- Okay, well welcome everyone to Ethics Grand Rounds.
I wanted to alert everyone to next month's lecture.
The topic, I'm blocking the speaker's name,
oh yes, Elizabeth Sepor will be speaking
on the ethics and law around physician
or healthcare provider conscientious objection.
And so these are things like pharmacists refusing
to fill prescriptions for contraceptives
or the morning after pill and so forth.
So that should be a very interesting and relevant talk.
It's a pleasure to introduce Professor Lena Hatchett
who is currently Associate Professor
at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics
and Health Policy in the Stritch School of Medicine.
She's had a very interesting and creatively
bootstrapped herself career, which has certainly filled me
with all kinds of admiration.
Her undergraduate degree was in psychology
from SUNY New Paltz.
Her MA in psychology and PhD in social
and health psychology from Stony Brook.
So she's a psychologist by training
but she's done all kinds of other sorts of things
in her journey.
Today she's gonna talk in her role
as executive lead for the Proviso Partners for Health
and describe a collective impact model
in building health-related services
in a sort of community engagement environment
to address all kinds of inequities
as well as deficiencies and actual holes in services.
I'm gonna leave her to talk more about that
in more detail.
She's the recipient, I counted them up, 20 grants
in 20 years from a variety of foundations
including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
multiple support from that organization,
the Trinity Health System, and then a number
of northern Illinois, Chicago area government grants
as well as other foundations.
She's an educator in public health ethics,
in social science and bioethics, in cultural competence
and in health equity.
And she owed her courses are primary
in those areas.
She's been heavily involved in this idea
of the collective impact model and is a collaborator
in the Hundred Million Healthier Lives sort
of coalition, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
In her other functions at Loyola, she's been
a community and university partnerships director
which as she put it, was where she finally found
a job title that actually matched her skillsets.
So she's directed the Bioethics Professionalism
Honors Programs for about 10 years now
in addition to numerous other duties
and prolific publications.
So without further ado from me,
please welcome Professor Hatchett.
(audience applauding)
- Welcome everyone and thank you so much
for the invitation to be here and to share
our equity journey of Proviso Partners for Health.
That was a wonderful introduction.
I think I'm gonna see if you're available
as a publicist for some more media on our experience.
So thank you all for being here.
I'm gonna get started.
And I'll talk about our equity journey
and how it might be a framework for the work
that you're doing here at UT.
And we're gonna leave a lot of time for questions
at the end.
So I've presented this in a way that opens doors
for questions and ideas.
So this is entitled, Proviso Partners for Health,
A Model for Real Cultural Consciousness.
And that that title of cultural consciousness came
from our medical students, my work
in collaboration with them.
We have cultural competency.
We have cultural sensitivity and there's a level
of cultural awareness that's needed.
And the medical students and I came up
with the idea of consciousness at a deeper level
of awareness, not just knowing about culture
but transforming the way we work
within a cultural frame.
So I'm very proud of our collaboration
with our medical students.
The two basic learning objectives that I have
for us today is to discuss an equity framework
that helps bridge people and places
so that we can transform community health and well-being.
Equity becomes that bridge to transform
where people are struggling with inequities
and where there are places, geographic places
where people are struggling.
And I'm hoping that you'll have a time to discover
how this idea of cultural consciousness can build trust
between your communities here.
Some of you may be researchers.
Some of you may be community members.
Some of you may represent community organizations
or you might just have an interest.
So I'd like to create time for us to discover opportunities
that can apply to your own work and interests.
The first piece we have to get to know is
where am I working in the Chicagoland area
and Proviso is a set of 14 communities outside
of Chicago and our hub is in Maywood, Illinois.
It's nine miles outside of Chicago
and it might as well be 90 miles outside of Chicago.
It's a part of suburban Cook County,
and we are dealing with suburban poverty.
There's a lack of insurance.
There is high unemployment and those associated
chronic diseases that are at high risk.
When you look at the areas that we serve,
we have a Hispanic community, African American community
and white community.
And what this map doesn't show you is the segregation
within these communities.
So on average you see these numbers
but the reality is more of African American communities
in Proviso are struggling with poverty, unemployment.
And this isn't recent unemployment because
of the recent economic challenges.
This is historic unemployment.
The associated health risks such as overweight and obesity
has been in our area for the last 15 years.
