This week’s episode is a discussion about reclaiming public spaces such as parks and playgrounds in order to build a sense of community and increase healthy and safe behaviors among children and young adults. The panel discussion was hosted by the UI Injury Prevention Research Center and the CPH Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.

Steve Sonnier:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to From the Front Row brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Stevland Sonnier and if this is your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how that are relevant to anyone, both in and out of the field of public health.

Steve Sonnier:

Today we’re excited to present a recent virtual panel discussion by the UI Injury Prevention Research Center and the College of Public Health Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, entitled “A Safe Place to Play: Reclaiming Public Spaces to Strengthen Community.” The event was moderated by two of our very own UI CPH PhD students, Chelsea Hicks and Robyn Espinosa. Here is their recent webinar.

Chelsea Hicks:

Welcome to A Safe Place to Play: Reclaiming Public Spaces to Strengthen Community. This is a panel discussion on youth, community, and violence prevention. My name is Chelsea Hicks.

Robyn Espinosa:

Oh, hi. My name is Robyn Espinosa. Chelsea and I are fourth-year PhD candidates in the Occupational and Environmental Health Department at the University of Iowa, and also trainees in the Occupational Injury Prevention Program in the Injury Prevention Research Center.

Chelsea Hicks:

We are so glad that you could join us for this event today. We’re just going to cover some brief housekeeping at the beginning. This event is being recorded and it will be available for viewing later. We also would be remiss to not acknowledge all the people who put this event together, and so this College of Public Health Spotlight Event is sponsored by the University of Iowa College of Public Health Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and the University of Iowa Injury Prevention Research Center.

Chelsea Hicks:

We’re going to start off with watching the trailer from the Pine Point film and then following that, we will introduce the panelists for the discussion.

Robyn Espinosa:

We are so excited about the panel that we have put together today. It’s full of wonderful speakers who will help us discuss the relevant events and importance of the themes that were presented in this Pine Point video. We have Sylvia Ortega, who is a high school programs coordinator for the Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics, or BEAM, program based out of New York. Marizen Ramirez is a professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Minnesota and a principal investigator for the study, Link for Equity. Mark Berg is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology and the director of the Crime and Justice Policy program in the Public Policy Center at University of Iowa. Albert Sharp is the founder and CEO of Invisible Book Bag, Inc. based out of Chicago. Unfortunately, our fifth panelist, Luana Nelson Brown, wasn’t able to join us today.

Robyn Espinosa:

Panelists, I want to thank you first for being willing to speak today on the panel and I would like each of you to share more about what your work is and reflect on how your work is impacted by the things that were presented in the film. Anyone can feel free to start.

Sylvia Ortega:

I can start. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sylvia Ortega. As Robyn said, I am a high school coordinator at a nonprofit called Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics, or BEAM for short. We’re a nonprofit that’s committed to closing the gap that exists in education and in STEM, particularly between low income marginalized students of color and their more privileged counterparts. We provide a variety of experiences, mentorship, resources for students to just basically be at the same starting line as their counterparts that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

Sylvia Ortega:

I think, in particular for me, something that I found very powerful within the documentary, it reminded me, for one, about my home town. I was born and raised in the Bronx and I still live there now. The Bronx is a very impoverished county, in particular, one of the poorest districts in the country is in the Bronx and is about 10 minutes from where I live. There was this reminder of the theme of numbness and how young people continue to be numbed by this violence and stuff that’s coming around to their communities.

Sylvia Ortega:

Something that I continue to think about is how do you unlearn numbness, right? How do we unlearn something that’s passed down generationally because trauma is definitely generational, and it’s also just surrounded by us at all times. If a young person is growing up in a community that is very violent and impoverished, how do you unlearn that this isn’t normal, that this should not be normalized for them and they shouldn’t pass it on to their offspring and so on and so forth.

Sylvia Ortega:

Definitely just a lot of the things I was thinking about in the work that I do and just watching the documentary was how can we, as educators, educate young people that their surroundings really are a product of a messed up system that was not created for them or with them in mind. How do we use that power to really field the work that we do? A little bit of my thoughts. I’m happy to share more later.

Albert Sharp:

Good afternoon. My name is Albert Sharp. I’m presently employed by Habilitative Systems, which is the largest African American social service agency in the State of Illinois. We annually service over 700 clients in the Child and Welfare Department and over 3,500 in our own care centers. Today, I’m sitting before the panel as the CEO and co-founder of the Invisible Book Bag. It’s an organization that came of a group of men sitting around talking.

