Caring for Those Who Can't Pay

We all know that access to health care is far from guaranteed in this country.  While emergency rooms won't usually turn away an uninsured person with an immediate need, our health care systems could save a lot of money AND people would be healthier if they didn't have to wait for an emergency to get medical care.  At the same time, the number of Americans who have health insurance continues to fall, in part because so many employers are choosing not to offer health insurance as part of employee benefits.  Even those who have insurance often struggle to meet deductibles and put off getting medical attention for fear of racking up significant out-of-pocket costs.

Meanwhile, the economics of providing medical care become increasingly complex, and doctors are having to make tough choices about what kind of care to provide to which patients. Programs that fund care for the poor and elderly are placing tighter limits and controls on what they reimburse, and requirements for malpractice insurance and new technologies create new expenses for medical practices.  It sometimes seems like the only ones benefiting from the system are the insurance companies.

Despite all that, a number of local doctors are doing something remarkable here in Youngstown: they're providing free care to people who need it.  Through the Midlothian Free Health Clinic, Dr. Thomas Albani and his colleagues are providing both basic and specialized care, much of it made possible entirely because medical professionals donate their time.  You can hear all about in this week's interview, and you can help ensure that the clinic continues to operate.  Call the clinic at 330.788.3330 to find out about how to donate and how to participate in their next fundraiser.

Making Sense of Food Policy

"Food policy" was a new phrase to me when I joined the Grow Youngstown board a couple of years ago, and I have to admit that I'm still not entirely clear on the full range of what it might cover.  As MVOC organizer Tammy Thomas and Grow Youngstown director Elsa Higby explain on this week's show, the idea behind the new Mahoning Valley Food Policy Council is to identify existing regulations that get in the way of the production and distribution of locally-grown and healthy food and advocate for new policies that will make it easier for growers, distributors, and consumers to improve the quality of food available in our area.  That might involve everything from zoning to allow urban farms or backyard chicken coops to regulations governing the sales of small-scale locally-produced packaged foods.

You can find out more about this model by visiting the website of the North American Food Policy Council. Along with explaining how such councils work, it has a list of the more than 100 that exist around the US.  You can also read the charter of the Ohio Food Policy Advisory Council, created by Governor Ted Strickland in 2007.

Want to get involved?  Check out the MVOC's Health Equity campaign information or visit the Grow Youngstown website.

Art Beyond the Museum, the Museum Beyond Art

One of the things I appreciate about this week's guest, Leslie Brothers, director of YSU's McDonough Museum of Art, is that her vision of art itself -- not just the role of a campus art museum, but of the very idea/act/artifact of art -- is so deeply connected with social change and community engagement.  This fall's Dreaming Awake: The Town Hall Project is a good example.  It involves some elements that seem to fit neatly into what most people think of as art -- most notably the project animations from the Vito Acconci Studio.  But it also redefines the museum itself, the place we think of as the location for art, as a place for community gatherings of all kinds, and that, in turn, invites us to think about how such gatherings might be not merely enhanced by art but could be, in themselves, forms of art.  To my mind, thinking in these terms transforms both how I think about art and how I think about community. 

Links within the McDonough's website will take you to a description of the Town Hall project and to a schedule of events.  One of the highlights of this fall's schedule is the Skeggs Lecture by Vito Acconci.  

In our conversation, Leslie mentioned the inspiration of a statement on art and social change by Laurie Anderson.  Here's a link to that piece, definitely worth a look.

More than a Free Meal

I had two expectations when I sat down to talk with Jim Echement about the Rescue Mission of the Mahoning Valley, and both turned out to be wrong.  First, I thought I’d hear that the economic crisis of the last three years has caused a significant increase in poverty and homelessness.  While that may be true in terms of national statistics, and while the Rescue Mission has seen some increase in traffic, Echement doesn’t see economics as the primary problem.  Rather, he suggests that for most people, homelessness and persistent economic struggle are not matters of economic conditions so much as of personal trauma.   That may reflect his organization’s mission to help people overcome significant personal obstacles, to in effect change themselves, in order to move toward a more economically stable life. 

But that leads to my second misconception.  I had assumed that the Rescue Mission would have a goal of providing life-changing assistance to anyone who is homeless and in need.  In some ways, that’s true.  They provide meals to anyone who walks in the door, every day.  But when it comes to helping people get off the streets permanently, Echement suggests, they focus on those who are ready to make a change.   To qualify for their “Second Chance” program, which provides long-term housing, training, and support, participants must agree to abide by some clear and rather strict rules.  That helps to instill discipline, and that, in turn, helps people discover that they have more control over their own circumstances than they might have thought. 

