In Rochester NY, Deborah Puntenney and her network are transforming the conventional wisdom about how foundation money can produce resident health outcomes. Eight years into the project with the Greater Rochester Health Foundation they are investing in the social determinants of health through grassroots, place-based and resident-driven efforts. This is not about more health services.
The foundation and a group of its grantees formed the Neighborhood Health Status Improvement Initiative, where four neighborhood groups are using Asset Based Community Development to work on health-related issues.
Deborah shares examples from an inner-city community in this conversation with Peter Block and John McKnight:
Jackie Reed embodies the community embedded in efforts such as Every Block a Village and Westside Health Authority. She explains how health has become “a focus on problems” rather than on the people having them, and how she has helped create a new kind of health that offers fulfillment.
For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work. All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.
Health Is a Neighborhood Issue:
Conversation with Jackie Reed
September 9, 2014
John McKnight: Welcome everybody. Today, we are joined by Jackie Reed. I’ve known Jackie for thirty or forty years and she is one of the great inventors in Chicago. Jackie, welcome and we are glad that you could be here.
I wonder if we could begin by having you give us a little background on your history and what led you to focus on the issue of health.
Jackie Reed: I grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, during a time when Natchez was segregated. I went to segregated schools and I lived in a segregated community, but we never felt poor. We had a sense of pride and dignity. Education was very important to our families. My mother had 11 years of education and my father couldn’t read or write, but they had a lot of hope and they had dreams for their children. So, we grew up with a strong sense of family and a strong sense of community. We grew up with a sense of dignity about our community and believing that we could do anything.
I am 64 years old now and so I am a child of the 50’s and 60’s. I came to Chicago when I was 18 because there weren’t many jobs down South. I was looking for a job to work that summer so I could save up money to go back to school. I was going to Alcorn State University, and it wasn’t a state school; it was a private college at the time. Then I met my husband, got married, and stayed here in Chicago. It was quite a big difference here because the people had more. The people had more, but they didn’t have a sense of sacrificing and demanding more out of themselves. It seemed to me that people were into living in the moment and having a good time. Now don’t get me wrong because I liked it. All of sudden I didn’t have to worry about school and sacrifices. I could go partying on Saturday nights and work and get paid. The guys had more money and cars. So, we could have a good time. I had a sense of freedom, but there was always something in me that said I had to prepare for my future. I had to help somebody.
In growing up in the South, we had always seen people helping each other. If somebody had chickens, then everybody had eggs. People had gardens and people could eat out of each other’s gardens. I remember my Daddy raised hogs in the country and when he would bring a hog back, we would cut that hog up and take some to our neighbors. We would take a leg to this neighbor or a shoulder to that neighbor. By the time we finished giving that hog away we only had a little bit of that hog for ourselves.
This was the way people lived and we came to understand that what people thought about us was very important. We had hope and we had a community and we had a future. They did the usual things and got into each other’s business and so forth, but people really cared about each other.
These are the values that I grew up with and the values that I came to Chicago with. This was at the time when they actually did outreach to find people who wanted to get on welfare So, people in the neighborhood would say that you could go down to the Welfare Office and tell them that you are not married and you can get a welfare check and so forth.A lot of people did that. They were working and they got dressed and went out on Friday nights and they spent money. They used bad language on the streets and they didn’t care if children were there or not.
So, I saw a breakdown of the values and the morals of the people grew up with. I know that these people had grown up with families from Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas just as I had, but somehow they did not have the same sense of identity and purpose and drive for that community that we had. I think that part of it was we had a clear sense of what we had to do for ourselves because the community, the white community, the power structures in the South, were so organized against the Civil Rights Movement and in Chicago it was very different. You really couldn’t tell because the Aldermen were Black and the Mayor was Mr. Daley. There was a sense that he was going to take care of you in some kind of way. There was a different level of awareness about the political structures and what was possible.
I liked Chicago and moved to the West Side. I started to work in factories, I went to school, and I paid my own tuition. I didn’t know anything about getting money to help pay tuition. I was told that I wouldn’t do well in school because I had gone to segregated schools but I didn’t find the University of Illinois to be particularly challenging. It was fine, but I didn’t feel threatened or somehow inferior there, and I did real well. I finished my degree in sociology and then I went to the University of Chicago, later on. Just basically having babies along the way (I have four children), struggling, paying bills, and trying to feel, What is my purpose, what is my sense and what can I contribute?
