 Community and institutions are partners and we must build trust, credibility, authenticity if we are to cultivate that partnership. Without it, we fail our communities. Now I'm excited because to start along that theme, we have the opportunity to hear today from Dwayne Wharton, who serves as the Director of External Affairs at the Food Trust, where he leads local and national advocacy. Dwayne is a appointed member of the City of Philadelphia's Mayor Commission on African American Males and the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council. He serves as the Board of the NET Foundation, Greater Philadelphia Philanthropic Network, and the Bridging the Gaps Community Health Internship Program. He's also a member of the Allies for Reaching Community Health Equity, Health Equity Experts Network. Dwayne is a former Peace Corps volunteer and was recently named Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health Leader. Please join me in welcoming and thanking Dwayne for being here today. Thank you Gabriel and Live Well Colorado for this opportunity to be here with you today. I actually received a call from Time Magazine asking me to be the person of the year. And I said, I couldn't do it because I'd be here in Colorado with you. So thank you. But seriously, I'm extremely honored and humbled to be speaking with you this morning. I have a good amount of time given to me to speak, which is actually a really rare treat for me. See, I live in a house with my wife and two teenage daughters and an occasional drop-in adult niece. And I don't get a lot of time to actually talk. You ever encounter people who ask you a question and before you can answer, move on to something else? Right. So they asked me, what was I going to talk about at today's summit? And I began to explain how I'd like to discuss how social determinants of health intersect and how we should be looking to tackle these multiple issues and concerted ways and how equity should be at the center of our process, not just desired outcome. And I unsuccessfully tried to manage all of that before being distracted by what's happening with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle or how the Philly rapper Meek Mill is yet another example of how the prison industrial complex is out to get us or why they deserve a pet bearded dragon or a new kitten. So that's just how it goes. I just want to give you an example. So this is the text exchange when I was gone here from my wife to the kids. Question. Dinner suggestions. I'm thinking eggplant, parm or salad and homemade soup. My first daughter, wrong. And then my wife responds, what then? I said suggestions. That sounded like a complaint. My other daughter, can we have mac and cheese and bread? The other daughter chimes in, bread bowl. So my response to this is y'all and your tan food shaking my head. So then they respond, good bread and mac and cheese. My wife then just says, what? I could do mac and cheese and steamed broccoli, maybe Brussels sprouts. We once bread. And then she responds, you better leave me alone before dad takes over dinner again. So this is what we're dealing with here. So again, I do want to talk to you about social determinants of health and how we should look for ways to tackle multiple issues and concerted efforts with each other and how equity should be at the center of our process, not a desired outcome. But I first like to start with a little bit about myself and what's not in my bio so you have a better understanding of who I am. So I grew up in the northwest section of Philadelphia in a neighborhood called Germantown. And specifically in part we call it the dead end. Several hilly orange brick streets that all intersect at some unnamed, unclaimed woods at the bottom. These are not the nice kinds of woods with trails, preservation efforts and volunteers. This is just a bunch of unclaimed trees under train tracks that most wouldn't notice or venture towards unless they were looking for somewhere to dump junk. I don't remember if we inherited the name from the old heads in the neighborhood or just made it up as kids, but it sounded tough and that was very important to a group of black kids growing up in the 80s. Growing up, my friends and I, my bulls, as we say, spent a lot of time hanging on a corner. And corners served as a center of our universe. The meeting place where we would confer about what moves we would make for the day, decide which court we play basketball on, which house party to hit that night, practice our rhymes as we banged out beets on the mailbox, grab the soda from the corner store, compare tales about neighborhoods shenanigans, beefs with crews to live across the avenue, our plans to connect with John's that we were pursuing. So is anyone from Philly at all? All right. So the term John, right? So John is basically a pronoun. It takes the place of any noun that can stand for anything. For example, hey, can you pass me that John over there, right? Or John could be something like, I'm going to go speak at that John in Colorado, right? So we often would speak about John as women and young girls as well, which is wrong and I've learned that since. But John is kind of this interchangeable term that we would use. So I try not to use it anymore. But anyway, as an adult and a public health advocate, the symbolism of the dead end is not lost on me. For the large majority of us, we didn't realize that we lived in poverty. I certainly don't need to sit here today and share stories about how hard we had it. You know enough of these stories and