Albert Sharp:

The name is unique. Invisible Book Bag is about a concept, an idea. Every day our kids wake up with this Invisible Book Bag on their back with internal and external issues going on. We, as adults, don’t recognize the trauma or the depression, the signs of anxiety. We quickly make the assumption that they’re bad kids, that they’re just respectful to adults, they don’t want to follow social rules, they’re not socially acceptable behavior.

Albert Sharp:

Then we also have to make sure the kids understand. They have to take some of this ownership because they’re not able to articulate what’s going on internally, but that articulation comes from 90% of the adults that have came into their life have failed them. When you think about it, and take a moment to think about it. When you were little and you wanted Air Jordans and your mama said, “You can’t have that,” she failed you. When a teacher didn’t give you the tools or the resources to do what, they failed you. When the church that was the pillar of the community was not there anymore in terms of supporting the community, what has happened? It failed you.

Albert Sharp:

Kids get this unwritten rule from 90% of adults. Watching the movie of Camden, the first thing that came to my mind was, “That could be Detroit. That could be LA. That could be West Side of Chicago.” It’s an inner city anywhere in the country of the United States. What was so sad is that we have a university of environmental dysfunction within our community. Our kids are becoming a product of the environment which is dysfunctional. There’s no habitual family structure anymore. There’s no one they can really turn to and say, “I need help,” unless they find a way to trust. That’s what I took from this. It was a lack of trust in the movie. It was a lack of trust that our kids face today.

Mark Berg:

Thank you, everyone, for inviting me to participate and for all of you who are attending. I appreciate it. My name is Mark Berg. I’m a associate professor of sociology, criminology and some of my research focuses on, increasingly so, how the social environment comes to affect the physical health of children and adults. Some of this focus now includes methods that allow us to assess how this affects deep biological functioning of individuals, including the extent to which their selves are aging at a rate that exceeds or is less than their numerical or calendar age.

Mark Berg:

We also have examined cardiovascular disease risks and other concepts, including allowstatic load. The message is rather straightforward. It’s that chronic exposure to early life toxic stressors, which are so obvious in this film, leave a lasting imprint on the health of individuals that can be assessed at the biological level, at the epigenetic level. Some works show that these things are very difficult to unwind. People, of course, are resilient, but still what occurs to people when they’re in the their first 10 years of life, even their first two years of life, in terms of exposure, both direct and vicarious exposures to these types of stressors, has a lasting effect that we’re detecting among people in their 50s, women in a longitudinal study.

Mark Berg:

I watched the film and there were two things that stood out to me that I think are worth reflecting on just for a moment. One, I was uplifted by the message of hope with this park and the dedication by the individuals to provide children with a place to play. All children enjoy a safe place to play. That, throughout the film, I think illuminated how important social capital is and how important it is to have people in communities who are invested, even with limited resources.

Mark Berg:

That was offset by the themes which struck me, and still this morning I was thinking about it, and that is these children are carrying, as Albert alluded to, this burden of uncertainty, risk, threat all in an environment with limited support and many of them have had negative interactions with institutions that have effectively failed them, the police, the schools. I was struck by how the children view the police.

Mark Berg:

One child remarked they did more harm than the drug dealers. I think his father had been in prison. These are young people, so we know that this type of exposure affects their behavior and life outcomes, but I think the evidence is increasingly showing that that type of environment has profound effects on social inequalities and physical health, which we’ve documented, researchers have for decades. It’s a very good tool, I think, for a discussion.

Marizen Ramirez:

I’m Marizen Ramirez, and I am really honored to be here amongst just a fabulous group of people who can speak from the community, from research, about violence and how it impacts youth, especially youth of color. Through most of my career, I’ve focused on entering violence prevention, especially in stigmatized populations, and have, over time, really started to grow towards developing testing community-based interventions. There are people here, Cory, Peek-Asa, Linda Snetselaar, I think I see her amongst the attendees, Lisa Roth, Sato Ashida, who I worked with an continue to work in this space. I want to thank them for collaborating with me and finding really ways to develop evidence-based approaches to prevention.

Marizen Ramirez:

I was going to tell a little bit about where I grew up. I grew up in Los Angeles in the ’70s and ’80s when gang violence was prevalent. I had friends from school, a couple of family friends, who were jumped into gangs. My father worked as a counselor in south central Los Angeles. He worked with black/brown kids who were trapped in gangs. I think it’s interesting because I found myself really drawn to the school environment as a place for intervention. As many of you know, most of my work is based in schools.