Food insecurity, health risks, these are not new challenges.
These are ongoing challenges and disparities
that have actually gotten worse over time, not better.
So when we think about the community, you can look
at the averages but when you think about the geography
in these neighborhoods, and I'm not sure
what Dallas is like in term of segregation,
but in our Chicago area, Melrose Park
is predominantly Hispanic.
Maywood was, used to be predominantly African American.
Oak Park is mixed racially.
Lagrange is predominantly white.
And so if we don't recognize the geographic inequities,
it's gonna be very hard to come up with solutions
that can serve our community.
It's a little bit of a frame to our conversation today.
So what is Proviso Partners?
It is a collective impact coalition.
I've had some wonderful conversations with Don
this morning, and the work is community driven,
multi-sector, and we're dealing with community health
and economic opportunity.
We are funded by Trinity Health Systems
which is a large health system throughout the nation.
They have 93 hospitals, and they're one
of our largest funders for this work.
So key parts about what is Proviso Partners.
While I represent the university as Director
of Community and University Partnerships,
this coalition is led by the community
and the university and the hospital and businesses
are invited members to what the community is doing
in terms of organizing.
And that is a wonderful leverage for the success
that we've had.
It didn't get birthed in the institution,
and we're not engaging community members
on a university initiative.
This is something that was birthed, sustained,
evaluated in the community and hospitals
and faculty like myself have been invited to participate.
So I wanted to talk about the shift in mindset
to do this work, to even understand the framework
and how we approach health and economics.
We had to have a shift in mindset.
So on the left side of that slide there's this idea
that I wanna call fear.
And you may be a person living in the community
or you may be a researcher, or you may be
a hospital provider.
Poverty is an experience that is fearful.
We live our lives trying to stay out of poverty.
We are going to school, we save our money.
We make sure our kids get education.
'Cause we're living to escape poverty whether we
have money or not, whether we have wealth or not.
It's in our background, this fear of poverty.
Our community has a high level of poverty,
unemployment, obesity.
Those are the negative challenges within the community
and we may find ways of trying to avoid those situations.
Maybe if I work in a community that has less poverty
it'll be easier for me to make an impact on health.
Or maybe if I'm working with partners
who are already employed, it's gonna be a lot easier
than addressing unemployment.
And the reality is, those problems accumulate
in segregated neighborhoods and they escalate
because they're too difficult to challenge.
I don't think anyone right now would stand up
and say, I have the solution to poverty.
I have the solution to unemployment.
I don't hear too many people thinking about that
and approaching it as if it's solvable.
And with Proviso Partners for Health,
because we're led by community members
who actually live there, they are coming
from a place of hope, which is on the right side
of the community, of this slide.
So they weren't sitting and waiting
for the university to come and swoop in
and solve these problems.
They were actively engaging, organizing
and making actions on their own to solve
the community issues.
So at the time I arrived in Proviso,
there were 111 churches, faith-based organizations
taking up the baton to work on youth violence.
It's the work I'm gonna talk about was built
from that legacy.
There are without counting, at least 100 organizations
who are working on workforce development and training
and not just for our high schoolers
but for our formerly incarcerated members of the community.
What opportunities are there for them
in terms of workforce development training,
career development and so forth.
The school districts take on much more than education.
They're working on health, obesity, physical activity.
We have a thriving school-based health center
right in school that's been running for 17 years
and there's more opportunities than I can talk about
in the hour that I have.
So the areas of fear are much less than the areas
of hope and opportunity.
And part of the struggle is as researchers
or university systems, we think about the left side
and what the problems are and we measure those very well.
We aren't measuring the assets.
We don't know how to understand, how are those
111 faith-based churches working on youth violence
and what has been their positive impact
over the last 15 years.
Nobody in my community can answer that.
But we have to understand the pathways for hope
as well as the challenges that fear us.
And that has been a cornerstone of how
we approach this work.
That's why I call this slide shifting the mindset.
And it's not an and/or.
It's a we need both.
If there is no hope, there is no action.
In a lot of my early work I think I was giving up too soon
and fearful, is this going to work?
Will I be successful?
That was more important question
than actually doing the work, and something wrong with that.
And through my career I was able to change that.
There's a couple of concepts on the left side
I wanna go back to, a failed farmers market.
And this is an initiative that we started with
to address obesity.
