George Gund

Sometimes you have to try everything because everything is connected.

Our current challenges are overwhelming: the threat of world war, climate disaster, and civil war. While growing up I often heard the phrase, “we’re going to hell in a handbasket.” The phrase is actually not a metaphor—as nearly 200 years ago, men were lowered by baskets into mines to set explosives. Today, the premonition rings through my ears on repeat due to the harsh realities of climate change. Still, not a metaphor.

So, what to do? What would U do? What Would Urvashi Do?

My dear friend Urvashi Vaid passed away in May. She taught me, and thousands of others, to try everything because she did just that. Her actions—always produced through a queer and racial justice lens—were constant, targeted, creative, diverse, radical, brilliant, big, and small. As our co-conspirator, Ivy Young, once said, “Urvashi was always motivated by love for people who deserve better than they have.” Ivy’s words still resonate with me thirty-five years later. Back then, we were fresher and less weathered by experience. We have gained and lost so much along the way: ground, dreams, skills, responsibilities, vision, pounds, easy breathing, wisdom, lovers, Urvashi.

 

Urvashi cast a wide net. She built some institutions and organizations, and she tore some down. She was both a lawyer and a street activist. She was a philanthropist at the Ford and Arcus Foundations, and started the Donors of Color network. She was passionate. She yelled, she demanded, and she cajoled. Urvashi partnered with elected officials and also protested against them. She co-founded the Lesbian Political Action Committee and the American LGBTQ+ Museum of History and Culture in New York City. She was often angry and usually delightful (mostly at the same time). She was tireless. She never settled. She tried everything.

Since Urvashi was a writer, she left us a road map back in 1995 called “Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation.” Basic questions: equal to what and to what end? “Virtual equality” is when “we” act like “you/the mainstream,” meaning that anyone who is not centered in this society has to conform to be accepted. In this context, acceptance–unfortunately–means sacrificing your own community, having to denounce other “others,” and repressing your history, experiences and feelings for people who may not share them. Today, it is the current overwhelming “inclusion” efforts that are not transformative. Such efforts will not take us to safety and love, which we all deserve. All of us. It takes vision, an artist, and art. We are not after virtual equality; we are after freedom.

The photographer, artist, and justice-seeker, Dannielle Bowman, took on this year’s Gund Foundation Photography Commission. Like Urvashi, Dannielle pays close attention when she focuses not only on the City of Cleveland but on how Clevelanders live with the reality of climate change. Same society, very different experiences, including the difference in agency and autonomy to make choices. Dannielle has chosen to see difference, to see that environmental justice leaders in this region are overwhelmingly people of color. She has chosen to see differently and to be generous with that vision. Dannielle keeps her mind and her heart open to learning—not knowing what she doesn’t know, nor speaking for—but standing with the people in her photographs, living her life in the same place as those she is photographing. And since, like everything else, climate change affects us all differently, it follows that those closest to the problems are closest to the solutions, taking leadership where they are planted.

 

Dannielle and the Gund Foundation frame our environmental work as justice, so we prioritize basic issues of equality and equity when we see disparities, differences, challenges, and the path forward to fight climate change. This reminds me of a scene in the remarkable TV series “Atlanta” when Darius goes to a shooting range. Instead of a person, the target he shoots at is the silhouette of a dog. Two white men accost him, judging his decision to shoot at an animal, “You can’t shoot dogs. What are you, a psycho?” Darius responds, “But why would I shoot a human?” As Darius is led out of the shooting range at gunpoint, the guys inside continue to  train their sights on silhouettes of people, obliterating their humanity.

The climate crisis negatively affects BIPOC people at a radically disproportionate rate and yet mainstream environmental activists and the media continue to prioritize stranded polar bears on melting ice caps rather than understanding how that reality is connected to flooding and land erosion that leads to the loss of homes for people. The media highlights animals over people losing lung capacity to asthma, brain function due to lead exposure, and heart health due to living in food deserts as if all of these factors are not subject to the same climate realities in a fully connected system. What do you see? Who do you follow? Who is in your center?  Where does your seeing stop? We are after a more expansive seeing, one that is more connected. 