Marizen Ramirez:

I’ll tell you a little bit about an intervention, Link for Equity, and Chelsea and Robyn, thank you for mentioning that. That work actually started in Iowa after the floods and we were working with Cedar Rapids community, a community that was devastated by the damage of the floods, but the community that was particularly impacted were those families of color in impoverished parts of Cedar Rapids. Their school district actually suffered quite a bit of damage. They closed down their central district offices. They had to actually function out of trailers and an entire elementary school was closed down.

Marizen Ramirez:

Since then, we’ve grown that program. We’re still working in Cedar Rapids and we’ve developed this program. I should tell you about it. It’s a trauma informed care program that integrates psychological first aid and motivational interviewing. All that jargon is that it is focused on understanding the impacts of trauma and educating the communities, especially the teachers, who are really the first lines of defense for these kids.

Marizen Ramirez:

If a kid comes and has trauma, they’re going to show up in school, they’re going to have those signs that they can’t concentrate in school, they can’t form relationships, they act out. That leads to increases in the disparities and discipline referrals, which we see throughout the country. Dramatically, we see the school to prison pipeline that continues to bring kids, punish them, criminalize behaviors and then they end up in the prison system.

Marizen Ramirez:

We’ve taken that program. We’ve integrated what we call cultural humility training in order to address the trauma of racism and discrimination and reduce implicit bias. I’m going to get back now because we’re supposed to talk about the film and how it’s related. It’s very related to the work I do. I think all, Sylvia, Albert, Mark have really touched upon the impacts of trauma. The numbing that Sylvia talks about, the exacerbation of racism and poverty that actually continues generation to generation.

Marizen Ramirez:

There are a couple of things that struck me that we need to keep in mind here, is that it’s the BIPOC communities that experience much, much higher rates of trauma, much, much more. They’re more than twice as likely to have seen violence in the community, more than four times likely to be in foster care, more than three times likely to have felt discrimination and racism.

Marizen Ramirez:

We see young black boys in Pine Point, who have been continuously exposed to trauma, where it struck me, one older gentleman said, “A vision of their future is one where jail is inevitable, and selling drugs is their job prospect.” Young boys, because of so much loss, they have difficulty attending school. They act out like they would be in the streets. They need to now take care of their younger siblings. They’ve become the man of the house at the age of 11 or 12. For them, it’s survival.

Marizen Ramirez:

I think, as a public health professional, I’ve got to think about what is the public health approach. It’s socio-ecological approaches to prevention and I think we see that play its part in this movie, in which there’s research around green spacing. We see this happening, in which they take a community, a blighted community. They did have a park there, but it was damaged. There was vandalism. It wasn’t taken care of. What I love about this is they added the community engagement, and what did they talk about? Points of connection. An adult connected with an adult, at least three adults. That’s what Bryan Martin said, three adults for every child.

Marizen Ramirez:

You’ve got green spacing and you’ve got community engagement and you’ve got connectedness with people. I see hope in that, but I have to agree with Mark there. There’s still areas for building strength and I really was struck, and am more acutely aware now than ever, I think the whole country is aware, about police involved violence and the fact that… I think they talk about this, that the police arrests were high in that community and the use of excessive physical force was high. You’ve got that and then you’ve got the community engagement, but I really feel that that’s a place where they could have really done more. I think it’s a place we all need to still tackle today.

Robyn Espinosa:

Wow. Thank you for that. Wow, just thank you for everyone, just sharing a little bit more about themselves and also their initial reflections from that film. Really powerful and you all are leading naturally into some of the next questions that we have. Here is an interesting question that the film actually presented: If poverty is injuring children’s brains, what is the response? What are the long term effects of childhood violence and trauma? This question is directly to Marizen and Mark, but Albert and Sylvia, please feel free to jump in as well with your responses.

Albert Sharp:

The long term effect is, again, we have to understand that our kids are living in this environmental dysfunctional bubble. Once they step outside this bubble, they’ve been in survival mode so long, they don’t know how to just generally relax, decompress. If somebody walks up to them they don’t know too quickly, they’re in fight or flight mode. Right there, that’s the first effect you see.

Albert Sharp:

The second effect is they don’t learn self-discipline. It’s not that it’s not being taught, they don’t learn how to embrace it so when they are in a situation where they’re dealing with the police, they know how to respond. Our kids see the police; they quickly start running. Even if I see the blue lights flashing behind me and they pull me over and I know I’m doing the right thing, I get this sense of uneasiness, like what’s going to happen now? I’m a black man and they’re pulling me over and the first thing they’re going to say to me is, “Do you have a weapon?”

Albert Sharp:

The third thing that comes when you think about the effect it’s having on the kids’ brains is how do we get them to learn how to still keep their survival skills, but learn how to cope with socially acceptable behavior where it’s not a negative response every time.