And a farmers market seemed like a wonderful model
because community members had told us
this was a good way to go.
And we started with $5,000 and a lot of heart
and a lot of hope.
And unfortunately year after year, instead
of the farmers market being a success
growing more customers and increasing sales,
every year we got less customers.
Every year we lost farmers til eventually
it was just me and my collaborator, Loretta,
sitting at the farm stand.
And that was very difficult, very hard.
But we started to learn what was missing from our plan
and hopefully I'll get to that in this conversation.
So let's move on.
So understanding that shifting mindset of
from fear to hope.
When we think about who is in Proviso Partners,
youth are a big portion of this coalition.
They are in our leadership academy.
They are volunteering.
They are paid interns.
They sit on our executive team to make decisions
about what grants we go after, how that money is spent,
how the work is evaluated and disseminated.
In fact our high school intern named our coalition.
So they are not just sitting at the table.
They are in the decision-making capacity
to make the work successful.
They are not all people who are participating
in a community-based coalition.
These are just residents who may not have been active before
but they're struggling with the inequities
that we're focused on.
And the examples that I'm gonna give you are
about food and security and obesity.
They may be grandmas, mothers, fathers,
18-to-24 year olds, working, not working,
in school, out of school, and we need them
at the table, not just people who are connected
to an organization.
And we've been lucky to coral all of these partners
in the coalition.
And we look at the question of what we can do together
that we can't do on our own.
The common goal for us is to foster community health,
well-being and equity through policy systems
and environmental change.
And there are a lot of organizations providing services,
doing work and there's not enough people actually
transforming the policies and the systems
that create health inequities.
So we're doing that work and connecting partners
to each other.
Some of our outcomes, I had to think long and hard
about how to do this presentation because there are
six hubs with 55 people having 11 meetings a month
but I wanted to highlight some of our successes
so you could get a sense, I know people like
to see numbers.
So for our Community Leadership Academy,
which is when residents come on board
to learn about policy systems and environmental change
and become advocates for themself and their community,
we have 52% of people graduating.
Those are from high school to seniors
who are in the leadership academy.
We have one whole family who are participating.
A mom joined and she brought her daughter,
and her daughter brought her husband.
And those folks not only graduate through the program
but stay with us participating in the work
as a volunteer and as a community leader.
We've been able to increase the urban farmland
in our community through this work by 70%.
And farm, urban farms are a really great investment
'cause it doesn't take a lot of money
to get started but it's very sustainable
in terms of youth volunteers, opportunities
to distribute and sell food.
And we have a lot of unused land in our community.
The third point there is 40,000 which I don't know,
depending on where you sit and what you do,
that might be a lot of money or a little bit of money.
But we are so proud to tell you, this is earned income
for worker owners through Proviso Partners for Health.
So 22 adults and youth have worked,
gone through the Leadership Academy
and established their own worker-owned cooperative
so that they are earning income.
These may be people who are undocumented,
didn't have access to work, under employed folks
and this is their money that they've invested in
and have been able to create in one year.
And for us, it's a lot of money.
That can be transformative.
They're using it reinvest in their business.
They're using it to provide equipment
for supplies for the businesses.
And I'm hoping that we can focus on that story
a little bit more.
So how did we get successful?
I'll talk about how we started, Don is that right,
to talk about how we started?
It was a journey of opportunity, luck, hope
and we just didn't give up.
That's basically the story.
We kept trying.
I was in a meeting and I sat in a room
just like this one, and the person sitting next to me
was Loretta Brown.
And she's a community activist and a powerful leader
in the community.
And I said, I really would love to start a
farmers market here.
And her eyes lit up and she said, "Me too.
"We could do this together."
That was as simple as that.
What we both carried was a sense of hope
for this community and we were not gonna give up.
We were gonna try and try again and try different methods
to succeed.
We had no vision at that time of a big, large coalition
of multiple people, but we knew that we needed people
to have hope and a willingness to try
to transform the health of the community,
in particular, food access.
What we came to realize in 2015 is there were organizations
coalitions that operate as a collective impact
all around the nation working collaboratively,
multi-sector with residents with hospitals,
with universities, with businesses
to improve the health of their community.
And we've been learning from each other since 2015.
And this process of the SCALE Community helped
to give us a language and a strategy
for why what we were doing was successful.
