The 2020 “Determined” series was one of the first collaborations by Charlottesville Inclusive Media. The award-winning reporting, photography, graphics and art consisted of 10 stories about the broad effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on African American communities.
Charlottesville is full of potential. But we can’t be the best community possible until we create space for more people to lead. Charlottesville Tomorrow, Vinegar Hill Magazine and the In My Humble Opinion talk show — together Charlottesville Inclusive Media — believe that it’s time for a change. If we are going to fulfill Charlottesville’s potential together, we have to invite more people into everything, but especially into our media, our stories and, really, our shared understanding of who we are.
Charlottesville Inclusive Media was created for this moment. Our three organizations are independent, with our own histories, missions and frameworks in which we work. But we share a common goal: Create news and information that better informs and includes our communities.
After several years of building our partnership, and telling stories that matter to more people in our communities, we are framing a collaborative approach to newsmaking that builds up conversations and understanding for our community. We are creating an inclusive pathway for media professionals, a sustainable media ecosystem that creates more ways for people to tell their stories and speak the truths of more of our neighbors. In short, we are inviting more people (and compensating more people) to tell the stories of Charlottesville and the surrounding areas.
Sarad Davenport, content manager and digital strategist for Vinegar Hill Magazine says, “Much of how we frame the existence of people of color, and Black people in particular, is as a problem that must be solved… What is more true is that life is complex across race and culture and there is no lack of innovation, but there is often a morbid lack of resources.”
Morris took the helm of Charlottesville Tomorrow in 2018 to build an organization that could take on our racial reckoning and inequality. “I felt at the time, and still feel, that the failure of local news business models contributes to the passive racism that local media adopted over a period of decades,” he says. “My role was to lead the organization through this transition at all levels — staffing, revenue, journalism, mission, board makeup, distribution — and to build an organization that treated its own people and its community with the dignity, value and respect they deserve.”
The partnership has been crucial to meeting that mandate because of the perspectives the three organizations have brought to each other.
“CIM’s progress in influencing the larger media landscape through our ally relationship has been much faster than I could have imagined,” Morris says.
“Tackling these questions together without losing our identity and rootedness is and will always be a challenge, but in the tension we seek a higher order of being, not only in journalism but in the community and world. It’s hard work, we have to be very thoughtful and trust comes with time. Leaving space for each other and also speaking together at times is important,” says Davenport.
The working title of CIM’s plan is First Person Charlottesville — a multiplatform channel and community that will bring to the fore first-person testimonies and closely reported stories about life in our community. The project is seeking its first major funder to anchor the work for the next three years. If you’re as excited about this work as we are, here are three things you can do:
Make a tax-deductible donation to CIM. Your donation will be made to Charlottesville Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization. When you include a note that you would like your donation to go to CIM, it will be earmarked for this work.
Interested in making a large investment to get First Person Charlottesville off the ground? Contact Michaux Hood at mhood AT cvilletomorrow DOT org.
WRITTEN BY: Charlottesville Inclusive Media
We are a partnership between Charlottesville Tomorrow, Vinegar Hill Magazine and the In My Humble Opinion talk show on 101.3 Jamz. Find out more.
Virginia Press Association awarded for Vinegar Hill & Charlottesville Tomorrow for the Determined Series collaboration. Determined received First Place Multimedia Report, First Place for Illustrations, Best in Show for Online Digital, and Best in Show Illustrations. One of the judges commented that “I was impressed with [their] ability to use a combination of illustration, photos, and graphics to tell this story. Clearly, the most important story of our lifetime told in a way that showed the emptiness of our cities and states due to the pandemic. Congratulations to Jordy Yager, Journalist; Lorenzo Dickerson, Photographer; Sahara Clemons, Artist.
Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker and Dr. Max Luna of the UVA Latino Health Initiative reflect on the virus’ lasting legacy in the region, and the path forward
By Samantha Willis | Photos by Lorenzo Dickerson | Artwork by Sahara Clemons
Mayor Nikuyah Walker is comfortable speaking uncomfortable truths. Now in her fourth year in the role of Charlottesville’s first Black female mayor, Walker has become accustomed to speaking her mind based on the facts as she sees them, without regard to who does or doesn’t like what she has to say.