John: Somehow you got into the health field. Can you tell us about that?
Jackie: I started out of my church at Bethel. They were looking for a director. I had worked in practically every area of social work and I was now in the church. I had become pretty famous in the church for my social work; I had been working with children needing adoptive homes and ended up placing more children in adoptive homes than any other social worker in the state. I was finding Black families for Black children.
So, Bethel wanted me to consider being the director and so I became director of a holistic health center. John, when I was director of the health center, I was also a social worker for the pastoral counseling ministry. Many of the people who came into the health center really didn’t come with a lot of health problems. They came in with a lot of community and social problems. Like the woman who had a son who was staying at home; he was on drugs and he was stealing all the baby’s formula and selling it, or the mother whose girl is pregnant by her mother’s boyfriend. We saw a breakdown in families. The intervention was more social than medical.
So, we thought to ourselves, What is health? How do we go about creating health in this community? That was one of the things that plagued me. I went to the universities to try to get them to partner with us. One of the universities came out and they would look at what I would call the flavor of the month, such as all these girls having babies and that is one of the reasons that you have family problems, too many teenagers having babies. So, what we need to do is have more clinics in the schools that can dispense birth control.
So, when you go back to the neighborhood the neighborhood people say that is not going to work. They would say that this is giving girls permission to have sex and this is basically legitimizing their behavior and not teaching them to restrain their behavior. Not teaching young men to restrain their behavior. Where are the values and the morals? We want to teach our young people rather than just giving them a pill.
Then you have the problem of another flavor of the month, of course, which was infant mortality. We have high infant mortality –– more babies are dying in Chicago than in Costa Rica. What are we going to do about that? We will do outreach to get that young mother into the clinics. If we can get that mother into the clinics during the first trimester of her pregnancy, the babies won’t die. Then it didn’t become about the mother; it became about her womb. How can we get this womb to the doctor’s office? It was not a focus on people; it became a focus on the problems. They were going to find a quick fix for the problems, but people are more complex than a womb or they are more complex than their sexuality.
Anytime we would do something the politicians would not necessarily listen to us, because if you had a problem with drugs and drug abuse in a neighborhood, the people say we need to have more drug treatments and have something for these young men to do. Politicians would say, We are going to lock them up. So, you lock up the people on drugs. You take the womb to the hospitals so that they can be taken care of. Everything is about a problem and something that we can quick fix it with the next flavor of the month.
I just got fed up with it because people began to look for this outside quick fix to come in here and dope us up or lock us up or something. People lost their sense of what we can do for ourselves. Because the quick fix was something that was based on research, and because it was something that was more legitimate than my little idea, people lost their confidence and their ability to make a difference in their own community. They would go in there and they would listen to what a researcher had to say. The researcher would give them some incentive for coming: You come to this thing and you’re pregnant, we are going to give you some Pampers or we are going to give you a baby bed. Things like that.
That way is not really respecting people. People need respect. People need to maintain a sense of dignity and a sense that they themselves have the solution. So, I left that organization after about four years and I said, The hell with this. Every time we tried to get some program going, people would say that’s not what we need. So, let’s go hear what the people say and then, based on what the people say, we are going to put a strategy around that and work on what the people say.
That is how we started the Westside Health Authority. We say we are going to use the ideas of the people here and we are going to use their capacity to make a difference in their community. We are not going to get wrapped up in organizational interests because then you have to worry about big money and interests. We want to be an organization that people would use. We wanted to be able to get people’s ideas traversed from one point to the next point. We want to build their capacity up to care for work in their community and to make change in their own community. That’s how we really got started with the Westside Health Authority.
John: I was just wondering about the name Westside Health Authority. When they hear something called an authority, most people would think governmental. You didn’t call it the Westside Health Organization. Can you tell us why you chose the word “authority”?
Jackie: We believe that the people really are the authority on what needs to happen.
I mean, look at all the professionals and all the dollars that have been spent on the west side of Chicago, just to give you an example, in health care. The program that was supposed to reduce infant mortality, I think, had somewhere near 30 million dollars spent over a period of ten years. Then you have all the hospitals; you have five hospitals alone that probably had spent somewhere around quarter of billion dollars a year in health care and all people are doing is getting sicker and sicker.