You know, why is this working?
What's the science behind this and how can we scale
and spread it to other people?
So that's been a huge advantage to accelerating our success.
Now I wanna come back to Proviso's work
and think about the community health system.
We were able to ask who is in your system
and what's one thing that you asked them to do?
In a traditional culture we think okay, well healthcare
is providing health services.
And the university's educating people.
And individuals from the community are the recipients
of that work.
And in our coalition, we're working and wearing
different and unique hats.
Healthcare system doesn't just have to provide
health services.
Let me focus on the role of our hospital.
Let me see if it's in here.
When we think about our hospital from a health
and equity perspective, not only is the hospital
providing care, serving patients, doing effective outreach,
our hospital is also the largest employer
and purchaser in the Proviso region.
Putting on another hat.
They have to employ people.
We employ about 6,000.
They have to purchase goods and equipment
to run the hospital.
So in our collaborative we ask the hospital
as a role as an employer and a purchaser
how much of those dollars, those resources,
and their opportunities are coming to this community,
those same neighborhoods that are impoverished.
This is a question.
We don't strong arm anyone in the beginning.
But looking at where the purchasing dollars are going
and what are the opportunities to change the hiring
practices to hire locally, to purchase locally.
Our hospital's on First Avenue.
Our garden is on First Avenue.
Our high school is on First Avenue and we have
this beautiful system of growing food.
The hospital could be purchasing it and providing it
at clinics where patients are coming
to address food insecurity.
We have a project called Veggie RX
and that providers write a prescription to the patients
if they are food insecure.
They are eligible through their SNAP benefits
to receive a basket of food.
They also get discounted food.
But it's right there where the patients are.
The physician is involved.
The patients are involved.
Our community partners are involved.
If our hospital invested 1% of their purchasing power
on food from us locally, it would transform
our local food system overnight.
And we're in negotiations for that to happen.
How can we make it work?
How can we deliver on time?
How could we create a financial food system
that benefits the hospital and benefits our community,
not just providing the care.
So that's one example of how working in coalition
can transform community health and economic opportunities.
I'm only gonna focus on the hospital
and the resident leaders in the interest of time.
Now when we come to resident leaders,
these are moms, fathers, youth, just regular people.
They may have been active the community,
they may not be.
It's not a limitation to them being involved
in the coalition.
At our table they become change agents.
They have lived experience on inequity.
How do you feed your family with a low-income,
with no transportation and your own struggling health?
How do you do that?
Well communities know, individuals know
how to cope and they know how they could cope
more effectively with the right opportunities
and resources, and those are some of the strategies
that we incorporate.
Our resident leaders are owners, champions
and they're peer learners educating the university
and the health system of what to do
with the limited resources that we have.
And that's been highly effective.
The worker-owned cooperative model was established
by community worker owner.
His name is Gabriel Lara and he researched
in New York and San Francisco some of the models there.
He then partnered with community members
to help them establish their own worker-owned cooperatives.
And he's supporting them now.
It's something at the university I could never
have thought of or done or have the capacity to do.
But a community resident leader can do that
and he's been highly effective in training 60 residents
so far on the idea of worker-owned cooperatives.
So there's so many resources to learn from community.
So I've shown you some of the outcomes,
some of the structure.
And I wanted to take time to go over the real equity
framework for community transformation
that helps guide us.
And we learned this together.
I didn't sit and think about it and then deliver it.
We learned it together by looking at
what we were actually doing and how we were doing the work.
And the first feature of REAL stands for resilient.
This goes back to that slide I showed you
about fear and hope.
We all are dealing with severe social determinants
of health.
Our health disparities are worsening.
Our inequities are worsening in community.
But despite those real challenges,
there are opportunities, assets, right in the communities
where we're living.
For us in Proviso, one of the major untapped resources
and opportunity for resilience is our
formerly incarcerated men and women.
They were coming home out of jail and prison
without an opportunity to work and without a pathway to work
but they're willing and they actually help
in our urban farms and are part of the
worker-owned cooperatives.
So changing the mindset of yes, we have problems
but that's only part of the story.
There's also hope and opportunities,
and they're right there.
They're right outside the door and we don't know enough
about them as researchers and our health systems
don't know enough about those assets.
So we work from a frame of resiliency,
not ignoring the problem but really leveraging
and capitalizing on the opportunities.