Robyn Espinosa:

Thank you for that. Are there others who want to weigh in as well?

Sylvia Ortega:

Yeah, I’m just going to add that, in addition to what Albert said, it’s also difficult for kids to even build healthy relationships with each other. There’s this normalcy of what they see outside and that’s how they connect and build relationships. As a result, there’s acting out, right? If they’re suspected of something that someone did, then they act out and then they get punished. I think Marizen pointed to this, about there’s this school to prison pipeline. Then you wonder why so many people of color are incarcerated and so on and so forth.

Sylvia Ortega:

I think, during a time where kids’ brains are growing and they’re constantly in a fight or flight, there’s this red brain, the red part of their brain. Imagine just constantly being in a stress response and just not knowing how to navigate life. You enter a store and you’re constantly in a stress response. You go to school and you’re constantly in a stress response. You come home and you’re constantly in a stress response. How can you build positivity and how can you be able to restore that harm that’s being built to you physically, but also in your brain, right, because your brain is still developing?

Sylvia Ortega:

There’s this really great book called, The Body Keeps the Score, which really talks about just how trauma lives in the body. I think, Mark, you talked about this in your intro, just the medical disorders that come about because of stress that just builds in the body and builds in the brain. I think anywhere from the instance of the stress and when that comes on into adulthood and when people are aging, it’s something that affects everyone just long term.

Mark Berg:

Yeah, and I think with regard to a public health approach or a public policy approach, we can essentially, I think, serve two purposes with significant substantial investment in communities. We can reduce the burden of violence and crime and reduce the mental health and physical health consequences of vicarious and direct exposure. I think there are investments in programs or programs that we can invest in, I think, that don’t involve the law enforcement and aggressive policing, that could prove successful and I do think we can even look to other countries that rely on that approach.

Mark Berg:

Marizen mentioned green spaces. We know in some western European nations, they invest heavily in public spaces and the comfort of public spaces. These are also places where the populations are healthier and people live with less violence and so forth. I think this is an opportunity for us to reap two rewards from substantial investment.

Mark Berg:

One thing I’ve noticed in public spaces, just as a parent as well, people use them. If you build them, people use them and when your kids are interacting with one another, parents are interacting with one another. If parents are concerned about anything, they’re concerned about safety for their children and safe spaces. It would just seem ideal to be able to harness that awareness and turn that into a substantial investment.

Marizen Ramirez:

I just want to add just a few things to think about. One is, as an injury and violence prevention researcher, when the studies of the ACEs, the adverse child experiences, came about in the mid-1990s, it was really the point in which violence, trauma, its visibility was raised because of its connection with chronic health outcomes. We’re talking about events that happened in childhood traumas and they’re now linked to cancer and heart disease and substance use, and of course, later, a lot of experiences of violence. I think that connection is really critical. It took that much to finally put us on the map here, so I think that’s something to think about.

Marizen Ramirez:

Another piece is some of the work that we’re trying to do is look at actual biological measures of toxic stress and so some of that research is coming about in which we’re looking at people who have had trauma and we’re seeing spikes in cortisol that you find in their hair or in saliva that result from chronic exposures to stress. It’s still a mixed bag because what’s interesting is, in people of color, we right now, my research team, we’ve just found that it’s the opposite end, which may be a numbing experience, that these people that have trauma now have depressed cortisol levels. It’s a dysfunction. It’s either super elevated in some groups and then chronically depressed in other groups.

Marizen Ramirez:

Getting back to this issue of what are the outcomes and adverse outcomes, they’re significant. We’re seeing it in chronic health disease later in life. We’re seeing it in even some immediate impacts that show up in the schools, their inability to create or establish relationships and then their behaviors, and in academic performance. I think it’s important. It’s very clear in terms of the life trajectory of youth who experience trauma.

Marizen Ramirez:

Then the last thing to mention, just tagging onto Mark’s comments about prevention, which I think we should be oriented towards, but there’s one area of prevention which I think is really important and as I talk to families of color and we try to understand where is their viewpoint, in speaking to them, it’s about economic development and workforce development. I really, really strongly believe that that’s an area that we in public health should also engage in, the efforts to try to provide them, our communities or brothers and sisters of color, they can’t find jobs. They’re struggling to get food on the table and if we can’t meet those basic needs, how then are we able to move forward towards building community and relationships?

Robyn Espinosa:

Thank you all for those answers. Just a tidbit about my research. I also, like Mark and Marizen, focus on ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, and I found it so interesting that Sylvia and Albert both had the processes down without the actual scientific terminology. You understand because you’re seeing it firsthand what the numbers are telling us, as researchers.