To address the climate crisis, philanthropists—like artists, activists, advocates, all of us—must make the connections between climate justice and economic development, housing stability, healthcare, and education. At the Gund Foundation, we have made deep investments that demonstrate vivid overlap among these program areas. For example, our grants to Growth Opportunity Partners model the efficacy of community solar: solar installers are working in neighborhoods to build assets that reduce energy costs, transform vacant lots, and add new clean energy jobs. Our grantee partner, Greater Ohio Policy Center, advocates for increases in transit funding at the state level to ensure that Clevelanders who do not own a car can get to and from work, medical appointments, and the grocery store.

 

Now, one of the country’s oldest urban public housing sites, Lakeview Terrace, is poised to connect directly to the parks and greenspaces that Ohio City Incorporated, LAND studio, and West Creek Conservancy are creating in Cleveland: places like Irish Town Bend and Lake Link Trail. Environmental Health Watch’s Healthy Homes program works to remediate home health hazards that can contribute to conditions such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, and lead poisoning. And, Bike Cleveland has worked to make Cleveland’s streets safer for bikes and pedestrians, carving secure routes to school for students citywide.

Dannielle photographed many of the people who are showing us the way out of the climate crisis—not the organizations, not even the issues—just the people, living their transformative lives. Like Urvashi and Dannielle, philanthropy must try everything because everything is related. We must follow the leaders to a safe, fair, and healthy future. Connectivity is slow and local and painstaking. The work, and those of us engaged in it, can be full of doubt, but it is the only direction to go, to the gathering of a shared tomorrow.

 

Catherine Gund
Chair

In the U.S. and internationally, a set of mostly small, community-based groups is quietly undertaking new approaches to philanthropy that put power directly in the hands of people with the kind of lived experiences essential to making wiser decisions about who gets funds and under what criteria. From giving circles to crowdfunding to participatory grantmaking, the common lesson we are learning from these experiments is that trust-based grantmaking is an essential approach to strengthening communities and working for durable change. They all rest on an idea, often credited to author Stephen Covey and applied to social movements by poet and organizer Adrienne Maree Brown, that “change moves at the speed of trust.”

Not only do these practices recognize the opportunity created by shifting power and deepening trust, they also challenge and dismantle the notion that people with money know best how to spend it. This myth—that wealth and whiteness equate to wisdom—is a foundation of foundations.

Earlier this year, during a talk with the City Club, I spoke about philanthropy as “a debt that is owed to society.” I mean this literally. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues in her recent book on predatory real estate practices, discrimination and racialized economic inequity across the country and in Cleveland are a direct result of cynical and exploitative public-private partnerships that benefited the elite few at the expense of entire communities of people working hard to enter the so-called middle class. This signals to us that in our imaginings, the colossal—and widening—wealth gaps in Cleveland will persist unless we keep racial justice at the top of our agenda and distribute money through our grantmaking like we are paying our debt. (Yes, this is also the dialect of reparations.) Money is not generated by an individual; it is created collectively. The Foundation’s wealth belongs not to my grandfather or his descendants but to the much broader community.

 

I believe a big step to repair the harm of extraction—amassing great wealth at someone else’s expense—is to address constitutional philanthropic fragility. This fragility parallels white fragility: a group with privilege and power refusing to reflect on how history and power dynamics perpetuate the inequality from which they comfortably benefit. The word “fragility” comes from the Latin fragilitatem meaning “brittle, easily broken.” Brittle materials absorb relatively little energy—they are isolated from vital resources and the life-giving exchanges of nourishment that keep an organism healthy. At the center of philanthropy’s fragility is perhaps a similar lack of porousness, a resistance to a critical exchange of ideas based in the need to maintain power.

Perhaps nothing in the natural world illustrates this as well as the Pando Forest in a corner of Utah’s Fishlake National Forest. Thousands of genetically identical quaking aspen trees are united through a massive, shared underground root structure; the roughly 13 million pounds of biomass survives collaboratively by exchanging and widely distributing the resources it collects from the sun, air, and soil. I believe that Cleveland’s future similarly depends on this type of critical exchange. Our ability as a foundation to contribute to a just Cleveland requires that we dissolve brittle, inflexible relational dynamics between the Foundation and the people who live in this city—the people who are leading from the roots.