The second piece of the framework is economics.
And all of us are struggling with the impact
of poverty in our neighborhoods.
But too few are highlighting the economic needs.
For our community members, if we're looking at obesity
or a lack of food and food insecurity,
the best way to solve that is if people have
their own earned income from their own work opportunities
with money in the pocket, they can go and buy food
wherever they need it.
They can open up their own stores.
They can use their money to buy a car
or take transportation to get to food access.
So if we don't deal with the economics
in our struggle for health, we're never gonna
solve the problem.
We can't provide enough food and services
to stamp out the economics.
So with our worker-owned cooperatives,
we're transforming the system to create worker owners
so that there is businesses within the community
in a place where there was none.
The third piece is accountability.
And we're accountable to someone.
We may be accountable to the institution
that we work.
For this coalition, we are accountable
to the community residents that live there.
This was born by community residents.
It's supported by their volunteer hours,
their work hours, their design, their decision making,
their evaluation.
And so our data has to speak back to them
and that's why we count how much dollars are created
and generated.
That's why we count how many internships are created,
how many worker-owned cooperatives are created.
So it might not be beautiful data from an
epidemiological standpoint, but it's the data
that matters to the people who live there.
And we can do both, we can measure both.
It doesn't have to be an and/or.
So we make sure everything we do is accountable
back to the community and that includes our budget.
The final piece, I feel like I wanna take a pause
for all of these things.
The final piece of this equation is love.
And I'm sitting in a room with about five
community members and we were trying to determine
what our strategy, our model and our mission
was gonna be in the early days.
And our high schooler, Rebecca, said, "Well I have an idea
"but it doesn't matter 'cause adults are not going
"to listen."
I said, that's a funny response to have.
We're doing all of this collaboration
and we really wanna hear what you have to say.
And she said, "The heart of this work is love
"and adults don't understand that,
"that we can have love for each other
"and that's why we come to this coalition.
"We love our community, we love our families
"and without it we wouldn't be here."
And she was about 17 at the time.
And I tried very hard to be open and listen.
I talked last night about my listening ability.
I didn't wanna hear this.
I did not want to hear that our large coalition
with all of these partners was gonna be focused on love.
I had that biased judgment that nobody's gonna
take us seriously.
Do you think I could write to a funder
and say we're all about love?
That's what I was thinking in my head.
I don't know what my face was doing,
but my head was like, okay, we have gone down the road
of failure.
But based on our factor of being accountable
to community, I had to listen to what Rebecca said
and make sure that it was in there.
I had to tell the truth.
And I said well, this is what the group wants
so this is what we're gonna report
and let's see what happens.
And the beauty of working with community members
and youth like Rebecca, this was the best strategy
of our whole work because people understood this.
There are philosophers and researchers, really understanding
what love in a community means, feel ya
between each other that there is a dimension there
that's missing in our work.
And it's the foundation for care, for trust,
all of those things we have struggles with.
I could tell you some more stories about love
but that was where we took a risk where we truly
followed what we said we were gonna do
and it has served us.
Our national coalition, A Hundred Million Lives,
they are convened by the Institute
for Healthcare Improvement.
They have now changed their mission to include hope
and love because of the work that's needed
to transform communities.
These are slides I should have been showing
but I was talking too much.
So just in terms of the data, we have 60 resident
peer leaders and the community leadership academy.
And those folks stay with us and continue
to spread the work.
So if you're wondering how we did so much
in a little while, it's because of these folks here.
It's not a one and done.
It's a relationship that's continuing.
They are getting promoted.
They are gaining jobs as worker owners.
They are becoming leaders and advocates
in their sphere of influence.
We have three thriving worker-owned cooperatives.
One's catering, one's a corporate cleaning business
and one is a media arts business.
22 worker owners, $40,000 in income generated.
And this is sort of a trick question
but we're able to create that earned income so quickly
because we hire our own to feed ourselves in our meetings.
We all have to cater for an event, hire locally,
hire our own and they also have contracts
with other universities and organizations in the area
'cause folks want to invest locally.
They just hadn't had the pathway to do it.
The growing season is, and the urban agriculture
opportunities are huge in our area.
Growing, delivering, partnering with the hospitals
and distributing to food, people who are food insecure
at the clinics right there.