Robyn Espinosa:

Keeping that in mind, this question is, and it’s for Sylvia and Albert, but everyone else can feel free to respond as well, in the Pine Point film, we saw that chronic toxic stress plays a role heavily in the Camden community. How have you seen chronic toxic stress impact your specific community or the communities that you’ve worked in?

Albert Sharp:

One is global pandemic. We’ve seen it every day now. In the black and brown communities, it was taboo to acknowledge that you had mental illness in your household. It was something that we just would not. Go to counseling? I’m not crazy. Now going through this global pandemic, we’ve got actors, sports, entertainers, everybody’s coming out letting the world know it’s okay to let them know that you have some social ills going on.

Albert Sharp:

We almost can be honest with ourselves in this pandemic. We’ve had some mental challenges ourselves, so seeing the chronic stressors in my community is, sad to say, when I do a kiddie college reading program, which is K through third grade and I go and sit in front of five, six, seven-year-olds and I say, “Who knows somebody on drugs,” 90% of the class raise their hands. “Do you know somebody who has been shot in the last month?” 90% of the classroom raises their hands. What really, really hurts is we are so used to these stressors that we became so desensitized, it’s the common in our community.

Albert Sharp:

If you say somebody got shot or if you’ve had three or four long months of winter and the first weekend it gets warm, the first thing we say is, “Somebody going to get shot this weekend because it warmed up.” Those are the chronic stressors that I see all of the time.

Sylvia Ortega:

Yeah, I definitely see very similar stressors. I am a social worker by trade, so I guess I play a pretty interesting role in my job because I not only coordinate some of our programs, but I also am able to provide mental health services for our students. I think, in particular, Albert said COVID really hit our families and students more because they were already at a disadvantaged starting point. Once COVID hit, they were losing jobs. They were losing family members, just to deal with all of that. I was very fortunate that students and families felt comfortable reaching out to me and asking for help and support.

Sylvia Ortega:

I think a lot of what I try to do in my role, and in my life, in general, is really try to destigmatize mental health support. If I’m in therapy, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m talking about this with my therapist.” I normalize it as if I’m like, “Oh, I just went downstairs to the stores to get some milk.” I’m trying to normalize these situations with youth because I think, as they continue to have these conversations with their friends, we’re continuing to destigmatize this as a whole. Mental health is not going to be as taboo as it used to be some years back.

Sylvia Ortega:

I think one thing in particular, especially as it pertains to the documentary, is the ability of just going out to play. I remember one specific moment during this summer when I was working with some students, they were all so excited because the basketball courts were open again. They had been closed for some time and they were like, “Yeah, we’re all going to go out. We’re going to hang out. The basketball courts are finally open.” Just to see that joy in their eyes just because the courts were open again, it really made me recognize how important outdoor spaces are.

Sylvia Ortega:

I think a couple of the panelists have commented on this, the green spaces and what folks area doing in other counties. I feel like if we bring that to this space, we’re going to be able to rehabilitate a lot of the damage that has been done and a lot of the harm that our students have gone through.

Marizen Ramirez:

I just wanted to mention a few things. I’m in Minneapolis and there were a couple of big events that happened here that I think shifted the world. I also live in the community where Philando Castile… I live in St. Anthony, so the police officer who shot Philando Castile was from my community. It occurred about a year before I moved up here. It’s interesting because when I take my walks, I walk by the police department and then about a few blocks from there, there’s this big art mural of Philando Castile. We see also a lot of art that depicts George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Marizen Ramirez:

I think our community is really sensitized to what’s happened. Even I’d say the University of Minnesota is, as well, so there’s a lot of effort right now, finally, it took a while, but there’s now a lot of effort to engage in some training around implicit bias and racism. I still hear it. It’s interesting. I hear from white men that just feel like this is really difficult to engage in these kinds of conversations in training in that space.

Marizen Ramirez:

What I’m seeing now is a community that has been impacted. I see some efforts to try to engage in some cultural humility training and movement in terms of dismantling some of the systemic racism that’s pretty deep seated. Then I see other communities that are struggling and pushing back against this and not truly understanding what’s been happening. I think we see that throughout the country. You turn on the news and it’s there. It still continues despite what we know and what we see.

Chelsea Hicks:

I think a lot that has recently been said ties in with some of the work that I do. I study disasters and trends in violence in black communities and understanding social vulnerability. I feel like what we see, which is the pandemic, which classifies as a disaster and puts a stressor on communities, just the same as we see the racial tension and the struggle and the different things that communities are going through with these compounding effects of already existing vulnerabilities. It’s really important that the hard conversations are had.