What issues of consequence can be addressed by any foundation acting alone? None. If fragility is a symptom of our failure to recognize our connectivity, then there’s only one way forward: through collaboration. Collaboration demands porousness that leads to the exchange of ideas as well as the ability to hear and accept criticism. Collaboration requires that we honor our connectivity through trust. Visionary examples of this kind of collaboration within philanthropy include: the Greater Cleveland COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund, the Ohio Transformation Fund, the much older Fund for Our Economic Future, and the new, game-changing Ohio Climate Justice Fund. These philanthropic innovations were made possible because a group of people said “Yes!” to incorporating community feedback and focused on breaking down barriers to delivering immediate, impactful action.

The Foundation’s vision of justice, one that delivers security of health, wealth, and mobility, is not only within reach but is the right application of the knowledge we’ve acquired in the last year. The pandemic exposed too many severe fault lines and rot in our country’s infrastructure—a woefully inadequate public health system; grotesque inequities across race, class and gender; the portion of elected officials and citizens who will use science and evidence to make critically important public choices and those who will not; the proportion of the country that believes that government can and should act to address the pressing issues we face relative to those with a deep suspicion that it should not and cannot. And so forth. At the Gund Foundation, we’re asking: How can philanthropy help heal these fault lines and contribute resolutions to the urgent challenges we face that are just and equitable?

 

“Our ability to contribute to a just Cleveland requires that we dissolve brittle, inflexible relational dynamics between the Foundation and the people who live in this city.”

We’re committing ourselves to making the Gund Foundation a liberated space in which we create this kind of healing, forward motion together—from acknowledging how systemic racism shaped our city, to enshrining anti-racist practices at every level of our work. To challenge the status quo of wealth and whiteness, we must cultivate a shared vision of abolition with the energetic people organizing Cleveland’s most strategic, sustainable and transformative work. For us, this includes aligning investments with long-term, mission-focused work.

Poet Adrienne Rich, in her work “What Kinds of Times Are These,” responds to a question, posed by playwright Bertolt Brecht about the pains of living in a nation of conflict. Reframing our landscapes of possibility, both politically and socially, Rich prods readers to consider the sources of our discomfort and our nourishment.

so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen,
because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

 

Artists, like Rich and this year’s Gund Foundation annual report photographer Brian Palmer, help us see a different future. To really bring about collective healing, we have to look at the enduring problem of economic inequality with the artist’s approach: first, be porous; listen to the world. Next, interrogate and educate our intuition. Ask ourselves, like the aspen trees, what nourishment serves our collective growth. And, eventually, imagine together something that wasn’t there before. This is our devotional act for the city: reimagining justice starting at our shared roots.

 

Catherine Gund
Chair

 

I’m at least as much a journalist as I am an artist. Most folks would say I’m more of the former than the latter.

I’m also the son of parents who endured a familiar strain of American racism—that of white against Black—systemic and personal. Edith, my mom, born in 1936, attended integrated public schools in Queens, NY, but confronted bigotry as she pursued a career in teaching in Long Island and New York City. She was the “first Black” in many positions, and she has both scars and wisdom from these experiences.

Eddie, my dad, born in 1928, never recovered from the government’s seizure of his family’s land in York County, VA, in 1943 to build a Seabee training base. His entire majority-Black community was dispossessed. Resettlement options open to whites were closed to Blacks because of Jim Crow. My father, the grandson of enslaved people who in freedom helped found the village where he was born—and from which he was evicted—served during the Korean War just two years after President Truman’s desegregation order. While stationed in Germany, Eddie fought no battles with Germans, but many against racist white soldiers from the Deep South who resented him—his sergeant’s stripes, his ability to speak a smattering of German, and his popularity with the local (white) ladies. He came home to the same Jim Crow–sick nation in 1952.

My parents passed on this history to me and my sister—my father with a bone-deep bitterness; my mother with caution, weariness, and an iota or two of hope for a better future for her children. They sensitized me to racial prejudice and white supremacist attitudes, even before I had a name for these perceived forces and threats. I wake up each day knowing that my mere Black presence will frighten or offend some non-Black person. It happens in Richmond, in New York, in Cleveland—all cities with plenty of Black folk—when I enter spaces not typically frequented by Black people. Are my reactions perceptions or misperceptions? Sometimes it’s crystal clear, sometimes not. The point is, not thinking about race is a luxury I don’t have.

For me, American democracy is more of a promise, too often broken when made to people of color, than a lived reality—or a real possibility. In some places it seems unattainable. I felt this keenly in Cleveland and about Cleveland. On paper/in pixels, the city’s poverty rate is staggering. The poverty rate among African Americans is even more shocking. Many times a day, I ask myself questions that may seem basic, but that clearly have not been answered, in Cleveland or anywhere else: How can such privation and deprivation exist in this rich nation with its rhetoric of equal opportunity? Why do racially discriminatory systems, patterns, and practices endure?