So, we believe that the people themselves really are the authority on what needs to happen in the community. We believe that if we listen to the people and follow what they and give them an opportunity to use their ideas and to use their capacities, we would create health in a community.
Peter Block: Jackie, what you are saying is mesmerizing and thank you. What I’m interested in is what did the people say?
Jackie: We went out and knocked on doors. We got a grant from the MacArthur Foundation; they took a chance on us. I actually had gone to the MacArthur Foundation and asked them for some money to hire some people from the community so they could go out into the neighborhood. We asked people, What is health and what is working in the community? We wanted to build on that rather than on what’s not working. The MacArthur Foundation said that we had to go the university and get somebody from the university to help us.
I went to the university and I told them that we are the “authority” –– we are the boss, and if they were willing to work for us then we would give them part of our grant. They were willing. I had graduated from the university and had some friends there. We hired a woman from the university to come and work with us. She started to work with us around 1990 and she just retired, actually about six months ago; she ended up quitting the university and working for us.
So, we asked the questions in the community. We trained about 15 people from the neighborhood to go out and ask their neighbors, What did they think would work in the community? What is health and how can we make the neighborhood healthier? The people said, Well, I really don’t know anything about health, but I wish that we could do something about those gunshots behind my garage on Saturday nights. So, we asked them, What can we do about the gunshots? And they said, You can’t do anything about the gunshots unless you do something about jobs. These young people are not like us when we were kids and nobody had money. We were satisfied to go outside with no money and be ok, and now you see television and everything is about money. The kids don’t feel like they are worth anything if they don’t have any money and so we have to create some jobs for them.
Then somebody else would say, Well, you can’t create jobs unless you have some businesses. So, we need more businesses right here in our neighborhood. We have to go to Oak Park for everything we buy or to some other neighborhood. We don’t have our own economy right here in our neighborhood. Then somebody else would say, Well, you just can’t build a community and have a healthy community just because you have kids or you have a few jobs. Because if you don’t teach morals and values, if you don’t have that as your foundation, the jobs will leave and the businesses will dry up.
So, we are just listening to what people are saying. We looked at what we had and what we had was four hospitals in that neighborhood. These four hospitals were also around the table with us because they had their own organizational interest. They were competing for patients. We had the community’s ear and voice they wanted to make sure that they were plugged into us. So, we used that leverage with those hospitals, and we worked with five schools and those hospitals to help to get 291 young people into internships. Now, the hospitals will provide a precept for young people to go there, and they will learn and work in the pharmacy and they will work in food service and they will work in the gift shop and in the library and they would work going around visiting patients and taking books and they worked in the accounting office. So, they learned all kinds of skills.
These young people saw themselves differently. They began to have hope and their grades improved. The families began to brag about what their sons were doing. They weren’t gangbanging and not hanging out as much. They were paid to do this because many of these young people have the experience that their mamas or their aunties taking care of them are on kidney dialysis and then the phone service would be shut off, but they had to have a phone because that is their lifeline connection. So, the money that we were able to raise for them through the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development, which is a right way for the mayor to spend the money, was a good thing for Chicago to do. We were able to get them stipends and they could actually go to work. We got the community college to come in and train them on various kinds of skills so that they could actually learn, not only from precepts, but they could also have some formal training from Malcolm X Community College, Wright Junior College, and other colleges that came in.
Our mission was to go out of business. We were always looking at ways that we could make a difference in terms of public policies and getting this thing implemented citywide. So, in three or four years, we had gotten 291 young people into paid internships and they ended up in Walgreens to train them in pharmacy and we built partnerships for them. The city of Chicago liked the project, and the public school hired our staff and took over the project which they called the Schools to Work Project. Our staff is still working there.
The people said, Schools and businesses. How do you build businesses in these neighborhoods? We have been trying to do that forever, and we were able to get these same hospitals to tell us who supplies their lights and who presses their sheets and who provides the catfish for the trays. Then we were able to get businesses in neighborhoods to supply those things. The real beauty of our work is the entrepreneur and we got ma and pa paint companies out of basements to paint the kitchen for Loretto Hospital and we got MK Cleaners to do the cubicle curtains for West Suburban Hospital. We were able to help these companies to get 3 million dollars over a period of three and half, four years. This became a model for the Empowerment Zone when the Empowerment Zone legislation was passed, and we worked with the city to put more together and do more of that.