Chelsea Hicks:

I feel like, for far too long, we’ve had communities of color be uncomfortable in trying to appease everyone so everyone feels happy versus I think now it’s time for everyone to feel a little uncomfortable so that we can have the conversations that need to be had so change can actually happen. With that being said, thank you for the response that you all have said so far.

Chelsea Hicks:

We would like to open up questions to the audience. You can just drop your questions down in the Q&A and we’ll provide those questions to the panelists. Please drop those questions in and we will ask them straight away, but we also have other questions we can start with, too. We can start with one that we have prepared. What opportunities do you see in the community to build resilience or prevention or diversion programs? Speak to that.

Albert Sharp:

One of the opportunities that we utilize with Invisible Book Bag is we sponsor sports camps, and they’re not your traditional camps. The coaches that I have to work the camps go through a two-week training on how to teach life skills because we use sports as the hook to get the kids there, but teaching them to become men is a lifetime. We take the opportunity to sit them down before they even touch a ball, whatever group they’re assigned to, and just ask them general questions. If you weren’t here today, what would you being doing? That would generate conversations.

Albert Sharp:

I ain’t going to tell my age, but there’s somebody on your panel who was a little girl who attended the camp a long, long time ago. Couldn’t shoot a layup to save her life, but she was the smartest one in her group because her dreams were bigger than the camp. They were bigger than the camp, and not to say that she wasn’t getting that wholesome holistic approach at home, but this environment that she was in allowed her to learn how to talk in front of her peers, to feel comfortable about herself.

Albert Sharp:

Those are the little things that we take for granted. She learned how to stand up in front of a group and be like, “Such-and-such and such-and-such, and I’m going to be such-and-such, such-and-such.” Our camps are geared toward empowerment, civic engagement and they’re all free. The only thing you have to bring is a copy of your grades from school and be willing to do a civic engagement project. Our civic engagement project is to go back and do something in your community, to give back to the community.

Albert Sharp:

After the George Floyd killing, or murder, they tore Chicago up. There was places in the city that I got the kids together that were in the camp and we literally went and cleaned up the blocks to make them take ownership for their neighborhood and to show the people that we’re not the problem. We’re actually a small sample size of the solution.

Marizen Ramirez:

I just wanted to build off that, Albert. It’s really beautiful to hear how we want to be solution oriented, and I would say strengths-based, taking a strengths-based approach, which there is such beauty and strength in our communities as well. I remember working at Campton, Kentucky, with kids of color who had to deal with the violence that was occurring in their communities, the shootings. This young high school girl said, “I’m never going to leave Compton. I love Compton. This is my home. This is my community, and I’ve got my family here and they’ve got my back, and I’ve got my girls here and they’ve got my back.”

Marizen Ramirez:

You see that, even in Pine Point. People, with what they’ve experienced, they just thought Brian Martin had that commitment to his community that was just incredible and he brought in the other coaches together to really commit to the betterment of the young boys and young girls who were in Camden. I think that that resilience should come from, really, ultimately, the community themselves and finding their strengths and engaging them in solutions.

Marizen Ramirez:

We can come in as researchers and say, “Hey, we’ve got the best program in the world. We’ve got the science that shows that it’s all doing really good. It’s going to work for you all.” The answer is it’s not unless it’s tailored and it engages people to come up with their own solutions.

Marizen Ramirez:

I’m going to say one thing. I came into Minnesota to bring the Link program from Iowa there, and we’re working with equity people in communities of color. They said, “We don’t like to be labeled to have trauma, so don’t use that word with our community. Trauma gives us a bad rap.” We really had to just step back and say, “Okay, how do we talk about this in a way that’s respectful, that’s humble, that’s aware of that perspective. I think that we, as researchers, come in and we’re like, “Okay, we can use our terms.” Those terms may not be exactly what our community members want and need, so engagement is key.

Robyn Espinosa:

Thank you for those responses. In my defense, I can do a layup now. It’s been a long time. One of the questions we have from the audience is how can non-black, indigenous people of color be involved in the efforts to build trust, provide opportunities, bring people together? Do the interventions have to happen within those communities or can they happen between communities?

Albert Sharp:

Yes, it can happen between communities. Being able to take kids to different communities and show them the different ways and also bring those kids from that community into the inner city lets them learn. It’s a learning process. It’s a give and take. I would recommend anybody that wants to help to reach out. There’s groups. There’s always volunteering that you can just go in and help out with.

Albert Sharp:

Most of the social services agencies on the West Side are connected to suburban social services and have linkage agreements. When they come in and maybe have a day where they paint the building or sit down and be part of a mentoring group, it allows you to grow the community as well as help that individual understand where they are. It’s easy for me to tell you what I’ve been through, but you really don’t understand it unless you took a couple of steps in my shoes.

