4
Perspectives from Leaders on the Frontiers1
Moderator Colby Dailey from the Build Healthy Places Network started the panel discussion by sharing a story about the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, which featured performances by artists Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. Dailey spoke to two female colleagues the following day; one felt empowered to see Latina performers who celebrated Latino cultures and languages, and the other was a leader in the #MeToo movement, who expressed concern about the portrayal of women. Dailey said she herself brought the perspective of being a mother to a young child. The three together explored their perspectives, each being quite different. This anecdote, Dailey added, of how different people bring different perspectives to something as common as television entertainment, illustrates how the work being done to improve health and advance health equity brings even more parties and positions to the table.
The Build Healthy Places Network is a national organization based in San Francisco, Dailey said, and it aims to reduce poverty and improve health and equity in low-income communities through collaborations across development, finance, and health organizations. Such organizations include Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs),
___________________
1 This section summarizes information presented by panel session speakers Nicole Payne from the American Planning Association–New York Metro, Nupur Chaudhury from the New York State Health Foundation, followed by Justin Garrett Moore from the New York City Public Design Commission and Columbia University, and Jennifer Allen from ioby. The statements made are not endorsed or verified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
nonprofit banks that address social determinants of health through investment in low-income communities and community development corporations (CDCs) and nonprofits that are the “brick and mortar,” building quality affordable housing, community centers, and charter schools. These organizations work together.
Dailey identified health and how CDFIs and CDCs invest in health. She said that there will be positive changes to health outcomes if investment can be made in areas of prevention and social determinants of health. Rather than blazing new trails, Dailey said, “everything old is new again,” in that people are building new collaborations with organizations that have existed rather than operating in silos. This led her to question “What can bring us together?” Dailey said they conducted an audit on various sectors and organizations, all relating to building healthy and equitable communities, to establish a set of common principles and values. The principles and values established by Dailey’s organization include (1) collaborate with the community, (2) embed equity, (3) mobilize across sectors, (4) increase prosperity to improve health, and (5) commit over the long term (Build Health Places Network, 2020).
Dailey introduced Nicole Payne from the American Planning Association–New York Metro, Nupur Chaudhury from the New York State Health Foundation, followed by Justin Garrett Moore from the New York City Public Design Commission and Columbia University, and Jennifer Allen from ioby. Highlights from the panel are provided in Box 4-1.
Payne shared her love of transportation, including motor vehicles and transit, and noted that transportation has not had a role in the health, wellness, and placemaking fields, but she also felt confident that this is changing. Traditionally, she said, “transportation planning has been used to define the value of neighborhoods.” She referred to Arredondo’s presentation as an example in which he illustrated the Iron Triangle as being defined by the use of rail lines (see Figure 3-1). She described the negative aspect to this as its historical use as a way to discriminate against persons of color, such as the absence of sidewalks, “stop and frisk,” and building major roadways through neighborhoods.
Payne noted the need for extensive work to correct the impacts of these harmful strategies and policies. To start this process, she said transportation as a field is looking deeper into how people interact with their physical spaces and infrastructure and how design and policy impacts social well-being. She gave the example of Complete Streets2 and its philosophical approach to ensure safe and accessible travel for all users, which emphasizes how people use the infrastructure rather than the infrastructure alone. A second example is the Vision Zero Network.3 She said that while they aim to reduce traffic fatalities, cities are embracing the idea of streets being a place for social interaction. She put forth the idea of designing designated areas that are culturally appropriate and accepted for such activities. She gave the example of the Scraper Bike Team in Oakland, California, which encourages youth to engage in physical activity and to avoid crime and violence (Scraper Bike Team, 2020). This is not the stereotypical white, able-bodied, wealthy bike rider, she said, and designing bike lanes for these users will fit the needs of Oakland’s community.
Lastly, Payne saw an opportunity to use data from redlined neighborhoods to show the need for reinvestment. She noted that other “nontraditional metrics” include “share of nonwhite population [and] share of household that speaks English as a second language.” While this may create pushback politically, she said advocating to government leaders and being present for these conversations will help to promote positive change.
Chaudhury continued the panel by seeking to “[ground] us in the time that we are in.” She recalled that Trayvon Martin would have been 25 years old on February 5, 2020, the day prior to this workshop. She was at the Active Living Research Conference earlier in her career just after
___________________
2 Complete Streets are ones that are designed and operated for safe use and support movement for all users (DOT, 2020).
3 The Vision Zero Network aims to help communities eliminate traffic-related mortalities and severe morbidities while promoting health and equity (Vision Zero Network, 2018).
Trayvon Martin was killed. Shavon Arline-Bradley, a previous health director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, gave her a broader understanding of why transportation and walkability were so important to health and to children like Martin.
Chaudhury listed some questions that she uses to guide her work. These include, “What are the spaces and places that we belong [to] and who gets to decide that?” and, “What are the restrictive cues that communicate messages to us?”
Later in her career, she worked in Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Brownsville had and still has the highest concentration of public housing and evictions from public housing, and a high violent crime rate. She said its residents knew that the city did not care about them or their neighborhood. She paraphrased lines in Michelle Obama’s book Becoming about growing up in Chicago knowing the city did not care about her [South Side] neighborhood when they discontinued investments in the area. Returning to her work in Brownsville, Chaudhury focused on using her “power and privilege” to gain advantages on others’ behalf, but she understood when she needed to “step back” and empower its residents. She closed by imploring those in the audience to consider how they can leverage their own “power and privilege” to remodel the system “so that communities are leading us and we are following in that work.”