“Nothing has changed,” is her straightforward response to the question of what meaningful change has taken place during her tenure.
“I’m sure if there was someone else answering this question, they would celebrate the small victories, but I’m not that person,” she said flatly. “We have so long to go.”
The region’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis supports, at least in part, Walker’s assessment. Nearly 50 years after the ratification of the Civil Rights Act – which chipped away at America’s legal caste system by banning segregation and discrimination by employers – Black Americans and other people of color still endure disproportionate social, legal, and economic challenges, as reflected by the coronavirus’ outsized impact on their communities. Locally, Black and Latino residents of the Blue Ridge Health District (BRHD) comprise 41.5% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and nearly 22% of deaths from the disease, according to thelatest available data, despite both groups making up hardly more than a quarter of the BRHD’s 250,000 residents.
“What we saw with COVID,” said Walker, “when we look at who was being impacted by it the most, and who was getting the vaccine first, those processes were fueled by the same systemic racism that fuels many inequities here.”
Nikuyah Walker, Mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia
To date, the Virginia Department of Healthreports 66,587 people living in the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson counties have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. The vast majority of these people are white, whereas people of color – Blacks, Latinos, Indigenous Americans, and Asian Americans – account for 7,746 of this at least partially vaccinated group. The Blue Ridge Health District, aftercoming under fire from some community members for the initial vaccine distribution that largely excluded people of color, has ramped up its efforts towards equity, partnering with several organizations to host vaccination events targeting Blacks and Latinos.
“Charlottesville addressed [the coronavirus and vaccination] in the way that things are typically done,” said Walker. “We categorize people based on deeply rooted inequity systems in this country. Very little has changed.”
Understanding and mitigating systemic inequities, and the unique health and wellness challenges they present to the local Latino community, are at the heart of theUVA Latino Health Initiative‘s mission and work. Dr. Max Luna, a cardiologist and associate professor at the University of Virginia for the past 13 years, founded the Latino Health Initiative about five years ago.
Dr. Max Luna, a cardiologist and associate professor at the University of Virginia
“We [Latinos] share with other people of color a higher rate of poverty and limited access to health insurance, similar to our African American brothers and sisters, although [Latino underinsurance] is higher,” said Luna. “We share so much together, more than our differences; we’re in this fight [against health challenges and disparities] together.”
Luna said that in the Charlottesville region, “most Hispanics, more so even than the Black community, have limited access to teleworking.” Roles in the foodservice and hospitality industries put local Latinos at a greater risk of contracting the virus. Concurrently, Latinos have fewer resources to help them navigate COVID-19’s health, social and economic effects.
“Latinos … have less access to a safety net via unemployment. Latinos have limited health literacy, to access and understand in detail our health system and vaccination information,” Luna explained. “Language gaps make it more challenging for Latinos, who maybe don’t have [the] language proficiency to understand resources and build trust with doctors, nurses and other providers.”
Even before coronavirus crashed the scene, the Latino Health Initiative was working within the communities they serve to fix these issues, listening as much as teaching, said Luna. The Clínica Latina, which the Latino Health Initiative runs in partnership with the Charlottesville Free Clinic, has been providing “free primary healthcare twice a month to Hispanics in their own language by culturally proficient physicians and students,” since 2016. The same year, the Latino Health Initiative formed the Cardiovascular Initiative for the Latino Community Health in response to Latino residents’ high rate of deadly cardiovascular disease, serving nearly 500 people so far. Since the virus spread across the globe, Luna said his office has continued to serve, providing COVID-19 testing, care and vaccine information in Spanish – online and in-person – with a focus on cultural competency and compassion.
Dr. Max Luna at the COVID Vaccination Center on Seminole Square
“We know that only 55% of the Latinx community in Charlottesville have reliable access to the internet,” Luna said. “What we have done is create a series of messages about the vaccine en español, in [a language tone] that wasn’t coercive and is easy to understand. Then we went to [the] Blue Ridge Heath District and said we need to have more access beyond the website; they have since given us the opportunity to do creative outreach with them.”