 

“American democracy is more of a promise, too often broken when made to people of color, than a lived reality—or a real possibility.”

These photos are expressions of my anger, cynicism, hope, and so many other feelings about the opportunities available to Black people in this democracy, this nation that still cannot fully contend with its ugly past; where so many white citizens are wedded to myths and delusions of white supremacy that are toxic to the physical and mental health of people of color, and to the health of our country. I worried—and still worry—that my photos would be too depressing, too dispiriting.

 

I visited Cleveland three times. COVID-19 was a factor, a presence on all of these trips and had a profound effect on how I made photos—mostly from a distance. In October 2020, I visited during early voting in a presidential election that pitted the incumbent, our nation’s most antidemocratic and racist president in modern times, against a sane, if uninspiring, politician who was human. Along with many millions of others, I was terrified that my countrypeople would keep him in office despite his demonstrable and toxic antipathy to people like me and those I love—Black, Muslim, Latinx, unrich, queer, etc. It was a scary time. Nineteen-year-old Vincent Belmonte was killed by police in East Cleveland my first day in town in January 2021. The January 6 insurrection happened the day after. During my third stay, Daunte Wright was shot and killed by police in Brooklyn Center, MN. I am embarrassed to write that the details of his killing, so clear at the time, are now hazy. Wright’s story blends with those of the other African Americans whose lives were taken by law enforcement officers.

In spite of the awfulness I describe above, I found hope and affirmation from the folks at University Settlement, Famicos, Twelve Literary Arts, Kirk Middle School, Shaw High School—and even the folks at the Garfield Heights Funeral Home. They were doing what they do every day, serving their community. Proudly. To me, they are the bulwarks of our creaky democracy, the folks who grind through obstacles—structural, situational, whatever—to get things done for those around them.

 

My faith is in them, their dedication, tenacity, patience—and their palpable achievements. By documenting these people and the work they do I hope to convey my hope that democracy will be realized by and for the people now trapped at its margins.

 

Brian Palmer
Journalist & Photographer

When I was the age my children are now, the AIDS epidemic had just started to rage. My friends, roommates, girlfriends and I fought every day for more research and education, less stigma and hatred, more love and care. Through our shared activism with New York City’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), I was spending intense, often desperate, always significant days with my dear friend Charlie Barber. It was too early to even dare to imagine a time of effective treatments, of living full lives, of raising families, and so, in many ways, I stopped planning for a future. At that time, beloved scholar and community activist Kathy Barber, Charlie’s mother, was on the board of the Gund Foundation where she served for 19 years. We lost Charlie in 1992. Four years later, championed by Kathy, I was invited to become the first third-generation family member on the board of the Foundation, and in some ways, the opportunity to serve helped crystalize for me that I needed to allow myself to once again imagine and work toward a better future.

As I write this letter from home quarantine, the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racism raging all around us, it is helpful for me to reflect on those days when everything seemed so uncertain as well as on the leadership of other women who, when moments demanded it, stepped forward. While I may be the first woman Chair of the Foundation, women have always been critical to its success, from community organizers in Cleveland, to those whose dedication made the more prominent work of others possible, to those on our board and staff. I draw strength from this ongoing legacy.

 

“The opportunity to serve helped crystalize for me that I needed to allow myself to once again imagine and work toward a better future.”

Eliza Bryant started a nursing home for African American women in Cleveland in 1897 after witnessing formerly enslaved people, like her own mother, migrate north only to be shut out of white nursing homes. Annie Perkins wore men’s clothing and cropped her hair short in the 1880s so she could fulfill the critical democratic duty of distributing newspapers for The Cleveland Press. Henrietta Givens cooked and cleaned in George Gund’s Cleveland home from the 1930s through the 1950s, feeding and tending to my mother and her siblings. Jessica Roelser Gund, my mother’s mother, birthed and raised six children while also serving on the boards of the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Women’s Committee of the Cleveland Playhouse, and the Gund Foundation as one its three original trustees. Jessica led the Foundation with George, not behind him.