Justin Garrett Moore described hearing a man in Harlem, New York, watching the planting of trees and saying “they are not planting … those trees for us.” This gave Moore a sense of how residents viewed changes in areas undergoing gentrification. Moore explained that trees were being planted in the name of environmental justice as well. He said that this illustrates how there can be more than one narrative for the changes seen. Moore said this is why there should be more transparency about various initiatives. He noted that residents should be informed of why initiatives are being made, for whom they are being made, and who has ownership over them in order to build trust. Part of the transparency should include open and frank discussions about the failures, he said, which does not occur often due to reasons such as politics and leadership. He emphasized the need for leadership to talk about failures and take responsibility. He gave two examples on this. The first is Betsy Head Park, an initiative in Brownsville. After community promotion, the city designed plans for the park after holding community meetings. In his position, he reviewed the plans, but saw that they were not right. The park design did not have features that would interest youth, which is something the community identified as a need. Moore said his position gave him the power to have the plans redesigned. He explained that it is necessary to have those in leadership and with power ensure community representation, although
that may not always happen. The second example was Urban Patch, an initiative that he and his family created in Indianapolis, Indiana. Its first project was creating a permaculture/urban garden in a previously vacant lot—a different use and type of power. He built relationships with the community and raised a small amount of money, leading to small but impactful change. He concluded by saying that the ability to increase and “scale up” work, while having positive impact, shows that “power can … come directly from people.”
The last speaker of the session was Allen, who wanted to talk about the financial side of inclusive placekeeping (i.e., work of communities leading the work of stewarding and enhancing the place where they live, learn, and play). She said she gets frustrated and impatient because people in the field have been “talking about the same things” for decades and change has been slow because “we are not dismantling the systems that are continuing to oppress people.” She acknowledged that governments should provide certain services, but that that work does not always get expressed in practice equitably or in ways that follow the lead of what community members need. Allen said that at ioby, a nonprofit crowdfunding platform aimed at building support for change within communities, they provide resources to residents to change aspects of their communities to meet their needs. This connects people to resources online and in real life, and projects range from linking people to the know-how for creating a community garden, to resources for purchasing a vacant property and turning it into a space for art and healing. She asked, “How do we work in this current system while dismantling it?”
She concluded by giving the example of Carmen Lane, who lives in the Buckeye neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, that is mostly African American and in a lower socioeconomic status. Lane saw a vacant home and, wanting to repurpose it as a place for “healing,” secured a grant from the local land bank. There was a gap in funding, so they turned to ioby to raise funds. In two campaigns, they raised a combined $15,000, closing the gap. Lane was able to work within a system with limited resources and numerous barriers.
DISCUSSION
A brief discussion and question-and-answer session with the audience followed the panel’s presentations. Maureen McGuigan from the Arts and Culture Department in Lackawanna County, Ohio, asked how to create spaces that are welcoming and inclusive of all races and income levels. She referenced something she heard on National Public Radio, that most people’s friends are of the same race as themselves. Chaudhury responded by underscoring the importance of standing and acting in
solidarity with others. She explained that the 1619 Project4 asks people to examine their role and situate themselves in relation to slavery—for example, she felt called to acknowledge the solidarity work between South Asians and African Americans. When she worked in Brownsville, there was only one other family that was also South Asian, and she felt a connection with them due to this commonality. She said she found other ways to connect and build relationships with other members of the community, driven by “the belief that we are in this together, that my liberation is bound with their, and vice versa.”
Allen added that establishing partnerships should come before discussions of what is needed for a community or neighborhood. It is important to get to know each other and see each other as people, she said. Moore said it is important to acknowledge that some may “need space and time to heal” from painful and sometimes traumatic events and situations, and this should be respected. Payne said that it is necessary for those with power within the city to tell other city staff that it is “their actual job” to go into a community and get to know people. Elizabeth Cohn from Hunter College shared that Hunter College holds monthly public conversations with people across the city.5 These conversations have the purpose of bringing people with different perspectives together. Dailey added that having “a learning mindset” is needed, as is recognizing the fact that race conversations can be difficult, and some may be fearful of saying the wrong thing. Being open to learning from mistakes is important, she said.
Hanh Cao Yu remarked on recent public dialogue surrounding racism and exploitive capitalism and asked the panel about their thoughts on economic forces and inclusive development. Moore answered that New York has been trying different strategies to promote long-term economic sustainability to combat racism, such as land-lease development deals. One example was the Peninsula, formally known as Spofford, in which the city maintained ownership of the land, which gives it control over its future development. This was unusual, he noted. There is progress being made, he said, but “capital is capital.” Payne commented on the larger debate about transportation as a public good. She questioned whether people should be charged to use public buses in a city with areas of poverty, for example. She said there are some programs that have been exploring affordability and transportation, but she believed these programs do not incorporate social impact enough. Chaudhury gave the
___________________
4 In 2019, The New York Times Magazine started The 1619 Project, whose goal is to place the consequences of slavery prominently in the national narrative (The New York Times, 2019).
5 Information about this initiative, called ConversationsNewYork is available at https://conversationsnewyork.com (accessed January 26, 2021).
example of Rebuilt by Design, a project after Hurricane Sandy. Community development block grants were made available for disaster recovery and relief. She explained that one of the funders held a competition and a requirement was that any plans had to be co-created with the community it intended to serve. This is what she called “the carrot.” By making this a requirement for the competition, she explained, plans were developed using these parameters, even if there were no city regulations or policies dictating this.
This page intentionally left blank.