I'm sure you can use your imagination. Just know that I got lucky on many levels and had a lot of help along the way. And the dead end shaped me in many ways. For a few of us, the dead end actually wasn't that at all. It served as a protection. See, if you were curious enough to walk into the woods, pass a discarded 40 bottles and car tires and under the rusty bridge that somehow held up the regional commuter train, you know the one with the quiet car and plush comfy seats and an actual conductor who took your ticket, very different from the sub, the L and the usual bus lines. And it's probably different from that train that runs past here, like blowing its horn all day. So, but if you push through that thicket with that not quite formed trail, you would find the dead end actually leads to Wissahickan Valley. Over 2,000 acres of unspoiled, natural and abundant life. With its dense woods and 50 miles of hiking trails, it's a true gem within the city. There you'll find people jogging on bikes and horsebacks and abundance of Canadian geese looking to be fed, a quaint restaurant and ice cream shop, picnickers and young couples holding hands. In a time when children are forced to grow up so quickly, I found a refuge where I could think, take a swim in the creek, skip rocks, climb trees, hike through woods with friends, make out, explore and gain respect for nature and life. And this should not be an uncommon experience for youth, but it is. And it's one of the things that helped shape me who I am. And like any neighborhood, the dead end has its hazards, but there were also plenty of people who took a healthy interest in me and the other kids. Simple gestures like Mr. Gay, who ran a vacation Bible school, who we went for the snacks but got a lot of moral foundation as well. Fathers, Heinz and Flood, who gave me keys to the church gym as a teenager so my friends and I could play basketball in the winter and keep us off the corner. Mr. Crawford, who, while watching the Eagles play, talked to me about college and my future and actually introduced me to the admissions officer who would take a chance on me while others like my high school counselor encouraged me to join the military because I just wasn't college material. These men saw the light that resides in me, the potential and the expectation to be something more. So the work I do is in honor of my community, the dead end, and those who have helped me along the way. Also, I didn't know my father very well. Like most of the dads around the way, he just wasn't there. He was a Vietnam vet. He was a member of the Black Panther Party. He was mostly a dreamer, a musician, an artist, a poet. Later on, he became an African drummer and Harlem, an activist and self-proclaimed prophet and king, but he was also an abuser of drugs and people. His absence in my life is what I call a mixed blessing. So a side note to the Black Panther movement as I'm learning and now involved in the food world. So their free food programs were feeding 20,000 people in 18 cities around the country in the late 60s. And I have a quote here from Bobby Seale who said, there are millions of people who are living below subsidence, welfare mothers, poor white people, Mexican Americans, Chicano peoples, Latinos and Black people. The Panthers' image and focus on self-determination and finding alliance between oppressed people drew the attention of Diego Hoover, who singled them out as a national hate group and the breakfast program as an act of subversion. So it's okay to think about them with wearing berets, being angry revolutionaries with big afros and guns, but not to think about them as pro-social movements to unite people who are marginalized and underserved. So in May of 1969, Hoover sent a memo to the FBI that read, the Breakfast for Children program represents the best and most influential activity going on for the Black Panther Party and as such is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the Black Panther Party and destroy what it stands for. Self-determination and an alignment of marginalized people is a threat. When Martin Luther King demanded economic and human rights for all poor Americans of diverse backgrounds in the Poor People's Campaign, he was seen as a threat. We see something eerily happening today as it was just confirmed this week that the Black Lives Matter protests have been monitored by the US government and has been seen as a potential threat. And before leaving office in response to calls to label Black Lives Matter a terrorist group, Barack Obama warned, we shouldn't get too caught up in this notion that somehow people who are asking for fair treatment are somehow automatically anti-police are trying to only look out for Black lives as opposed to others. I think we have to be careful about playing that game. We all have to be woke and we all have to stand up for each other and pay attention to what's going on today. My mother, so as a young woman, my mother enlisted in the Women's Army Corps. For those who aren't familiar with this, this was a women's branch of the US Army, started during World War II where there was a notable shortage of men and lasted for the late 70s when all military services were officially integrated, officially. Many interesting side notes about the Women's Army Corps. So one, conservative opinion in the leadership of the army and general public was opposed to women serving in uniform, but the shortage of men necessitated it. But this did not stop a massive slander campaign that labeled these women as sexually immoral. There