For more than 20 years I’ve served on the Foundation board, along with my aunts, Lulie and Ann Gund, who collectively have served over 45 years, and Cleveland community members like Kathy, Robyn Minter Smyers, Cathy Lewis, Marge Carlson, and, most recently, Margaret Bernstein. I have also spent the last two decades recruiting other third-generation family members and there are now six of us, including five women.

The current staff of the Foundation includes a phenomenal team of women: Jennifer Coleman, Maya Curtis, Marcia Egbert, Cynthia Gasparro, Paula Kampf, Jessica May, Ann Mullin, and Alecia Pretel. This year the Foundation welcomed Alesha Washington as the Program Director for Vibrant Neighborhoods and Inclusive Economy. In her critical and timely role, Alesha, who began as a Gund Foundation Fellow 13 years ago, now leads our work to strengthen democracy building and civic engagement strategies. These women not only keep the Foundation running, but are enacting change in communities throughout Cleveland, regionally, and nationally.

Since its inception in 1952, the Foundation has awarded $775 million in grants leading to many tangible manifestations of our commitment to use the power of localized funding to leverage community knowledge and organizing for sustainable impact. It also feels important to me to recognize all of the women I have named because despite the tremendous achievements we trumpet, the Foundation has not been exempt from the consolidation of power in the hands of (white) men and the denial of full partnership with women that is a hallmark of patriarchal institutions.

Our world, now riveted by the uprisings in response to police brutality and systemic racism, similarly reflects this all too common myopia. The cold-blooded murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis was the spark, but women have also long been subjected to relentless, state-sanctioned violence. Breonna Taylor’s killing in Louisville is just one recent example that is, appropriately, receiving more attention, but far less publicized are the police killings of 23 trans women so far this year. Black Lives Matter, the movement that has spread a straightforward and powerful statement across the globe, including on all of the basketball courts in the NBA’s COVID-19 “bubble,” was created in 2013 by three women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Tens of millions have taken to the streets in protest this summer, but few could name the movement’s founders or know that they are women.

In this context, I want to express gratitude to the women who are responsible for the direct care of our fellow citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic, and who are bravely stepping up to protect our communities. Around the world, the majority of responders on the frontlines of the coronavirus fight are women. According to the World Health Organization, women make up seven out of ten health and social care workers globally and contribute $3 trillion annually to global health, half as unpaid labor. Rarely are these women given the recognition they deserve. Rarely are the systems that cause inequality confronted. I’d like to change that—both in regard to the women leading the charge worldwide during these moments of crisis and the women directing philanthropic action at home, including here at the Foundation.

In February, I opened my first board meeting as chair by reading the Foundation’s 68-year-old mission statement aloud:

 

The George Gund Foundation was established in 1952 as a private, nonprofit institution with the sole purpose of contributing to human well-being and the progress of society. Over the years, program objectives and emphases have been modified to meet the changing opportunities and problems of our society, but the Foundation’s basic goal of advancing human welfare remains constant.

My intent was to ground our work in the words that Jessica and George (and George’s mother Anna, the third trustee) drafted decades ago to guide the choreography of the Foundation’s grantmaking, but also to remind us that a mission is not a static thing. Like the photography presented in these pages, the mission is meant to ignite feeling and spur action, engaging with and adapting to the ever-changing challenges and opportunities in our communities.

Our annual report this year contains work that is close to my heart. Photographer Deana Lawson created these direct, intimate and excruciatingly human images, her photography echoing the unique boldness of each of the Foundation’s recent grantee partners. She captures women who urge us to ask a pivotal question: What does a better world look like through her eyes? This question will guide my own work as Chair of the Foundation. Both asking this question and responding to it are fundamental to achieving gender equity, globally and locally.

 

Examples of this approach include the Foundation’s grants to Birthing Beautiful Communities, a nonprofit that supports pregnant women to deliver full-term healthy babies in the face of a society that fails to protect both the women and the babies. We have also invested in Better Health Partnership to connect expectant mothers and their infants with community supports that are systematically withheld from them. And we’ve partnered with Neighborhood Family Practice, an organization that operates a doula program to serve neighborhoods on Cleveland’s west side who are denied access to high-quality health care.

One of our most significant recent grants is a $1 million contribution to PRE4CLE, Cleveland’s expansive preschool program. In addition to aligning with the Foundation’s long-term commitment to equity and excellence in Cleveland’s public schools, the grant honors my Aunt Lulie, who passed in March of this year, and her steadfast support of early childhood education. For 21 years, Lulie devoted herself to the Foundation and to expanding access to high-quality preschool education for children in Cleveland. Our recent grant created the Llura Gund Early Learning Fund, which will focus on revitalizing the facilities of many of Cleveland’s preschools.