Luna said his group has visited five area Latino churches in the past month and contributed to the creation of a virus vaccine hotline in Spanish. They’ve partnered with BRHD and other groups to staff vaccination centers with Spanish language interpreters, “so that Latino people are comfortable when they come for information.”
Luna, like Walker, feels the current climate reflects the region’s long-standing challenges concerning equity and health outcomes for people of color. The current moment calls for action and accountability, Luna said, from health district leaders, from his colleagues at UVA, from local leaders in the region.
A year into the COVID-19 crisis, the city of Charlottesville helps local minority-owned businesses fight back from the brink, and assists community members in regaining employment
By Samantha Willis | Photos by Lorenzo Dickerson | Artwork by Sahara Clemons
Starting this week, the city of Charlottesville’s Office of Economic Development will disburse $40,000 in grants to local small businesses, all of which are owned by people of color or women. Themini-grant program, facilitated through the city’s Business Equity Fund, is the latest effort specifically designed to aid area business owners and employees recovering from the coronavirus pandemic’s economic impact.
By theexecutive order of Gov. Ralph Northam, most nonessential businesses closed to the public to stem the spread of the virus. This order – which also closed public schools and banned public gatherings of more than 10 people – effectively gutted many small businesses statewide, including Black-, Hispanic- and Asian-owned businesses in Charlottesville and the surrounding counties. ADecember 2020 meeting of Virginia’s Small Business Commission revealed that 27% of small businesses in the commonwealth closed either temporarily or permanently during the pandemic, with more than 40% of those businesses in the hospitality and leisure industries.
“A lot of our minority-owned businesses were greatly impacted [by the coronavirus pandemic],” said Hollie Lee, chief of Workforce Development Strategies in the city of Charlottesville’s Office of Economic Development andDowntown Job Center. “That includes barber shops, beauty shops, nail salons and other personal care businesses, as well as foodservice businesses.”
Now, with the number of Virginians who have received a complete coronavirus vaccination steadily rising, some of these businesses are re-opening their brick-and-mortar home base or pivoting to offer their services virtually.
“We are starting to see businesses coming back to life,” Lee said. In the early days of the pandemic and in its continuation throughout 2020, Lee said her office focused on helping businesses stay afloat. To date, the agency reports it has disbursed more than “$2,000,000 in grants, loans and other supports” to city businesses since March 2020. That figure, said Lee, includes the first round of small business relief grants held last July, resulting in 129 awards to small businesses; 50% of these awardees qualified as “socially disadvantaged,” either by race, ethnicity or gender.
As the pandemic continued, the agency focused especially on helping businesses owned by minority members of the Charlottesville community, usually identified as Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous and mixed-race people. The numbers from subsequent grant disbursements reflect the success of this effort. In the second round of small business grants, 74 awards were disbursed to local businesses and 61% of those were businesses owned by a member of a minority community, a woman or both. Mini-grants of $2,500 each are rolling out to businesses this week; 100% of them are owned by socially disadvantaged groups, with Black business owners comprising 75% of grantees. While COVID-19 fomented a 22% drop in the number of small-business owners total nationwide, Black-owned businesses – in Charlottesville, the surrounding region, the state and across the country – were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that 41% of Black small businesses nationwide were forced to shut down as a result of the pandemic. Latino-owned businesses dropped by 32%, and Asian-owned establishments suffered a 26% decline. Conversely, “the number of white business owners fell by 17%,” the report found. Along with providing vital capital to keep businesses’ doors open and operations running smoothly, the OED grants equip grantees with business growth strategy training (via webinar), and one-on-one coaching sessions with a business consultant.
In addition to helping business owners, Lee said her office’s work through the Downtown Jobs Center has shifted to assist individual community members find their way back to gainful employment.