was fear that if women served as soldiers, the masculinity of men would be diminished and devalued. That the slogan, freeing a man to fight, would mean that more men would be placed on the front line and took the safe jobs away from men. And that this type of social change was simply bad for the country. And African American women experienced bias on multiple levels. They were organized in segregated units. It was sent as dates to where African American men were stationed so that those men would not seek out the company of white women. Lesbians were initially supported, with chaplains being instructed to be sympathetic to young women far from home who formed intense relationships and friendships. But more overt gayness couldn't be accepted. You can only be a little gay. Particularly noteworthy for this audience would be the publication of a physical training manual titled You Must Be Fit, aimed at bringing women recruits to top physical standards. That manual begins by naming the responsibility of women stating your job to replace men, to be ready to take over, and conclude with a section on the army way to health and added attractiveness with advice on skincare makeup and hairstyles. So, but in between having six kids, my mother worked at a local factory that produced trains. This was very dangerous and labor-intensive work. It didn't pay great, yet somehow she was able to send us all to Catholic school, where I became a safety captain, an auto boy, and president of the CYL, the Catholic Youth Organization, which is all my first foray in religion. But I did have a rough time as a teenager. After leaving the small school where I had been with the same 20 kids for eight years, I was expelled from the large Catholic high school within three months of my freshman year, and I bounced around to four different schools in three years. There was a lot going on at home and in the community that left me very unsettled. And at that time, you know, more recently, anyway, where my mother reflects on it, she tells my daughter, I was a mess. And I have to remind her, you were a mess, too. So despite all that could have been better, my mother maintains and always has a huge spirit with an open door, an extra bed, and a plate for anyone in need. There's lots of more to this, so, you know, I'm, again, from a big family, and they've been a tremendous influence on me. And again, we didn't have everything that we wanted, but we got everything we needed. And we learned how to love hard and strong, and have strong opinions on what is right and what is wrong. And now that I have my own family, I see the most important work I will ever do is within the walls of my home. So the work I do is an honor of my family. And there's a lot more in those pictures as well, just to kind of point out, that's mama, why is this pointer not working? Top left, that's my brother and I, next to it. I had a rap group, so that's my buddies, Matt Johnson. If you don't know Matt Johnson, he's an incredible author, and I love him and drop and lots of other things, anyway. When I went to college, I learned how to learn, and I actually joined a fraternity of men who have continued to support me and continued to push me to achieve. And then I met my wife, both of us with our long dreadlocks and hippied kind of urban thing, got married and went to the Peace Corps, where we, you know, began our family and came back with little Zola, and later on Maya. And they're in high school and driving me crazy. And now that they're older, I'm no longer coaching their soccer team, which is pictured there. I'm spending a lot of time with my nieces and nephews, particularly my nephews, who really don't have a lot of male support. And then in between that, I keep busy with work. I DJ as much as possible with my buddies. And I have a diverse group of friends from the neighborhood in which I grew up in, but the worlds are very different, very different today. And the final one on the far right corner is that I try to get my kids involved as much as possible on activism and just for them to understand that we all do have a larger responsibility. So anyone ever see this meme as a video? So there's an old R&B song, right? And this guy changed it, and he would always sing it when someone would come with a falsehood. And this song goes, why are you always lying? And you always lie. So it's become a meme and it's viral and everything. But the notion around how we talk about increasing access to healthy eating and active living by removing barriers that inequitably and disproportionately affect low income communities of color is hard. I'm happy to share some things about the Food Trust, some examples of good work that have resonated with me from the city of Philadelphia and across the country and even I just shared some of my personal experiences. But answering this question is a challenge. There are lots of problems communities face that are direct results of bad policies, historical and structural racism, and the fallout of simply living in an overly capitalistic society. There's nothing wrong with capitalism, but it has to be shared. As a society, we simply don't believe that all people are created equally and are deserving and should be treated as such. We don't believe that all people deserve a living wage, healthcare, housing, fair education, safe water, equal access to the internet, and even simply the right to be in this country. We suffer from short memories, historical revision, and outright amnesia at times. We have created a litany of false narratives about what