Then the third thing, the big thing and the real foundation of our work, is called Every Block a Village. You can get businesses created when you have a lot of people who want business and you can help them clean up their portfolios and introduce them to the procurement offices at the hospitals. But how do you get people to change their values and morals? How do you get people willing to commit themselves to helping their neighbors on things they will not get paid for? Maybe what we can do is to find a citizen leader on every block and then try to turn every block into its own village. Maybe, on this one little block we could get the neighbors connected to each other and understand each other’s needs, and then maybe we could turn this block around. Maybe, they would know who their kids are and then tie that block into another block.
So, we organized blocks, and we called the effort Every Block a Village. We brought people together on these blocks every month. They began to talk about their blocks, and they began to talk about their children and about their vision. They remembered the way it was when they were in Mississippi and Alabama. We built relationships with these folks. Then we began to ritualize these relationships. They would take each other soup. They would take each other to the store. They would go to the pharmacy for a sick neighbor. We began to ritualize; we would bring them together for Thanksgiving; we would give potlucks and everybody would bring a pot. They were smiling and grinning with each other and their children would be smiling and grinning. So, when you saw the children on the street acting up, you could say, You shouldn’t be doing that, and you are not afraid of that kid anymore. When you saw some kids hanging out in front of your house, you are not calling the police saying that they are drug dealers; you know those kids in front of your house. They just don’t have anyplace to go. You can ask, What are you doing out here?
So, you are building relationships with your neighbors. You are establishing rituals and patterns for celebrating each other. You are feeling good. People would say, I was sick before this; I had this terrible disease and I didn’t feel like coming out to this meeting, but I sure feel better now. They feel a sense of satisfaction and a fulfillment from giving their gifts, and that is what I call health.
Health is a satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment because you have a purpose for living and that purpose propels you to do something, to give to somebody, and that makes you want to do more. The more money you get the more you want to share. The better you feel the more you go out there and not only work in your garden but go over to your neighbor’s yard and cut their grass. So, it’s a sense of being fulfilled and I think that when people are on the dependency end of it, they lose their sense of purpose and they lose their sense of their destiny. The biggest health problem we have in our neighborhood, particularly among our youth, and it is hopelessness.
I will stop there and I’m sorry, I just get going.
John: Jackie, one other thing. I know that when I was attending meetings of the citizen leaders of Every Block a Village, you always started with a prayer. Various citizen leaders would lead a prayer to begin and also to end the meeting. Then one time I remember that you and I went and interviewed some of those citizen leaders in their homes. One of the things that became very clear there was that they saw the base of what they were doing as an expression of their faith. Over and over again, that’s what we heard. I was wondering if you could talk about the historic church and the question of faith and how that gets manifested at the block level and the organization.
Jackie: When we first started Every Block a Village, we had people in the neighborhood who were Muslims and people who were Christians. Also, we had staff who were Jews and staff who were Muslims and staff who had no faith, but we had to be who we were. We do not discriminate. They are all very lovely people and they have all made tremendous contributions.
The idea here is that you have to believe that God is in charge and that God is with you when you are trying to help other people. This notion is about the spirit and you know the spirit is about loving other people. You can’t have love unless you are in relationship with other people. I mean to have the spirit and not be in a relationship with other people is like having eyes, but keeping them closed. It is the beauty of the spirit to be shared and to share your life with someone else and that makes you better and makes them better.
I think that everybody knew that. Most of the people are Christians. They don’t go to the same church. Most of them go to different churches, but they express their love for God by how they love their neighbors. That is very Christian, and I think very Islamic, too, that you love God by loving people. You exhibit your love for God by the way you help other people. We always emphasize the fact that people had to give of themselves, and it is in the giving of yourselves that you really do benefit the most. The person who gives benefits the most. Of course, that is also scripture. Jesus says that it is more blessed to give than to receive. By the giving you receive. It is when you keep yourself and when you hold on to your stuff that your life drains away and you become fearful, and you become hopeless. When you give yourself to other people, even if they are unlovable, you are doing it because of God. You give people a chance because you love God. It is a spiritual thing. It is a spiritual principle.