Prior to the pandemic, Lee said, the city’s unemployment rate was relatively low, hovering around 2.7% in January 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. As the pandemic bloomed, however, “we had many individuals who reached out saying they had lost employment, in the hospitality and food service industries especially,” Lee said. “So we had employers who no longer had open positions because they had to cut back their hours severely or close down altogether, and employees who lost their jobs. It was a spiral effect … [and] now things are still a challenge.”
Hollie Lee, Chief of Workforce Development Strategies City of Charlottesville’s Office of Economic Development and Downtown Job Center
A number of these employees were people of color, another marker of the disproportionate impact the coronavirus continues to levy onto minority communities in addition to the public health risks it imposes. The most recently-available data shows that the 2020 unemployment rates in the Charlottesville region peaked in April at 9.5% but gradually lessened as the year came to a close, with a 4% rate in December. Lee, an Augusta County native whose parents owned a variety of businesses throughout her life, said she was born with “an entrepreneurial spirit.” Her background enables her to relate deeply to local business owners and workers, whom her office will continue to help mitigate the financial fallout of COVID-19.
While many local industries suffered during the thick of the pandemic, construction was not as hard hit, said Lee.
“We did a trade builders training academy during the pandemic, because a lot of construction companies needed trained workers for a variety of projects.” she said. “Locally, we didn’t see the construction industry really grind to a halt, like we did after the 2008 recession, for example.”
Screenshot of an email from Hollie Lee, Director of Workforce Development in the City of Charlottesville’s Office of Economic Development, detailing the demographics of business owners who received grant funds from her office, totaling over $2 million since March 2020.
Quinton Harrell agrees, and said there is renewed opportunity for Black subcontractors and laborers in the region. Harrell chairs the Minority Business Alliance — a group convened by the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce to support, connect and elevate minority-owned businesses — and is the founder of Heritage United Builders (HUB Cville). Harrell said the impetus of his company’s existence was a conversation with Charlottesville City Council members and other leaders about the city’s track record of excluding Black builders and companies from city-backed general contracting projects.
“I learned that in that 2017 budget, the [city’s] budgetary spend for local vendors was around $53 million; of that 53 million, 0.04% was African American vendors. So that was a startling number, and I wanted to help correct that,” said Harrell.
To that end, Harrell launched HUB Cville in 2017; the company “connects African American and minority subcontractors to jobs with general contractors, institutional buyers, residential construction firms and clients.”
So far, Harrell has connected about eight Black subcontractors to local projects and anticipates assisting others in the future. The national tumult following the death of George Floyd spotlighted a plethora of America’s racial inequities last year; the pandemic, Harrell said, only exacerbated existing problems stemming from the structural racism woven into practically every thread of the nation’s socioeconomic tapestry. With the renewed interest in racial and social justice came more opportunities for Black businesses, said Harrell, who points to President Joe Biden’s $400 billion campaign commitment to aid small businesses in recovery from the coronavirus with specific measures to “tackle inequities in the federal contracting system.”
Locally, groups including the Minority Business Alliance, the OED’s Minority Business Program, the Central Virginia Small Business Development Center (where, Harrell mentions, his wife Yolunda Harrell works part-time) continue collaboration with local and state government agencies, as well as private sector companies to boost Black and minority business representation in all industries and increase the number of certified small, women-owned and minority-owned (SWaM) businesses. In the meantime, Harrell advises Black business owners to learn from the economic burn of the COVID-19 pandemic and use that hard-earned knowledge to build up their businesses.
Harrell chairs the Minority Business Alliance — a group convened by the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce to support, connect and elevate minority-owned businesses — and is the founder of Heritage United Builders (HUB Cville).
“I owned a retail clothing store years ago, and I wasn’t managing revenues responsibly. I was going through the motions of bookkeeping, but I wasn’t using that financial knowledge to make business decisions. So when the economic [recession] came in 2008, I lost … almost everything. But it taught me to stay as educated as I could on my business strategy and best practices, and to always be thinking long-range. I’m of the mindset that we can’t let a crisis go to waste.”
Note: Anyone interested in shaping the continued revitalization of the Charlottesville region’s economic landscape may share their input with the Office of Economic Development this month.