 

 

Moving forward, our lives, our roles in our communities, and our philanthropic work, will inevitably be shaped by the prolonged twin crises of this unique year. Over the past five months, as COVID-19 and a growing movement for racial justice exposed systematic and systemic injury to the very lives of already strained Black and Latinx communities, countless individuals, community-based organizations, agencies, foundations and companies have nimbly pivoted operations to redirect their efforts and add their voices to calls for change. It is in moments like these that we must urgently consider the duty of our power and the implications of these surges of empathy and generosity for those of us who strive to build more effective philanthropic action.

 

 

“It is in moments like these that we must urgently consider the duty of our power and the implications of these surges of empathy and generosity for those of us who strive to build more effective philanthropic action.”

The grantees described in this report exemplify how the Foundation has increasingly invested in organizations directed by those most impacted by systemic oppression with the aim of sustaining empowered community leaders who are working to respond strategically to today’s urgent challenges. To tackle criminal justice reform, housing insecurity, education inequality, health care fissures and more, we need to be more disruptive grantmakers. We need to give with more flexibility and longevity, adjust deadlines, convert project support into general operating support, prioritize grantmaking strategies that align with local and national advocacy efforts, and back both the direct action of visionary grassroots organizers and forward-thinking policymakers. We cannot squander this moment of reckoning and its possibilities for real reconciliation and transformation.

The roar of our voices—organizers, philanthropists, mothers, voters, artists, leaders, and more—is building towards a crescendo in 2020. It’s a vitally important election year. It’s the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. It’s also the 100th commemoration of the League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland. There is no time like the present to make ourselves visible and have our voices heard loud and clear. In this painful yet truthful moment, imagination is more necessary than ever to pull us forward together. So, today I write with hope for a future that is more collaborative and more local, more intersectional, definitely more female, and, in every aspect of our lives, more just for all.

 

Catherine Gund
Chair

 

In this wildly unsettled time, what does it take to decide to bring a child into the world? Love? Faith? Hope? Courage? Mere biology? Perhaps all of those, but sometimes it also takes help.

It almost has become trite to observe that it takes a village to raise a child. It is not noted often enough, however, that sometimes the village also is needed to successfully birth children.

In Cuyahoga County, the infant mortality rate among African American women is nearly four times that for white women. A remarkable organization—Birthing Beautiful Communities (BBC)—began working in 2014 to address this disparity by providing perinatal birth supports to Black women. BBC’s trained specialists—called doulas—provide physical and emotional support, education, advocacy and community engagement as they work to overcome the effects on birth of poverty, limited opportunity and proximity to violence—all of which contribute to the toxic stress that is central to the infant mortality crisis among Black women. Numerous scientific trials have demonstrated that doulas greatly improve physical and psychological outcomes for both mother and baby.

Deana Lawson, an acclaimed artist who has been widely exhibited, turned her camera lens on the work of BBC for the photographic essay featured this year on our website. Lawson portrays the mothers, children, fathers and doulas who BBC brings together to save lives through early intervention.

 

 

“For pragmatic reasons alone, the pandemic should force us to take a fresh look at virtually every system and way of doing things.” 

Birthing Beautiful Communities has grown rapidly in its short life, a testament to the quality of its work but also to the tragically great need for its services. Fortunately, it does not labor alone. BBC is part of a community-wide, coordinated plan of attack on high infant mortality rates called First Year Cleveland. Its key strategies focus on racial disparities, extreme prematurity and sleep-related infant death. 

The work of First Year Cleveland has shown promising impact in its first few years, but the vexing racial difference remains alarmingly high. Although the infant mortality rate has declined for all groups, the disparity between white and Black infant deaths has grown.

 

The very fact that we must marshal the resources and commitment for Birthing Beautiful Communities and First Year Cleveland is just one aspect of the ongoing inequality in our society, which has been again starkly illuminated by the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and by the brutal on-camera killing of George Floyd. 