Our data is just being gathered now.
We're starting our second pilot.
The data from Baltimore and Syracuse have shown
a reduction in BMI and diabetes indicators
from a similar program.
And we're gonna be pooling the data
and making sure that our protocols are similar
to see the effectiveness of food distribution
at the clinic.
Accountable, I talked about.
This is a picture of Loretta right there,
in the garden working and training our youth.
And the love.
So I'm doing okay on time.
This love aspect of the framework of having resiliency
addressing the economics of the community
that you're dealing with, being accountable
to people with lived experience of inequities
is all grounded under this idea of love
that we would love each other and we would love
the community that we're working in.
The folks on the right in the photo are our first cohort
of students.
They were 18 to 24 and in our first garden.
And the way we ran this program called Green Core
was to just open the doors and whoever wanted
to come in could participate.
We had no criteria.
We had no exclusion.
You wanna come and work, we're gonna take you.
'Cause it was our job not to screen out
and exclude people, but design a structure
that could accommodate and meet people where they are.
Each one of these students have human possibility
and potential.
We know this about ourselves but we forget it
when we look at other people, when we look
at the statistics of poverty, racism, unemployment,
chronic disease.
By the time we finish reading all that data,
we have forgotten about the potential
and the capacity in each and every one of us.
And the love piece of the framework reminds us
that we don't know what the capability
and the possibility is for this person sitting
in front of me, wherever their background was,
whatever their life experiences are.
We don't know what the next future will hold
but it's our job to create a structure
that can harness the synergy and the opportunity
that comes from that individual person.
So we ask guys, what are you interested in?
What are you passionate about?
What do you think about this program?
Kalen was the first to get hired in a full-time job.
He went back to school, took custody of his son
and is thriving.
He guest lectures with me.
Other people went on to college.
Other people, some people struggled.
But the idea that thing were possible was planted
in this experience, that their backgrounds,
juvenile or not, was not gonna be a barrier
to what their future could be.
And that's the piece of love that we share
in Proviso Partners and we try not to forget it.
I wanna open up for questions because I
wanna hear from you all.
So I'm going to abruptly stop there
and I can bounce back to different slides when needed.
So on this slide, on Friday we got a call on Wednesday
that Senator Dick Durbin wanted to come
and visit our coalition and partner with us
on the HEAL Act, which is an initiative in Chicago
that collaborates with different hospitals.
And it's just the first meeting, but for our
community members to get this call
and to get this recognition that what we were doing
was powerful and important speaks to this.
We could have have imagined that Senator Dick Durbin
would know us and call us, but he did.
And we'll see what happens when he, I'll keep you informed
on how it goes.
Okay, so I'd like to take questions
from the video audience.
Will I hear?
Okay, thank you so much.
- [Man] Thank you for your (mumbles) presentation.
As you know, you're dealing with a concept
of the great migration that occurred in the last century
which half of Americans fled during segregation
and Jim Crow.
They came to Chicago from all across
and then encountered defacto segregation.
And so it's a monumental job you're doing
and thank you.
- Oh, thank you.
- [Man] (mumbles) farmers market.
- Thank you so much for those kind words
because those are the things that make us say
in those early days that we can't give up.
We had no choice but to give up, to not give up.
And then people saw our sustainability.
We haven't given up on the farmers market
but we need, I was representing public health
and Loretta was representing the community
which is a wonderful way to start.
But a farmers market is a business model.
You need to know how to price, sell
and market the food.
And we didn't have a business partner at that time
and there were a lot of people who want
to revisit it the right way.
We didn't have the know all at that time
to make it a business model.
And I'm sure that we will get back to that,
but thank you, yeah.
- [Man] I'm curious if you looked to other folks
around the country doing similar kinds of work
and what comes to mind is the work
that Father Greg Boyle does in Los Angeles
with is it (mumbles) incarcerated folks,
know who are gang members getting reengaged
in the community.
So what other examples inspired you?
- I'm so glad you asked the question.
The question is what other examples inspired us
and it's a funny thing to say.
We listened to our local community and were led by them.
Those youth in the picture told us what we needed
and how to design things.
And then we leveraged the resources and created it.
By the time we got finished doing that,
then we started to look at models outside.
We actually didn't have the luxury of the time
to resource what was going on 'cause it was all
happening so quickly.