Meetings to discuss the agency’s “Recovery Roadmap: A Plan for Business Recovery in Charlottesville” campaign will be held via Zoom virtual conference at 8:30 a.m. March 17 and at 4 p.m. March 18. Registration information and more details may be found here.
Charlottesville City Schools leaders, teachers, and students pull together and press forward in preparation for their return to in-person instruction
By Samantha Willis | Photos by Lorenzo Dickerson | Artwork by Sahara Clemons
Next Monday, March 8,Charlottesville City Schools kindergarten through sixth-grade students will return to learn inside their school buildings. For many students, it will be the first time inside a physical classroom since Gov. Ralph Northam closed schools statewide in March 2020 to stem the spread of the coronavirus. While most middle and high school students will continue virtual learning for the time being, a small cohort will also go back to class in person, as school administrators, teachers and students prepare for the eventual return to school by prioritizing safety, academic advancement, and equitable access to education for all young people.
During the coronavirus pandemic, 4,529 CCS students and teachers engaged in fully remote instruction, a process that has been admittedly tough for many teachers and students.
“I believe that not everyone does the best with virtual learning; some kids don’t work well in this environment,” says Iya Seggan, 16, a Charlottesville High School junior, and creative writing coordinator of teen-led advocacy group Central VA Activists.
Iya Seggan, 16, a Charlottesville High School junior, and creative writing coordinator of teen-led advocacy group Central VA Activists
The group’s goal, according to Seggan, is to educate their peers at CHS and other area schools on topics like racism and the daily lived experiences of people of color, and to offer a supportive hub for teens of color and their allies. Seggan – an ambitious young woman who plans to attend Virginia State University, earn a postdoctoral degree, and become a professor of African Studies, Women’s Studies, or Philosophy – says the virtual learning struggle is a personal one. “It’s hard for me to turn in my work more often, instead of how it would have been in if I was in school. My grades have suffered some because of that. I have less time to do my work, in a sense.”
Even before the pandemic, millions of K-12 public school students in the United States were impacted negatively by the digital divide, defined as “the gap between people who have sufficient knowledge of and access to technology and those who do not,” in a 2018 study by the ACT Center for Equity in Learning. In Virginia, over 200,000 K-12 students do not have reliable internet access via a broadband subscription, according to a September 2020 report conducted by the State Council on Higher Education for Virginia. The same report found that 173,000 of the state’s K-12 students don’t own a laptop or desktop computer, and “Black and Latinx students are twice as likely as white students not to have a computer in the home.” These disparities can contribute to negative educational outcomes for students; Charlottesville City Schools leaders say they continue stepping up their efforts to close the digital divide, from providing pupils with Chromebook laptops, to individual interventions with families who need extra digital support.
“We worked really hard to ensure that students had access to devices, and access to [the] internet and WiFi,” says Dr. Katina Otey, the school district’s chief academic officer. Dr. Otey says the district organized mass Chromebook distribution events at each of its schools, and established drop-off points in area neighborhoods, including Westhaven, the city’s biggest, oldest public housing community.
Dr. Katina Otey, Chief Academic Officer, Charlottesville City Schools
Earlier in the pandemic, the school district took steps to ensure students’ basic needs were met, says Denise Johnson, Charlottesville City Schools Supervisor of Equity and Inclusion.
“We were doing meal distribution, supply and hygiene drives, just to make sure our families have what they need to survive.” Additionally, Johnson says the district distributed internet hotspots to families who needed them, and partnered with Comcast to make an affordable “essentials” internet package available to families at a reduced cost.
Dr. Otey notes that, as of February 23, the school district’s director of technology received no new requests from parents for access or technology needs. Dr. Otey, who joined the district in June 2020, and was previously director of elementary school leadership in Chesterfield Public Schools, says, “So we are in a good place where the kids are able to engage in virtual instruction, and have everything they need, technology-wise.”