The social isolation required by the pandemic is frequently punctuated by reminders that “We are all in this together.” And while that is certainly true, the limits of our togetherness are also quite evident. Multitudes have lost their jobs while others have not. Many of those still employed have the benefit of being able to work from home while others cannot. Among those who must report to work because they are essential are scores who are relatively underpaid, including health care aides, supermarket cashiers, delivery workers and others. Racial disparities coil through all of these circumstances, but perhaps the most prominent is the toll the virus is directly inflicting. African Americans are nearly a third of those hospitalized with COVID-19 in Ohio even though they are only 13% of the population. Nationally, Black people are five times as likely to need hospitalization as whites. 

Although COVID-19’s impact has been uneven, a virus always has a reach that is potentially universal. The affluent may be able to more readily reduce the risk of exposure and access better testing and care. But no one can truly hide. The spread is insidious and it obviously can afflict people of every status. The very inequality of health conditions, the fact that a few bear a disproportionate burden, ironically is why everyone is at greater risk. It may be easier to ignore the society-wide costs of unequal schools and unequal opportunities. But the costs to everyone do exist; many people just look away. In the case of a viral pandemic, without a far better public health system and universal heath care, those who cannot avoid exposure are more likely to become carriers and transmitters of the disease. That puts everyone at risk. Looking away is no escape. One way or the other we all pay.

 

 

 

“People of goodwill must seize this moment to force the scrutiny of disparities in education, incomes and employment, health care, housing and other fields.”

No crisis should go unused, and this can be an incredibly valuable opportunity for reassessment and reckoning. For pragmatic reasons alone, the pandemic should force us to take a fresh look at virtually every system and way of doing things. 

But in the nation-defining period ahead there must be a call to conscience as well as self-interest. Racial inequities arising from countless societal decisions continue to afflict Black and Brown Americans. People of goodwill must seize this moment to force the scrutiny of disparities in education, incomes and employment, health care, housing and other fields. All of these inequities stem from choices that we have made as a society or that have been made for us. They are not inevitable. 

These choices tragically include actions throughout our history that created the criminal justice system we have today, a system which, among many other failures, gave a Minneapolis policeman a belief that he had license to take George Floyd’s life in an appallingly heartless way. It was, of course, far from the first time something like that has happened to a Black American. But the repeated broadcasts of the video to an audience enlarged by quarantine sparked rage, anguish and multiracial cries—and marches—for justice. Perhaps Mr. Floyd’s legacy will be that his death generates enough empathy, understanding and enlightened self-interest to make lasting change.

Perhaps. But that is up to all of us, and especially to white people. We are still the largest and most powerful population group. We must emerge from both the social isolation of the pandemic and the far more complicated isolation of our privileged societal position to embrace not just the slogan, but the truth that Black Lives Matter. The consternation of some over the potential loss of historic monuments is nothing compared to what is really at stake: the loss of our core national beliefs, our animating national spirit, our ideals. For nearly our entire history we have celebrated those ideals even as we allowed the whitewashing of racism’s reality and its mockery of our lauded principles. We cannot lay honest claim to our ideals when we continue to so evidently deny them to Black Americans, a truth finally brought home for many by a video of a policeman—essentially a representative of our collective will—calmly murdering a Black man. If we do not change, those ideals are no longer ours.

But what ideals they are: All are created equal. Freedom. Equal justice under law. Democracy. They are worth fighting for and building toward. 

In America, one of the primary ways that we wrestle with such issues is through civic engagement, politics and elections. Distressing and alienating as politics can sometimes be, if informed citizens fail to engage and take action, including voting, there can be no assurance that the policies enacted on our behalf will reflect the broad will of the people. That is the choice before us. Will we step out of our isolation, and add reasoned and compassionate voices to the inevitable clamor? Will we act?

 

 

“Will we step out of our isolation, and add reasoned and compassionate voices to the inevitable clamor? Will we act?”

Nature and George Floyd are telling us something both profound and elementary: In the final analysis, we are, in fact, all in this together. If we do not come out of these twin crises working to build a better, more just future, then the next contagion—perhaps a lethal virus or perhaps a violent uprising—will be the one that truly levels us. Yet, we need not be motivated by anxiety; signs of hope abound. They can be seen in the refreshingly multiracial marches for justice. In the encouraging poll numbers showing majority white support for Black Lives Matter. In the expectant and newborn faces in Deana Lawson’s photographs. 

The road ahead may be hard, but only on it will we find the awakening that America needs and a new birth for our beautiful communities.

 

David Abbott
President