And Father Boyle was at Loyola three weeks ago visiting.
There's a model in Boston called UTEC that creates
entrepreneurial opportunities for the formerly incarcerated.
And the dynamic piece there is not creating it
but allowing people to come in, never giving up.
Those guys and women are creating all different kinds
of businesses, not just farming, not just carpentry,
not one thing but using their own natural talents
and desires to generate ideas and that's the secret
of not limiting it.
So UTEC is a wonderful successful model
and they're about to go national with their protocol
and Father Boyle is another model.
There are other folks in Chicago also doing this work.
And so after we had the idea from our youth,
then we started to learn what other people are doing.
Because I think if I had seen UTEC, I couldn't
have imagined that us, with our $5,000
is what we started with, could get to that place.
But we learned from our actual practice of
like if we build it, people come.
And they're engaged, then we could leverage forward.
Does that make sense?
Thank you, wonderful questions, yes?
- [Man] I'm curious how important political connections are.
I know our mayor is retiring.
I listened to our candidate and we have a congressman now
that (mumbles).
You had Senator Durbin call.
How important is it to engage with political leaders?
- So the question is, how important is it
to engage political leaders?
We had no political connections to get started, get running.
We started with $5,000 and this morning I ran the numbers
and we're at about $687,000 a year.
We did all of that without political connections
and our practice is speaking.
Now we will take each partner as they come.
I think it can be super helpful but just like any partner,
sometimes it might not work out.
And you have to, we can't give up and we can't slow down
for waiting for a magic chemistry of folks.
So if the opportunity to leverage resources is right,
then we can do it.
I think when you're sitting looking at a youth
who's 18 with untapped potential in the eye,
you don't look for, you don't wait.
You know his life needs to be acted on right now.
And he's asking you to, let's work together
to create an opportunity, you find one.
So I think, I wouldn't wanna say that it's not important
but for each community and each collaboration,
you have to determine which partner you need
and what is in it for them and what is gonna be
the benefit to you.
I put this slide up because we work with different partners
in different ways.
So just as we've said the hospital is also an employer
and a purchaser, it's the same way with
an elected official.
They may be helping you in making connections,
not necessarily making policy changes for you.
But good question, yes.
- [Woman] I'm curious to know if this also addresses
(speaking off mic) if so how?
- That's a great question.
So the question is, does this model apply
to mental health.
And we've started as a grassroots operation
with community members.
We started working on food insecurity,
what we call food justice.
And then we spread to tobacco prevention,
the built environment, school wellness.
And our school wellness partners including the
school district and NAMI, the National Alliance
for Mental Illness, they are very interested
in doing more work on mental health right now.
What we will do and how we will do it together
is unknown.
I have a meeting tomorrow with that group.
And we feel that we can be very helpful
in changing the conversation around mental health.
NAMI would like to launch a campaign
to reduce the stigma.
The schools want to work in the different way.
And how I operate as Director of Community
University Partners is to listen to those different needs,
those different opportunities, create a big goal
around mental health and then see what assets
we have to get started, starting from
that place of strength.
And so we don't know that will look like
but there's a lot of momentum.
And all of this is portable.
It's not unique to the food system, thank you, yes.
- [Woman] Hi, thanks for the presentation.
As a native Chicagoan (speaking off mic) I value the work
that you're doing 'cause I do come to the old neighborhood
area as well.
But could you speak a little bit more about the practice
of how you garner support for what you did,
particularly going back to your title
about the cultural consciousness
and how you're able to get support across
(mumbles) as historic territories or boundaries?
I think many people can benefit from understanding
how to unify folks across areas that sometimes
look like a patchwork quilt of demographics.
- Okay, thank you.
South side or west side?
- [Woman] I'm from the south side.
I went to Whitney Young, (mumbles).
(laughing)
- So the question is how to build support
across a patchwork quilt of different agendas,
different players, different struggles.
Being outside of Chicago, nine miles in Proviso,
we're left out of some of those systems
of structure and support.
One, transportation, the public health system
is different, some grants we're ineligible for.
And I think to be honest you have to understand
that we didn't start with this big goal in mind.
We kept to the trust of our values, the hope
and the mindset change that things can be different here.
There are problems but there are assets.
And that's the message that we spoke on.
You have to earn trust.
You don't get it by asking for it.
