National Black Clergy Health Leadership Council co-chaired by civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and eminent theologian Rev. Calvin O. Butts III of blessed memory. She also created a Medical Advisory Board that includes Dr. Tom Frieden (former CDC Director under President Obama), Dr. Louis Sullivan (former HHS Secretary under President Bush) and Dr. Donna Christensen (Member of Congress 1997-2015).  

Prior to founding CHL, Ms. Fraser-Howze served for a decade as the Senior Vice President, Government and External Affairs at OraSure Technologies, and served as the President/CEO of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS (NBLCA), an organization she founded in 1987. While at NBLCA, she was an author of the federally-funded Minority AIDS Initiative (MAI) which was created in 1998 in response to growing concern about the impact of HIV/AIDS on racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. The MAI provides for over $500 million in annual funding, strengthening organizational capacity and expanding HIV-related services in minority communities. 

Ms. Fraser-Howze is currently working on a Master of Divinity at the Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, PA.