Seggan will be one of a small group of high school students who will return to their classrooms in March; Dr. Otey says the district worked with principles, parents, students, and teachers to determine which students needed the additional, in-person academic support (such as students with learning disabilities, students who speak English as a second language, and students who have struggled with their attendance or grades while learning remotely). All city schools will have decreased class sizes and follow enhanced safety protocols, says Dr. Otey, and are equipped with cleaning materials and safety supplies to keep students and staff safe. A “large majority” of the district’s teachers have also been vaccinated, Otey adds.
“There is still a conversation [to be had] about education equity and health equity,” says Johnson of the schools’ physical reopening. “We’re still in the midst of a pandemic, so we understand that families have to make choices on how to keep their families safe. Many of our students, their parents lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and that impacts the decisions their household makes. … No matter what choice they make, we want to ensure that all families have equitable access to education.”
Denise Johnson, Charlottesville City Schools Supervisor of Equity and Inclusion
Virtual learning hasn’t been tough just for students; teachers also feel the strain.
“It’s been stressful, to say the least,” admits Charlottesville High School special education teacher Pam Brown. “I am not the most computer literate person, but I’ve had to become more computer literate than I ever wanted to be,” she adds with a chuckle. “But what it comes down to is, you have to be flexible, you have to be creative, and you have to connect with your students the best you can.”
Tim Johnson, a history teacher at CHS who co-teaches a government class with Brown, agrees.
“We’re being super proactive about reaching out to kids. It’s a lot easier [for students] to hide in the weeds with virtual learning. A lot of times, kids aren’t [speaking up] in class, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t learning or doing the work. So we have to be flexible. … We invite [students] to office hours, invite them to talk for 15 or 20 minutes; you can take a lot of weight off of them just by talking with them one on one, letting them know that you care.”
Brown adds, “Being virtual, we had to work even harder to build relationships with students, but we did that by inviting them to stay on Zoom after class, just to chat about whatever they’re interested in, video games or shows, or sneakers. Or, if we see a student not engaging in class or notice their grade slipping, we’d pull up a Zoom break-out room and just ask them one-on-one, ‘What’s up with you? Do you want to talk, or can I help you with something?’”
Brown and Johnson say they feel the district has done a great job of including teachers in the back-to-school planning process; Brown serves on the district’s COVID committee, which guided the return to classroom instruction.
“First off, we were extremely pleased to have a teacher’s voice involved,” says Brown. “A lot of places aren’t consulting teachers on how to return to learn, considering we’re the front lines.” The committee comprised “administrators, parents, teachers” who worked together to craft the plan and present it to the school board for adoption last December. Brown also asked her students what they thought of the transition plan, and shared their feedback with the committee.
A successful transition back to school will require the area’s entire educational community –students, parents and families, advocates, teachers, school staff, and administrators – to continue cooperating and collaborating, Brown and Johnson believe.
“It will take being caring, being flexible, being compassionate, and being understanding,” says Brown.
Note:Calls and emails to Albemarle County School superintendent Dr. Matt Haas were not returned by press time; however, the Albemarle County Schools Board on Feb. 11 voted in favor of allowing all students to resume in-person instruction beginning March 15. Albemarle County Schools, which educates more than 7,500 students, will provide four days per week of in-person instruction to pre-kindergarten through third-grade students, and two days per week of in-person instruction to students in grades four through 12. Read more about the district’s plans here.
The 2020 “Determined” series was one of the first collaborations by Charlottesville Inclusive Media. The award-winning reporting, photography, graphics and art consisted of 10 stories about the broad effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on African American communities.
A Charlottesville mental health services agency helps holistically heal the minds, bodies and spirits of Black, Latinx, and underprivileged women, as other groups offer mental health support to local people of color.
By Samantha Willis | Photos by Lorenzo Dickerson | Artwork by Sahara Clemons
As COVID-19 cases climbed last year, so too did the toll weigh heavier on Americans’ mental and emotional health, and the struggle continues. As of February 1, 2021, an estimated36.9 percent of Virginia adults experienced symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, according to census data.
Navigating uncertain terrain amid lingering health and safety concerns remains a challenge for many. But for marginalized groups including Black and Latnix communities, the pandemic exacerbates existing mental health risks stemming from systemic societal issues they’ve faced for generations, like racial discrimination and decreased access to health care. In Charlottesville, various means of mental health support services have been created or expanded in the wake of the virus, in an effort to promote mental and emotional wellness in local communities of color.