it means to be an American, a patriot, a conservative, and even a progressive. To address these issues, we must first have a truthful accounting of how resources and opportunities have been and continue to be unevenly distributed and how we benefit from this and contribute to this inequity. So we all know the social determinants of health, the personal, social, economic, environmental conditions which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, and how they play a role in determining individual and population health. And these social determinants are largely responsible for the unequal and avoidable differences in health status within and between communities. Genetics, biology, and individual behavior constitute the largest contributors to health, but we're increasingly understanding and striving to correct the structural barriers as well. So you cannot read that. That's an example of the worst slide ever. But I just want to go over just some of the influences that have impacted issues like obesity. So around income, we know that limited income means making hard choices between food and paying for medical bills is a challenge. Something has to give, right? We know that weaker tax bases in communities don't fund our schools properly and we have an equity in education. We know that jobs are scarce in underserved and under-resourced communities. A lot of things around perception as well is around healthier food being perceived as being more expensive than less healthy products. For recipients of SNAP, we understand that there's a cycle in which people receive their benefits and during this window, they do the shopping for the month, which doesn't allow you to shop for fresh produce throughout the month. So you buy things that won't spoil because you can't risk losing those products and your family going hungry. You can't even afford to have your kid try something healthy because it takes so many times for them to actually... See, I'm still fighting, right? With my teenage daughters about whether or not they like Brussels sprouts or not and they're delicious. We know that that's a real concern, so we end up providing what's cheap and easy that the kids will eat culturally. So we understand that certain types of foods have been ingrained through generations in some cultures and speaking specifically about the African-American culture, it started for us as early as when we were bought here against our will. And when, as slaves, you were given the scraps and the least nutritious foods, while slave masters actually got to benefit from the bounty. And we made it good and delicious and part of our cultural fabric, but these are the same foods that are killing us, right? But it has a historical grounding. And it's reinforced through the food environment and low-income areas. There is more marketing. There are more fast-food restaurants. Speaking of policies, I think Nixon kind of built on a policy that Johnson had started around trying to encourage economic stimulation in urban areas through offering franchises to fast-food restaurants for African-American owners. They looked at it as a way to quell some of the unrest that was happening after King's assassination or economic activity to those communities to grow black businesses and all that stuff. It's honorable in their pursuits, but these policies had unintended consequences. One, it didn't stimulate further economic investment in those communities. Two, it left us with food swamps, right? And overabundance of these healthy things in urban areas. Time crunch. If you're working multiple jobs and catching the bus to get there, you really don't have time to prepare healthy foods. Transportation. We just talked about what's in proximity to you. If you have access to healthy foods, you're more likely to eat it. And then it just goes on and on. So just bringing that on. So you are all more familiar with this than I am. So the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation contracted with Virginia Commonwealth University's Center on Social and Health to develop maps for 21 cities and rural areas across the US using vital statistics obtained from state and local health agencies and population data from the US Census Bureau. They used this data to calculate how long a newborn could expect to live based on population counts and death rates for the geographic area in which they were born. These maps illustrate differences in health outcomes across communities to understand the connection between neighborhood conditions and health. And, you know, here's a really clear example. I'm not sure what that street is in Kentucky, but you see the difference in eight years. And in Philadelphia as well, you know, we have this same disparity and it's found in every community around the country. So we know that people of color in US cities disproportionately and historically lack access to opportunities from education to employment. And many of these are tied to racial inequality because of public policies. And that's within government to change. This represents a tremendous opportunity that we're going to have to figure out how to grasp. Philly is a majority minority city. It's racially and ethnically diverse with African-Americans comprising 44% of the population followed by whites at 35%. Hispanics and Latinos at 14% and Asians at 7%. And other diverse groups, you know, making up the remaining population. But like most cities, we understand how our past and present socioeconomic realities based on race and ethnicity demonstrate the lingering effects of structural and implicit racism. You know, we're the poorest biggest city and we are also the most diabetic. So a third of us live below the poverty line. Nearly half receive SNAP benefits. 