Peter: I have one more question. Tell me how you launched the block leaders and what they did in their early days?
Jackie: In order to really connect somebody with someone else, and to call them a citizen leader, we had to give them the name. The name went on before they were actually providing leadership.
We had some clear expectations for them. The expectations included them getting to know who was on their block. They also had to come to regular meetings and they had to bring somebody to the meetings with them. They had to represent their block at the meeting and, f example, someone would say, My name is Arlene Huntley from the 5400 block of West Haddon. She would give a block report. When something would happen, or there was some project going on, let’s say, October is coming up –– every October we would have Oktoberfest. We didn’t want to get into people’s ideas about Halloween so we would have Oktoberfest and the people would come and they would bring gifts for the children. They would have apple-bobbing and activities like that in the park. They would supervise it all. They would basically plan what they were going to do at Oktoberfest. They would get flyers out on their block about Oktoberfest.
If we needed to have people teaching, for example, about what health was in the neighborhood, we trained some of the citizen leaders to actually go down to Cook County and talk to the doctors. All of this was building their capacity as a leader, not only among their neighbors, but also with professionals because professionals are a part of the community, too. Of course, if they went down to County and provided training and then County had to pay them consultant fees for coming down there. They learned the language of the medical profession:, primary care, ambulatory care, and whatever else. They were also responsible for knowing who was sick on their block. They would make sure that a card got out and they would bring a card to an Every Block a Village meeting and 50 people would sign the card so that people felt connected to each other, even people who were not necessarily on people’s blocks.
Maggie Rogers: We have a question in the chat from Mac Johnson, one of our friends in Cincinnati. He asks, Can you share what works to help nonprofits’ staff to shift to ABCD’s approach of citizen versus client.
Jackie: That was one of the hardest jobs that I had to do. We had actually gotten funding to do the ABCD model, but all the people we hired wanted to be helpers. They wanted to go out and help people. It was difficult to get them to understand their job was to go out and organize helpers from the community. It takes a certain kind of organizer. I just got very, very fortunate to get somebody who was from Mississippi who had organized in the Civil Rights Movement, and they knew how to go out and find people to organize. They didn’t go out to do the helping; they were actually successful in doing the organizing. He has been with me, no matter where I go, he has been with me for about 30 years. He was very instrumental and knew how to go out and mobilize people.
What we try to do is to get people to go out to the community. They have to, first, not to go out and see who has needs, and see who is sick or to see who needs more food. They have to go out and bring people into the meetings. They have to let people know how much they wan these folks to come to this meeting. They have to build a relationship first. A lot of times you knock on somebody’s door and they will ask you, Why aren’t you guys doing more about these drugs in the neighborhood and why aren’t you doing something about schools in the neighborhood? I’ve got a mama here that’s sick and she can’t get her medical card, and why can’t you help me get her medical card?
So, you have to listen to all of that and you have have real authentic concern for people and show it, but you also have to keep your vision ahead of you and then you have to have a place to come back to and to debrief about your visit. So, when you come back you have to say to people, What did you learn? Then they talk about the needs and then I will start saying things like, Ok, that’s fine, but what are the assets? Sometimes people would say that we need to be doing more to help these people. Then you say, How are we going to help them?
So, you have to listen, and it is a process by which they get transformed. It doesn’t happen overnight because people have been trained in this dependency role to need help. It is very difficult to get people to see themselves as the help. That is why you have these meetings, and you have to get one or two people who are the strong leaders to have a voice that keeps repeating it.
I would like to share a story with you about one of the things that happened that blew my mind. We had a lady by the name of Diane Scott. We had organized people in the neighborhood to be on a community health board for Cook County Clinic when they came into the neighborhood. These ladies would go to the meetings, and they would come back and say the Clinic’s space is too small and we need to have another clinic built. So, one lady, Ms. Scott, says, I think we ought to build a clinic. Our children, every day, went to schools where they don’t have books and teachers who are not there to really teach them. They have to listen to the gang talk and walk through gang territory and be threatened.