The Women’s Initiative, located at 101 East High Street in Charlottesville, is a mental health services agency that serves over 4,000 women annually. The organization offers a variety of mental health programs including individual and group counseling, social support and mind/body exercises, and education on topics from stress management to mindfulness to conflict resolution. The organization makes its services accessible to all women in the region, regardless of their ability to pay, or if they have insurance.
Additionally, The Women’s Initiative offers culturally-competent programs that focus on the unique needs of Black and Hispanic women in the region.
“When women come to us, it is truly personal; they’re sharing their innermost thoughts with us, so we don’t take that lightly,” says Juanika Howard, MS, LMHP-E, a therapist who leads one of the organization’s Sister Circle program, specifically designed for Black women.
Juanika Howard, MS, LMHP-E, a therapist who leads the Women’s Initiative Sister Circle program | Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
Howard says she witnesses “ongoing anxiety and depression related to the pandemic,” in the women she treats weekly. Black people account for nearly 15 percent of the majority of COVID-19 deaths in the United States, and they continue to be disproportionately, negatively impacted by the virus. In the Blue Ridge Health District (BRHD) – which serves more than 250,000 people in the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, and Nelson counties – Black people represent over 20 percent of COVID-19 deaths, and at least 31 percent of hospitalizations prompted by the virus, despite representing only about 13 percent of the BRHD’s total population.
“There’s also that, Black women are just tired. Tired of trying to be that ‘strong Black woman’, trying to hold it all together, says Howard. Researchers Kelly Yu-Hsin Liao, Meifen Wei, and Mengxi Yin in 2019 linked the “Strong Black Woman” schema with “negative psychological outcomes,” including “depression, anxiety, and loneliness.” Howard says that these women seek solace in the Sister Circle program, a “space [where they’re allowed] to show that they’re tired, because they feel they can’t show that in their lives.”
Sister Circle’s current offerings include social support groups that “create safe and nurturing spaces for women to heal and build community.” The Sister Circle Healing Circle meets virtually 2nd and 4th Thursdays through March, 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.; pre-screening and registration details may be found here. Starting this Thursday, February 25, Howard will co-facilitate a daytime support group for Black women, to meet via Zoom, 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. This program, like many other services at The Women’s Initiative, is free to attend, thanks to a partnership with Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital and wellness group Your Life Matters C’Ville.
One of the barriers Black and Latinx women face concerning caring for their mental health is the lingering stigma present in both communities.
“We’re constantly working to break down the stigma of ‘Black people don’t go to therapy,’ that [therapy] is something for ‘crazy’ people,” says Howard. Ingrid Ramos, a counselor who facilitates the Bienstar and Resilience programs, agrees. Ramos’ programs address and support the mental health needs of area Latinx women, and are presented in both English and Spanish.
Ingrid Ramos, a counselor who facilitates the Bienstar and Resilience programs at the Women’s Initiative | Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
“There’s a huge stigma in [the] Latino community around mental health and therapy,” says Ramos. But throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, after The Women’s Initiative migrated most of their programs to a telehealth model, “we had a higher number of counseling sessions [with Latinx women]. There was more consistency in how they showed up. Telehealth has allowed them to get counseling without previous barriers, like needing child care or transportation.”
Latinx people are also disproportionately represented among the area’s COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations; Ramos says the virus continues disrupting Latinx women’s lives and lifestyles.
“Many Latino women here work in the service industry – restaurants, hotels, places” where they are in direct proximity to the public, putting them at risk for contracting the virus, Ramos says. Quitting their jobs to lessen their risk of exposure is not an option for most of these women, whose incomes support their households. “So they were trying to figure out how to make ends meet. Figuring out if they were going to have enough to eat was a huge stress.”