7 of 10 adults and 4 out of 10 kids are overweight and obese. We have a lot of issues that we need to tackle. So the food trust. We are 25 years old actually celebrating our 25th anniversary tomorrow, which is why I'm leaving in the morning, at Reading Terminal Market. Reading Terminal Market is a big public space where we have lots of homage farmers from Lancaster County. Lots of local businesses prepared food. It serves as a canopy for the city as so many people come in to actually buy things that they can't find in their neighborhoods. So the founder of the organization, Dwayne Perry, had conversations early on with, you know, the customers that were coming every week. Wanting to know why Ms. Hattie was traveling on two buses from North Philadelphia with her cart, just to shop there. And, you know, the answers were simple, that we simply don't have these things in our neighborhood. They had no access to healthy items like produce. And he began working with the growers and distributors and with the Tenants Association at the Tasker Public Housing Complex and created our first farmers market. And today we see that the disparity that existed in these communities was not by accident. And again, all cities have these maps as well. So it's a security holdings map which show redlining of low income areas and simply being devalued because people of color live there. So it contributed to white flight. It contributed to the underinvestment in communities. Even if you were a business that was looking to open in those communities, you couldn't get lending capital to operate there and you couldn't even get insurance. So it has exasperated a lot of these conditions and it still exists today. There's still discriminatory lending which takes place. Which is again, when you should be concerned that there's being deconstructed. But even the historical implications is that if you were denied a mortgage 70 years ago, your family has never had the opportunity to accumulate wealth which through home ownership is what this country has grown on. So we're still feeling the consequences of this past redlining. And when we look at the rates of obesity, we have Dr. Lloyd Jones from Northwestern School of Medicine who looks at the obesity epidemic as the largest epidemic of chronic disease that we've ever seen in human history. And we're trying to figure it out and you see that obesity it's common, it's serious and costly and we are it's so funny because Colorado is seen as being so healthy and people always say even in Colorado you're struggling with this issue as well. So the food trust looked at where there were the most underserved communities low income areas and decided to focus the attention to those areas. So these yellow dots represent the farmers markets that we're now operating in those communities. And like many communities we are trying to support our local ag but we're also trying to increase healthy food access to communities and we have some big markets Headhouse Square and Clark Park which have like guys with handle bar mustaches, sharpening knives and roasting coffee and stuff but most of our markets are still one, two farmers in a low income area serving that community. You know we've, you know everyone's kind of doing this now but you know the double lux program double up box program where you use your snap benefits at a market, you spend five dollars you get two dollars back here as sometimes it's a one to one match as well. We do programming at markets so health screenings and bringing in spoken word poets and musicians trying to create some theater to make it more attractive in some of these communities and cooking demos are wildly popular we're doing market and farm tours and tying it in with our bicycle coalition. We're partnering with faith based groups to operate at their institutions and with hospitals to have just distribution happening at hospitals as well and prescription programs for people that have diagnosis related to diet so we also have done a lot of work around supermarket development and we've worked here in Colorado with lots of partners including the Colorado health foundation on this issue as well but supermarkets all across the city and national movement to actually bring healthy food retail to communities. We know that people who live in proximity close proximity to markets consume more fruits and vegetables we know that it brings jobs to communities and provides economic stimulation for those communities as well and I'll talk more about the healthy food financing initiatives in a second we're also partnering with the heart association with the heart association around expanding these campaigns around healthy food financing all around the country so we also are working in all the schools providing nutrition education to young kids leading their wellness groups as well just really trying to help grow that appetite for healthy foods and trying to look at these things in a more comprehensive way we're also in church basements doing a lot of this work as well we have our height program healthy you positive energy where kids are the healthy change agents so it's about them instituting smoothie sales instead of big sales leading movement breaks and advocating for actual physical education time in their school day and we try to make it as cool as possible we bring in cool people like Chelsea but definitely