In the meantime, we are in our comfort zone and we need to build a facility here; they need to see something. She organized a group of the citizen leaders on the different blocks. The women got together for catfish dinners. The County says, If you build a building will you rent it? They said yes, and County didn’t have any real clue that we were actually going to build it, and I didn’t either. We had never done it before. These ladies started selling catfish dinners. The men would come in too. I men didn’t fry fish, but they took orders and they would take catfish dinners downtown to different office buildings every Friday. They got fish donated from the fish markets in the neighborhood and they got cornmeal from Jim’s Grocery Store on the corner. They ended up raising about $60,000 from catfish dinners.
So, it was serious then. They had made a believer out of me, and they had made believers out of themselves. I said to the foundation that we had $60,000 and County said that if we built them a building they would rent it to us. So, was the foundation going to help? They said yes, and how much is it going to cost? We said, Well, we have this consultant pro bono who says it is going to cost somewhere around 4.5 million dollars. They said, If you raise the four million, we will give you $500,000. Then we went to another foundation and said that Foundation X is going to give us $500,000; what are you going to do?They said we will give you $300,000.
So, it went on and on and then the Empowerment Zone money became available, and we went down to the Empowerment Zone Board. All the ladies went there in the morning and asked for 3.5 million dollars. You have to go before a group of people and the people have to decide. The audience was packed and the audience could be for you or against you. So, the whole neighborhood went down there and there wasn’t any room for anybody else. When they started voting on what to do with the money, we ended up with 2.5 million dollars.
Then the state said if we were raising that kind of money then they were going to give us a million dollars. Thay’s the way we raised the money to build this building. County signed the contract to rent the space. Then we had to actually build a building. We didn’t know anything about contracts and bidding out and all of that. We hired a guy to help us. The neighborhood people said to us, We sold catfish dinners. We do not want to see all these other folks coming into our neighborhood doing this work. This has to be our work and our young people have to do this work. So, we are going to make this a Black project from the community.
We had a young guy who had a trucking company. He got so excited about this project that he got the boys who were out on the corner training bulldogs on Sunday mornings to come work for him. He put hard hats on them. He put them on crane machines and had them working on digging a hole. He had about fifteen of them. More than he needed, but he was giving them an opportunity. Of course, they didn’t have union cards, so the union came out and said they were going to stop us from working.Then the community came out and said, You will not do that. The union said, Pay for one of the guys and you can continue to work. So, we were able to have our people learning and feeling good about this work. After that we had R.S. Scott, a black concrete guy, come in and lay the foundation and he brought his workers with him. People who didn’t have an opportunity to bid on the big contracts could bid on our contracts and they could actually get the contracts.
We ended up contracting out 87% of the contracts to local people. Because we had to finish the project, and some of these people had various levels of skills, we ended up with 55% of the contractors being able to finish this job. I learned that there are a lot of reasons that people don’t make it and all they need is a little help. Sometimes all they need is a little encouragement and for somebody to keep at it and to provide that opportunity for them. When that job was being built, the neighborhood would come up to the site and just look in and see all these Black boys down in that hole. I would get so many phone calls from people saying, I can’t believe that we are really doing this. There was a renewal of hope that we can do things in our own neighborhood. We can raise money. We can put people back to work. We can improve our schools.
So, that is the real lesson that we learned about when we do things for ourselves, when we mobilize our own assets. We could not have done that if those women had not sold catfish dinners. It was better to start with what they had and build on that than to start with money given to us by a grant. It’s that for most of what we do and the little bit that we have, the people have to sow that. The Bible says that God gives seed to the sower and so whoever sows that seed gets more seed. Your skills and gifts are built by you using them. If you don’t use them and you are waiting for someone else, you are the most frustrated and unhealthy person in the world.
So, we have to use our gifts. We have to use our capacities because we build capacity by using our capacity. That is what people on the block have to begin to learn. Unfortunately, the media, the stereotypes that everybody communicates to us in our community, is that we are deficient and that we are weak. We don’t know and we need to have more education. People have common sense, and these are the same people who built this city and who built this country. People didn’t have education. They were ordinary people with ordinary gifts and mobilizing those gifts because they had a vision.
John: Great, great.
Bob (caller): Hello, Jackie and hello everybody. I’ve enjoyed your talk. I’m just curious about something, Jackie. Did you find that people in the South had a greater willingness amongst them to help their neighbors than you find in Chicago or is it about the same?