Albert Sharp:

Then you start to really understand, “Wow, it’s hard waking up every morning and not knowing where your next meal is going to be coming from. Wow, it’s really extremely hard going to sleep at night when you’re afraid that Mommy’s boyfriend might come and make you his girlfriend.” It’s really hard to get people to understand that until they actually can open their heart and open their ears and become almost like a sponge and absorb what’s going on.

Robyn Espinosa:

I just want to add something to what Albert said. Really, any community, you can look at statistics for neighborhoods and communities down to the zip code. I know for a fact in Chicago, those people who leave the county jail or the prisons, they return to a handful of zip codes in the city. You can track it down to blocks and just small neighborhood areas. If you neighbor those kinds of communities, there’s always an opportunity, like he said, to reach out to organizations who are doing work, and if you have resources that can be shared, you can share those across those lines easily and right there, swing those over to your opportunities. A lot of the times, those concentrated disparities happen within those neighborhoods, so as Sylvia mentioned earlier, you’ll see poverty and violence and trauma that just keeps cycling through the generations. That’s another opportunity. Any other panelists, please feel free to add.

Marizen Ramirez:

I’m going to say that it’s about authentic partnerships, being authentic. We’ve dealt with this up in a Native American tribe that we’re working with right now. My trainer’s a white middle-aged man. He’s got to train on these concepts of building partnerships in trauma. He’s been honest, “This is difficult for me. This is challenging and I’m here to learn with you.”

Marizen Ramirez:

I think it’s just being honest, being authentic, understanding what cultural humility means and it’s community engaged partnerships. Some of our work, we do have representatives from the community that help us determine what are the appropriate steps we need to take to work with our communities. If we’re engaging them in the research, we want to have representation of their community voice. They may not even be a person of color. They just need to come from that community to help guide us.

Sylvia Ortega:

To just add to that a little bit, I think also, in terms of that cultural humility, it also comes in recognizing your privileges and when you come into a space, checking that at the door, recognizing also that privilege is not just you’re black, you’re white. It’s way deeper than that. It’s about access, educational, and all that.

Sylvia Ortega:

I think that when you’re able to come into a space and have that baseline and just recognizing the privileges you come in, then you’re able to build trust. You’re able to keep an open eye. I think not putting the onus on people to educate you, but you do as much education and as much research as you possibly can, because when we put the onus on others, then we’re continuing, in a way, to retraumatize them because now it’s their job to teach you and educate you and that’s what they’ve been doing their whole entire life, for generations and generations. I definitely think that that’s a big inference piece as well.

Chelsea Hicks:

We have another question from the audience. There are a lot of great programs in communities for kids but then often these kids go home to environments that are stressed and the work that’s done in these programs falls apart for these students. How can we engage families who are already doing the best they can? What can we do to support families and strengthen communities?

Albert Sharp:

That’s a great question, and I say that because a lot of times, our parents can’t be involved in the program because they have to work. It’s extremely hard to get them to pick up the kids’ report cards at report cared pickup. They look at it this way. If I put my kid in your program, I’m not asking you to raise them. I’m asking you to be a supplementary parent, so if you’re doing the parenting work, I ain’t got to come to the program.

Albert Sharp:

If we offer a stipend or we’re going to have some food, let’s be honest, chances are they’re going to show up, but voluntarily, it’s extremely hard to get the parents involved. It’s almost like you have to tell them when they’re signing the permission slip for the kids that the kids cannot be in the program unless you mandatory do a, b and c. If you don’t make that perfectly clear at the beginning, participation from the parents is really, really low and all you can do is hope that whatever you instill in those kids for those couple of hours you have them, that they take one thing from that because you’ve only got them two hours. They’re in a dysfunctional situation for 22 hours. That’s how you have to look at it.

Sylvia Ortega:

I’ll just add, and we’re playing mute tag, that one thing I totally agree with what Albert said and one thing that we do at BEAM, one thing that we’re starting is family committees and parent committees. It’s a small tiny step but even just showing parents, yes, we’re here for your students but we’re also here for you because we recognize that things are systemic and they’re familial.

Sylvia Ortega:

If your programs are able to add a family committee or if you’re able to have parent volunteers come and act as a liaison for other parents, things like that, even things as simple as translating documents and paperwork to languages of the families that you offer services to, I think that can really go a long way. It’s letting them know that I see you, I honor you and I want you to be involved to help because, like Albert said, we’re not here to parent your kids, but we can help be a mentor and a guide and with that, we can provide you resources so you can do it as well.