lots of athletes and musicians as well and it's a citywide effort as well working in rec centers and with tons of partners around the country under the banner of get hype filly so there's right there that's the mayor another bus and a move at the bottom there and then we work with our corner stores so we have about a thousand corner stores in the city of Philadelphia and we're working with about 650 over the years we've tried to help them one understand the impact of what selling unhealthy items in those schools in those communities is doing to communities but also how to make selling healthier items affordable and it's not coming from a blame perspective but more from a point of understanding and trying to help them learn how to be successful healthy businesses and again lots of complimentary programs around these efforts as well and we do fun things like night market where we are having street festivals on 30s and nights all throughout the warmer months where we promoted and we bring 50 food trucks out and bands and beer gardens and we attract 25, 30,000 people who want to come and enjoy the civic life around the city two things I must note is that the number of women entrepreneurs and immigrant entrepreneurs that participate in this program have been tremendous and we've seen lots of gains there's also lots of of course you have to try to prove and validate all your work so there's lots of information on return on investment around tax dollars to the city and to the state so the big thing though then which gets me excited is policy if we really want to improve health right we look at policy as the best way to do that and you're all familiar I'm assuming with the kind of pyramid grid which looks at how the social economic factors education poverty housing inequality and addressing those to be the biggest way to improve population health moving up the ladder and we always want to talk about personal responsibility if you look at the top counseling education telling people to be healthy be active only can constitute a smaller percentage of that healthy change but when you are able to move policy on the big issues like poverty like education we can really see a difference so the taxes isn't there too I just have to kind of mention that and you know tobacco tax and things of dissuasion so you know the campaign around fresh food retail we looked at where there were supermarkets in the city and where there weren't and kind of mapped it out and we adjusted it for population and we see that the denser dark color areas are places where there were more markets and then we looked at income where there were poor people and where there were supermarkets where there were wealthy people and weren't supermarkets and we're less worried about the areas that have wealthy people with no supermarkets because they most likely have transportation and can get to where they need to get to but if you're poor and live in an area that doesn't have a supermarket it's much more challenging for you so we mapped it out and saw this area which gave us great concern and then we added another layer to it and we wanted to look at diet related disease hypertension obesity diabetes cancers related to poor diet and we saw that neighborhoods that didn't have supermarkets that had poor people had heightened episodes of diet related disease and death and we used that to have conversations with lots of people we talked with government leaders and community leaders and people from the financial sector and other public health officials and mostly the supermarket industry about what are the barriers for you operating in this area and what would it get you how can we get you to come back and they talked about financing and how it was just simply more expensive to operate in some areas that land assembly was a problem that snap distribution meant that for two weeks out of that month in that community there was a run on a store and they had to pay overtime to their staff and they couldn't keep food on the shelves and that it was an unpleasant shopping experience and then those other two weeks of the month the stores were empty and they had lost they would lose their staff because they didn't provide hours during that period then they would have to find and train and bring other staff on which all added to their bottom line looked at workforce training and security as problems and et cetera so we came up with lots of recommendations around how to incentivize supermarket development and the biggest one was capital so the Healthy Food Financing Initiative a $30 million investment by the state of Pennsylvania was then managed by a local community bank and it was then used to provide loans and grants to roughly 90 projects across the state two-thirds of them were in rural areas and through that effort 5,000 people gained employment a half million people gained access to healthy food and since then that model has grown there's California that has one here in Colorado there's one there's a national model that the Obama Administration created as well and it means a lot to communities so here's Circle Foods in New Orleans and it was flooded after Katrina and was most recently flooded again this fall but would not have reopened if it wasn't for the Stress Free Financing Fund and if you look at the area in which it exists which is down at the bottom that 55 years of age being the expected lifespan for someone in those communities you know how important a supermarket is to that community so we do lots of things we're here in Colorado right now working