Jackie: I think at the time it was a greater willingness to help because you had a focused enemy, if you will. There was the Ku Klux Klan as the target enemy that mobilized people. In Chicago, there was no target enemy. There were good people and there were bad people. There were good people and bad people in the South, always, as well. People were much more open about their feelings about Black folks at that time. Here it was not as clear. People felt that they had more, and they didn’t have to mobilize as much as down there.
It’s no different now. In the South now, and in Chicago now, I think that you have the breakdown of community across the board. I mean the breakdown of families in Chicago and in Mississippi. You have crime everywhere. People are afraid. In Chicago people are afraid and down South people are afraid. So, this fear is actually, I think, the very root of violence in our community. People always just say violence is a result of not having money or these kids are trying to make money here or through gang activities, that sort of thing. Really and truly, I have learned that kids that are carrying guns because they are afraid that they are going to be shot up by other kids. The gangs would leave drugs, but they would have to have protection.
We were not afraid, even with the Ku Klux Klan in the South, because we had family and we had community and we had hope and we had church and we had a future presented to us. We had a destiny to fulfill. We were all made to feel very important to changing this community. We were very important to changing racism in America. We were change agents. Now, with the dependency kind of attitude you are waiting for change to happen to you or for you. When I was a child we had many Black leaders. Even as a grown-up, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, you had a lot of black leaders. Now, you look for the Black leadership and you don’t see them. You see preachers every once in a while, but people are so bogged down with their own organizational interests that you have to ask, Where is the community and where is the heart of the community? We were seeing that there was a real breakdown in community because people have embraced the whole dependency model, the professional model and needing service model, and it is killing us, actually.
Peter: I have a question. How does the economic or local business-owned landscape look now in the neighborhood? The story about having raised the money and 80% local to build the building. Describe the economic landscape some 20 plus years later?
Jackie: I would say it’s dire. I think that it has continued to bottom out. Unfortunately, it started probably in the 80’s with the loss of 145,000 manufacturing jobs in the Austin community alone. Austin was a heavy manufacturing area. With manufacturing leaving and businesses like restaurants and dry cleaners and other businesses that support manufacturing leaving the community, it has been piecemeal all the way. You have a few retail stores that have opened up. Of course, Walgreens is there and CVS and some fast-food restaurants. Those jobs are there and those kinds of businesses are there. You still have the liquor stores, but by and large, unfortunately, not a lot going on in terms of business.
Peter: Have you tried things to launch and support and fund locally owned businesses? What you are describing is everywhere. Outside-owned and money leaving the neighborhood.
Jackie: I talked about the business that we organized. We organized businesses to have contracts with people and so there were a lot of businesses coming in with various levels of capacity. That was one of the areas that sort of got spun out. I think that not for profit organizations try to do a good job –– and this is going to sound hypercritical –– but I didn’t think we should last more than five years. I wanted us to go out of business because you have to get into organizational interests if you are going to stay in business. As long as we could work in the community’s interest then I thought we could stay. At some point you have to try to figure out how you are going to survive and how you are going to pay your bills and the organization has to get bigger. It was something I didn’t want to get into.
So, the business network was spun out and another group began to do business networking. They organized a big roundtable with meetings with politicians about business development. The politicians brought various businesses to the neighborhood, but it didn’t really improve the neighborhood situation. It really has to be, I think, looking at to what degree you can create sustainable kinds of income in that neighborhood where it can turn over and over. So, you have Walgreens in there but the grocery stores are not there. A grocery store is a business that perhaps could have other kinds of links to improvement in the neighborhood. It has just not worked out. It is a difficult job to do. It takes almost full focus to do that.
We were working on Every Block a Village and working on building our health facility. We tried to stay in health because when you have an organization in a neighborhood people will take you down if you try to get into schools because your area is health. They say, We work in the schools. You have other organizations doing work in schools, and you don’t want to get into that fight because it is distracting and wearing on you.
Peter: Tough. It is amazing to listen to you, Jackie. We are so grateful. There is a realism mixed with hope. I think the way to create a local economy, perhaps, is with co-operatives and it’s a tough nut to crack. To bring outside businesses in doesn’t really solve the problem.
John, any questions or thoughts?
John: Well, one thing I know that is currently going on with the Authority is the housing development process. That is key to providing local jobs.