From my perspective, both parts of the Rescue Mission’s work matter – providing food and shelter for those in immediate need, regardless of their circumstances, and helping people transform their lives.  Those are challenging goals at any time, and all the more so these days.

Challenging the Myth of a Divided City

There’s an old, too-often told myth about Youngstown’s history: that we haven’t been able to solve the community’s problems because we’ve been too divided.  When I call this a myth, I mean that it’s necessarily false.  Rather, I’m thinking of this as a myth in the sense that this story at once influences and explains the way things are.  We do squabble among municipalities, between the cities and the suburbs, between whites and blacks, and between multiple organizations all trying to make a difference, and some of those divisions do hamper our efforts.  But the myth itself also encourages us to believe that we can’t achieve anything as long as we’re divided, and that, in turn, leads us to blame each other for local problems.  If only that other group would stop trying to do what my group is doing, we say, everything would be fine. 

It’s useful to keep this myth in mind when we talk about the work of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation.  On the one hand, the YNDC is an example of creating a new organization to take on work that some others were already doing, albeit in different and sometimes smaller ways.  When YNDC began, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative and ACTION had both been working to address the needs of urban neighborhoods.  Commonwealth, Catholic Charities, Habitat for Humanity, and some others had long been involved in renovating old housing and developing new properties to help lower-income families become homeowners or stable renters.  Jubilee Gardens, Goodness Grows, Villa Maria, and Grow Youngstown were all involved in various ways in creating urban gardens and promoting local agriculture.  

Despite that, YNDC is a welcome addition to the community development landscape, for two key reasons.  One is a matter of scale, which is made possible in part by significant funding – more than most of those other projects.  That has allowed YNDC to hire strong staff members and invest in meaningful ways in a few targeted areas.  Funding also allows YNDC to do something that the myth about Youngstown tells us never happens: to foster collaboration with other organizations.  As YNDC Executive Director Presley Gillespie explained when we talked, YNDC doesn’t want to compete with or eliminate those other groups, nor is it in anyone’s interest for every project or person to be part of a single organization.  Rather, YNDC can fulfill one of the visions of the Wean Foundation (one of its sponsors): to increase the community’s capacity for development by increasing our ability to work together – not by making everyone part of one big operation but by fostering productive partnerships. 

Opera for the Family

As this week's interview makes clear, Joseph Rubin loves comic opera.  As he describes it, comic opera is sort of the generation in between traditional opera and musical theater.  While everyone may not find the operettas performed by the Canton Comic Opera Company as hilarious as he does, this form of musical theater can be great fun -- especially if you're into the history of popular culture, as I am.  Just look at the images Rubin's group uses to promote their shows -- old sheet music covers.

Like the album covers from my childhood, these images promoted popular music, offering not only a chance to hear the songs (before recorded music, if you wanted to enjoy a popular song at home, you played it on your own piano while your sister sang) but also to see the performers and get a sense of the feel of the show and the early decades of twentieth-century history when it was first produced. 

That kind of enjoyable, even silly way of looking at history is probably worth a drive to Canton.  This year's season begins June 9, with Little Johnny Jones. 

Experienced Advice for Small Business Owners

Terry Diederick is enthusiastic about small business and its potential here in the Mahoning Valley.  He works as a mentor with SCORE, an organization that connects small business people with experienced advisors, many of whom are themselves former small business people.  Not only does he enjoy the work and appreciate his colleagues, he believes that this community offers many opportunities for small businesses to thrive.

While I'm less sure than Terry is that transportation and warehousing are going to grow here, I do share his view that small businesses may hold the key to this area's economic stability.  On the same day we recorded our interview, I spoke with a first-year class at YSU, who asked me one of the questions I get asked most often:  what will it take for Youngstown to once again become the thriving community it once was?  I always start by saying that it will never again be what it was.  That is, we will never have a single industry that creates not only  prosperity but also community cohesion.  We still make and form metals, and we still make cars, but neither industry will ever again be as large as it once was, nor does any contemporary industry work that way.  Youngstown's future relies on smaller-scale business, and to make that work, we need to tap into the expertise of people like Terry and his colleagues at SCORE.