to help increase SNAP enrollment we are working on trying to protect the farm bill and SNAP and that as well we are looking at SNAP education as a means to kind of help incentivize people to want and consume healthier items we're looking at marketing of healthy items in stores we're in Chicago working with a bunch of Muslim store owners about trying to improve their communities as well and I'm in Philadelphia so there's lots of things happening about increasing water access in schools about our soda tax and I just have to note that our soda tax passed a year and a half ago but it's now making its way up to the state supreme court and then there's a preemption effort by people in the state to take away the power of cities to tax and regulate itself so everyone wants state rights but not local rights which is really interesting but around the soda tax it's important that the money from that went to anti-poverty measures we didn't talk about it from a health perspective we talked about it as anti-poverty to fund pre-K slots to improve parks and recs in underserved areas I talked about it from a health perspective that if you improve pre-K and give kids a healthy start then they learn more and they're a better app to have success in life and that if you improve parks in libraries that people will be more active so that if you tax it it does dissuade people from drinking as much soda it's controversial, people may say it's regressive but as an organization we had to support it it became controversial because we worked so closely with the food industry and they're kind of mad at us we are advocating to help incentivize them to go into these communities and at the same time saying that this product which they rely on because it's so cheap to sell and very profitable for them to say that this is a problem so we're navigating that as best as possible fair funding for schools is something that we're taking up at the Supreme Court level as well and it goes on and on and on so we're pretty happy about our city council and our mayor and we just elected a really progressive district attorney who's someone who has been a civil rights advocate and attorney his entire life so intersectionality why is this important so we believe that your goals, whatever you're here and whatever you're a champion of and food has a place to work together there was recently in our trip to Harrisburg people talked about the food issue is important but we really need to focus on opioids well did you know that food access and opioids has a correlation as well and just being able to tie those issues in together as much as possible that when you're talking about civil unrest and communities, haha did you know that food justice and civil unrest have something in common as well you know in Baltimore people complained about the riots right, the civil unrest that happened a few years ago after Freddie Gray was murdered but that same community that people say why are they looting hadn't had a supermarket since King's assassination you know 50 years prior so there's a lot for people to be upset about and we are looking for ways to intersect these issues as much as possible so we're talking about fair wages right how are we talking about public health if we aren't talking about how to make sure people have the means to support themselves and their families and this age of corporate record profits where workers aren't seeing it we understand that there's a direct correlation we also understand just really quickly that when you do increase wages there's lots of evidence to show that there's healthier weight there's improved birth outcomes there's improvements in mental health that smoking rates go down that hypertension from stress go down and lots of other preventable diseases are addressed as well so this is so important and it's at the foundation of all the work that we do it's not what we do primarily as an organization but we have to support it and then we have to think about who are our allies who are the unusual folks what are the other issues that are impacting communities where is there injustice and how can we stand up for it I just love this another meme as well but again who are your allies and in Philadelphia our LBGTQ African American community elevated the issue around discrimination that they were facing in our city particularly in their safe place the neighborhood and how there was no space for them and it was heard there was a shake up in government around officials who support this work there was an addition of a black and brown stripe to the flag oh my goodness you would think that we were rewriting like the Ten Commandments I mean some members of the LBGTQ community really were upset by this but the response is that if you really believe injustice and equity and a fairness for everyone why do you have a problem with race coming into the conversation why is that an issue if you have people telling you that this is a problem why won't you listen so again it's kind of picking and choosing your fights just because it's legal doesn't mean that it's right and here's just some example of some of the things that were legal but certainly not right so pick your fights use your moral compass to tell you what's right and what's wrong again another meme I love so health is in everything you show what you're working on and we'll show how health is component equity should be in everything looking at ways to make sure so we talked about the soda tax so one of the things that also came out of that is that the contracts to rebuild these