Jackie: Two years ago, we started to look at ways that we could take some of the houses in the neighborhood that had been abandoned as a result of foreclosure. People on these blocks were having a difficult time holding on to their equity in their houses. The abandoned houses were being neglected terribly by the banks. They were being broken into. We came up with the notion that we would do 100 men and 100 homes. These homes would be renovated by people in the neighborhood and by local businesses. These homes then would be sold to local people.
That is one of the things we started doing, as well as fundraising. So far, we have done about 17 homes and at least 15 have been sold. If they haven’t been sold, they have been leased. It is really wonderful because schoolteachers from the neighborhood now live in the neighborhood. They were able to go on that block and help stabilize those blocks. We were able to start Every Block a Village on some of those blocks.
We are having an Every Block a Village meeting tonight and we bring people out to give them a bigger vision. Just trying to bring people who have resources back to the community and give them a good place to live and at a cost that they could afford. They would be able to get a great house that they would not be able to buy in some suburb. Then you have people who have values, people that have education and people who can contribute not only in terms of paying for their house and paying taxes on their house, but also serve as advocates with the politician for better schools and for more opportunities in the neighborhoods. You have better streets and people who pick up the garbage and pick up the trees, who make sure that the alleys are clean and there are activities in the park district.
Some of the things that they have been going on in Every Block a Village lately have been the demand that the fees be lowered at the park districts because kids can’t come because they cannot afford the fees. If they don’t pay the fee, they can’t participate in the park district. Also they are insisting that they have better bus transportation because if we have to leave the community to go get a job, we must insist that buses not just run in the daytime but also at night as some people work the 11 pm shifts.
These are some of the policy kinds of things these people are able to espouse. Then it has been a wonderful thing, and we have also raised money towards supporting that. I think we have raised somewhere around $400,000 and all of this money has been spent in neighborhoods and on neighborhood contracts and neighborhood folks working. People who were once in jail and coming out of jail have to come to these meetings so they will be a part of the community. It’s not just a job, but also a part of the community. It is part of what we require from them.
John: One of the things that strikes me as especially significant about everything that you are saying about the Westside Health Authority and the EBV is that you are bringing people together to perform two functions. One, to be advocates for better transportation, for instance. Also, to be involved in neighboring in ways that brings new life to people and the young people in the community. So, you have a double vision. So many organizations just have a view of advocacy, but you have been able to combine advocacy and community building in the same organization and that has always impressed me as being especially important. A lot of other organizations could learn a lot from you about how you make both those things happen.
Peter: We are nearing the end of the hour and we are so grateful to have you on this call. Jackie, any final things that you would like to say?.
Jackie: I am very grateful for John’s work and I have to say that it came to life for me when someone asked that question about how you get people to stop seeing themselves as someone who goes out to help someone with needs instead of going out to organize the help. So, that has been in the back of my mind all along. I’m just very grateful for the work that John has done and you, as well, Peter. It really began to help me think this way. I think that we have to help other people to think this way.
It is hard because as a Black woman so many times you don’t want to get caught in a conservative mind and say that these folks are victims, and they are going to be victims and leave them alone and so forth. It was not always the case. I had a young man who went out and did some outreach on the blocks. He’s about 30, and has been in jail about four times. I put him out there and he had been mentored by me. So, we paid him to go out and do some surveys, and he came back and said that the people who are 55 to 65 years old are the people on the block that are picking up paper. They are still trying to help their neighbors. They are really hopeful, and they are really helpful. The people between the ages of 45 to 55, he said, they are hopeful, but they are less helpful. He said those that are 30 are selfish. He said they think of themselves, and they are buying their cars and their jewelry and they are competitive with their neighbors. Those under 30 are not hopeful; they are hopeless and they are fearful. He said, I don’t know how we are going to change that. And he is 30. He is somebody in the church now. He is somebody who never went to church and now he is bringing his folks to church.
The change that we have to have is not change that can come from the outside, and it is not even outside of our people. It is the inside, and we have to change the heart. That is the only change that is sustainable. That is the change to help us all to grow because when you have a passion for something, even though your leg hurts and you have arthritis, you still get up and move because you have a passion for doing that. When you do it you feel better. You feel healthier and feel more satisfied. That is health and that is being healthy. That is satisfaction and fulfillment from giving your gifts to contribute to society. When you cannot do that, then we are not in a healthy society.