Marizen Ramirez:

Yeah, Sylvia and I were playing mute tag. Yeah, honestly, it’s like asking them what they need and I see Lisa Roth here. I remember when we did some of our work with families whose kids were hospitalized and trying to provide some trauma and care support. We were trying to figure out how can we get people to come to a focus group. We realized, well, we need to get a babysitter. We planned for that. We had babysitting. We had the funding for transportation and we wanted it to be enough to cover what might be even some work loss that needed to be considered.

Marizen Ramirez:

In the work that I’m doing with schools, we’re actually giving a portion of our grant to every school district that works with us and we’re trying to hire within the communities so that they adequately represent what might be the needs of their particular community. I think there are some strategies that could work. Again, it’s building that authentic relationship, being honest about asking and then putting every effort forward to try to respond to what might be some needs for families that really are struggling to even just get food on the table.

Chelsea Hicks:

Thank you, everyone, for your responses, for your thoughtful responses. It’s really an important conversation that needs to be had and this is just the start, right? This is just the beginning of that. In order to keep track of time, this is our final question and so maybe you have the first response that comes to mind to this kind of question, but what gives you hope. There’s a lot of work that you do that is very heavy on most days, so what gives you hope to keep doing the work that you’re doing?

Sylvia Ortega:

For me, definitely my students give me hope. I’ve been working with students since I was 15 years old so I’ve always worked with young people. I think their passion and their desire to just build a greater resilience is just something that I… I don’t know. I look at myself back when I was younger and I’m like, “I don’t think I had the passion and the resilience.” I think most importantly, people like Mr. Martin, who was the main coach for the baseball team, these thought leaders and trail blazers, just their ability and their passion to go into these communities and say, “I know what it’s like and I want to just rewrite the narrative to be able to allow students and future young people to just be their greatest selves and add more to their communities.” That’s what give me hope and I hope that more and more people can come up and show up in those ways.

Chelsea Hicks:

Whoever wants to go next?

Mark Berg:

I can jump in. What gives me hope, as a researcher, is that there appears to be a strong interdisciplinary interest across the medical sciences, the biological sciences, social sciences, in the social determinants of health in the long term consequences of violence and stress exposures on health and wellbeing. With that, there’s also a strong interest among practitioners in using this research as a platform by which to develop policies and to draw the attention of people who can allocate resources to develop programs that might bring about improvements.

Mark Berg:

I’ve seen this the past few years here on campus and elsewhere and it gives me a lot of hope that we are thinking very carefully about the ways the environment comes to affect children and ultimately, how that affects their ability to be good citizens and so forth.

Marizen Ramirez:

What gives me hope? I’m a community engaged researcher. I’ve developed into that, so it’s the community that gives me hope. It’s the kids, the teachers, the families, especially when they’re really excited about the work that we do. In many ways, I feel like I’m a service researcher. Is that even something? That’s what I feel like my calling is.

Marizen Ramirez:

I’m going to say that as we’ve built interventions to support families, the best interventions that we’ve developed are those that have come through partnerships with the people in the communities that are serving as interventionists, that are the trainers. One woman out of the Tribal Region of Northern Minnesota said, “The best intervention we can provide to children, as adults and as teachers, is our own regulated nervous system.” I’ll add into that in a community that engages.

Robyn Espinosa:

Albert, do you want to add quickly?

Albert Sharp:

Yes, what gives me hope is seeing the dialogue that has taken place here, knowing that there’s people within the community that still believe in hope of changing things. Listening to middle school kids now thinking about college as opposed to I might not make it past 14, that’s hope.

Albert Sharp:

Thinking about the opportunities that we have now because the global pandemic has made a paradigm shift worldwide. Everybody thinking has went from right to left now and we see the many shortcomings that we have. Now is the chance to jump on those opportunities, continue teaching and hopefully, bring some stability within our community.

Robyn Espinosa:

Well, first to the panelists, thank you so much for participating in this amazing conversation and for all the work that you are doing to make a change in the lives of youth and in the community that we are all in. I want to also thank the audience for attending and asking such great questions as well as the DEI Committee and the Injury Prevention Research Center for hosting this event. I want to be respectful. We went overtime a little bit, and thank you to all the attendees.

Steve Sonnier:

That’s it for our show today. A big thanks to Chelsea Hicks and Robyn Espinosa for putting on this exciting event today. This episode was edited and produced by Stevland Sonnier. You can find more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook.

Steve Sonnier:

Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apply Podcast and SoundCloud as the University of Iowa College of Public Health. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your colleagues. Our team can be reached at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Keep on keeping on out there.