And I think if I put on my university hat
and think I'm a big university and we have all
of these resources, that's not gonna get me anywhere.
What is the meaningful impact that's gonna happen
in people's lives because of my work
is a much better question.
And then you have to give in order to get.
So every single partner is investing in the coalition.
We're not just sort of giving handouts of opportunities.
And that changes the game.
You get people who are really committed
to our mission and not people who just wanna exploit.
I think that can slow down progress
if you have people who are really looking at something else.
So there's a commitment factor, the accountability factor.
And it happened over a slow journey, not overnight.
Now we can accelerate that process based on
what we've learned but it's about that love,
that trust and that relationship building
not just working on a food system
or working on a youth violence system.
And if you invite me back I can tell you more.
Or I'll talk to you after.
Other questions.
(woman talking off mic)
Thank you, yeah the untapped resource of youth
and their ideas, their creativity and then how it transforms
their own leadership at a young age that stays with them.
I put up the slide of the fear and hope.
After you read all these statistics and you listen
to the news every day about the one tragedy
after another, we're feeding fear and hopelessness
because we're not sending the model that folks are
resilient, that what you have is valued
just because of who you are.
And we have to send that message too
and it resonates 'cause they're starving for opportunity.
And we show people how to have synergy and leverage.
So if I can't connect you directly,
folks are connecting themselves for opportunities, yes.
- [Woman] Do you have any component to the program
either now or in the future that addresses homelessness?
- So we're more about a how coalition and topics evolve
with the synergy, with the right partner
and the right players and the right asset
at the right time.
And we also don't plan super long in advance,
which sounds odd but this is growing organically
based on the opportunities.
So we don't know what opportunity to address.
Homelessness might come soon.
We are in partnership with, talking to an organization
called Art Space which helps support affordable live
and work space for artists.
And we've done a pilot phase of conversation with them.
But if the right opportunities come, then housing
could be a direction that we have the capacity to go in.
I'm trying to answer how, it's sort of finding
that synergy, being in meeting, being in conversation
and then seeing the parts, the plays and the opportunity
are the things that we end up growing with, Joe.
- [Joe] So would you go back to your patchwork slide?
- The map?
- [Joe] Yes, please.
So I'm sort of picking up a facet of (mumbles) question.
I'm just wondering if you could comment on,
I mean these are diverse communities, right?
And we live in these very polarizing times.
And I just wondered if you found fringe benefits
or barriers regarding race relations in this work.
- So the question is, do we find barriers
and assets around race relations in this work.
And it's good that you asked about both the opportunities
and the challenges.
So this is highly racially segregated areas
and neighborhoods that even within,
I'm gonna focus on Maywood, the town where Loyola is.
Even in Maywood there are different pockets, streets
that are segregated across race and class.
So there's a Hispanic enclave, and African Americans
live here, and people of a different lower income
live in a different section of town.
And they may not go to services and opportunities
in another part of town.
And so yeah, that's a huge barrier and a huge waste
in how we support ourselves as a community
'cause people might not be willing to go into
other sections of town for a lot of reasons
that I can't go into right now,
but racial boundaries being one of them.
And so knowing that in our coalition,
we don't sweep it under the carpet.
We put it up front very early.
So in the first year of retreat, we had to deal
with our racial challenges, the internalized racism,
the structural racism, and decide as a coalition
what were we gonna do about it.
And we have the support of the Hundred Million Lives
that helped train us to address race, racism and equity
and go beyond that.
'Cause once you name it and you own it,
it's not so challenging and we make sure
that what we're doing doesn't cause harm
for people with lived experience of inequities
and we navigate those solutions.
And it's an opportunity 'cause people are so relieved
that we're talking about the elephant in the room.
They're like, ah, I can talk about my biases.
I can work on them.
I can name the structural barrier that's been in the way.
We have this brutal open and honest conversation.
It's not brutal but it's real.
And that's how come the framework is called REAL
'cause there isn't anything that we're going to hide.
Sometimes there's tears in our meetings.
Sometimes there's a lot of joy.
But it's the only truth we have and it's working for us.
So I see those conflicts as an opportunity
for us to do better, 'cause they're underlying
the social determinants of health.
So the longer we avoid talking about them,
it's a big part of the solution, thank you.
It's time.
Thank you everyone.
(audience applauding)