playgrounds and rebuild these libraries and the school reform commission with local government taking back over control of our schools that there has been such a history of inequity in school that people of color have been left out of unless you write that into these policies that you're putting forward council said they would not support it so there was no like you know false tales around when we do rebuild the libraries we'll have an apprenticeship program and we'll train folks of color nope we've seen that before they need to be on the job site from day one and that was some of the provisions around it so equity should be in everything that we do and it's part of the process as well as the outcome if we're talking about how to improve equitable communities and communities not at the table it's problematic and it's a practice right we never achieve it it's always work as some folks say it's like good oral hygiene you don't brush your teeth once and think that the job is done but you have to do this and practice it every day and we have to own our own stuff and own our own privilege and listen when people are telling us something is wrong we have to listen to them and be willing to learn so the food trust I've been there for six years I know that because LinkedIn just told me and when I first started I went to a meeting in Chicago with lots of like food advocates from around the country and I introduced myself as Duane from the food trust and I heard this voice in the back of the room and I was like what so I turned around and I found out who said it and I went over to later an old African American woman from like a southern rural farmers association and I said why did you say that and she said you know why I said that I've never seen a person of color from the food trust I'm like oh we're there there's some of us and she was like well I've never seen it so I went back and I shared this with the rest of the leadership team and I was like maybe motions and Yael who I love our executive director teared up like it's okay but it's just someone holding a mirror to us and saying like this is an issue and I said we do have folks of color but they're largely represented in the administrative staff and not representing the organization in a public way so what to do with that so we have been very intentional about diversifying our staff and not in a tokenism kind of way but looking to be as inclusive as possible and it goes beyond race right so we talk about like who else isn't here we're extremely young although we're getting older in leadership but we have an extremely young staff are there any folks who have more senior years on them that can help us be better informed about the work that we do we don't have a lot of diversity within the educational obtainment in our staff as well like you know there's folks who pretty much look the same from the same institutions and you know if they went to the school that you went to they must be great but we have to look at how do we bring members of the community into the workforce as well so we've started working to build more community health workers there are lots of other issues we have a huge returning citizens problem where are there opportunities for our staff to bring in some returning citizens so we've been able to hire a few to work at our farmers market staff it's seasonal it's not great pay it's a start we want to do more so we're always trying to find these ways and opportunities to look at diversity look at equity look at how we can be more inclusive in communities so Frederick Douglass right and this is kind of a call to action for all of us he talked about how power can seize nothing without a demand that it's a struggle and nothing is gained without struggle and that we're going to get what we pay for but we certainly will pay for what we get and we're trying to think about how we can incorporate that into the work that we do you know Mary and Nestle talks about this two class food systems where there is one group of people who will be able to enjoy home gardens fully and sustainable food at a greater cost and then there's another who are going to be eating industrialized food as deeply as possible at the expense of workers and our natural resources we need to figure out how will our work improve the environments in our neighborhoods for the health and well-being of everybody and it's not going to be given to us and if it's not us that's going to do it then who so does anyone know who that fist belongs to? That's right, I love Baldwin's fist author he's ready to fight so as I conclude I just want to leave it with a few final points so one our environment matters to build a culture of health where every person regardless of their background and circumstances has an opportunity to lead the healthiest life possible we must improve where people live, learn work and play how else can we improve our neighborhoods structures or alliances that are needed to be built to address these problems more equitably and therefore more effectively where are the policy opportunities and who are the champions at a local state and federal level these historical and structural barriers are not by accident and they will not be dismantled without a true commitment to do so we must first acknowledge them for what they are and build a bold and courageous policy pursuit and practice to create a society that everyone deserves and we must all work together to achieve this so remember John right it's a pronoun but only better so let's get out there and let's fix this John thank you