Ingrid and Juanika | Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
Even as Virginia’s vaccination process continues, Ramos says some Latinx women report more members of their families are contracting the virus, an added stressor. “I have seen entire families, from parents to children, who have COVID or are directly impacted by it.” These factors, combined with an uncertain future, “have contributed to high levels of anxiety and depression.” To counter this, Ramos and her colleagues offer regular mindfulness and support groups, in addition to resilience education programs that promote coping and stress management skills. In the spring, Bienstar will unveil a Latinx leadership group, La Cultura Cura (which translates to “Culture Heals”), in partnership with Creciendo Juntos, a leading Latinx advocacy and education agency. This partnership represents one of many such collaborative efforts The Women’s Initiative supports within the region, in an effort to bolster the resources and connections they can provide to the community. The organization also works with grassroots, community-based mental health advocates – like Myra Anderson, head of Brave Souls on Fire and co-founder of the #MASKUPCVILLE Initiative – in its quest to help women of color lead healthier lives.
There are several organizations that offer mental health and wellness services to underserved, often-overlooked people in the region. The city of Charlottesville’s Home to Hope program provides group support sessions and resources to the formerly incarcerated, a means of healing the trauma often experienced or exacerbated by state-sanctioned confinement. The World Health Organization reports that “prisons are bad for mental health” for reasons including “overcrowding, various forms of violence, enforced solitude or conversely, lack of privacy, lack of meaningful activity, isolation from social networks, insecurity about future prospects …, and inadequate health services, especially mental health services.” There were more than 31,000 people living in central Virginia in December 2020 who had previously served time in jail or prison and were, although free from facilities, still on probation or parole; this clarifies and contextualizes the importance of organizations like Home to Hope and the therapeutic support services they provide to vulnerable members of society.
Common Ground Healing Arts offers a monthly yoga class for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in partnership with The Women’s Initiative, and organized by Eboni Bugg, a local trauma therapist, yoga instructor and mental health advocate. The center also offers mediation sessions for people of color, led by people of color, which are accessible via Zoom every first, second and fourth Sunday monthly, 2:00-3:30 p.m.
The Central Virginia Clinicians of Color Network offers an array of culturally-responsive mental health services to citizens of color in Charlottesville and the surrounding region. The Network provides Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy at no cost to people of color, treating post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and other issues (like racism and microaggressions) they may experience. This service is held by appointment only at Jefferson School City Center; call 434-218-0440 for more information.
“People of color, particularly African-Americans, feel the [mental health] stigma more keenly,” said Bebe Moore Campbell before her death in 2006. Campbell, an award-winning author, founder of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Urban Los Angeles chapter, a Black woman, and mother to a daughter with mental illness championed mental health care for people of color in America. “In a race-conscious society, some don’t want to be perceived as having yet another deficit.” Through the continued work of the mental health services organizations mentioned here and emerging throughout the Piedmont region, citizens of color may access resources to help them step out of the shadow of stigma and onto a path of healing, health, and holistic wellness.
Black and Latinx people are dying disproportionately from COVID-19 in the Piedmont region; why have so few been vaccinated?
by Samantha Willis | Photos by Lorenzo Dickerson | Art by Sahara Clemons
In the final month of the turbulent year 2020, Sandra Lindsay – a New York City critical care nurse, who also happens to be a Black woman – became the first American outside of clinical trials to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Now, nearly two months later, Black Americans continue to die from the coronavirus at disproportionate rates, almost three times that of White Americans. Though Black people are impacted most severely by COVID, they make up less than six percent of the millions of Americans who’ve been vaccinated; Hispanic people account for only 11 percent of vaccinations in the country. In Charlottesville and the surrounding region, the statistics tell a similar story, and a chorus of community voices calls for change.
According to an emailed statement by Blue Ridge Health District health director Dr. Denise Bonds in response to community advocate Myra Anderson’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for racial demographic data of those vaccinated by the district, as of February 5, 2021, the Blue Ridge Health District (BRHD) had administered a total of 5,642 doses of the vaccine. Of those vaccinated, 4,873 of those people were white, and 426 were Black. Importantly, these numbers represent only the vaccines that BRHD has administered, not the total number of vaccines administered in the district; both the University of Virginia and Sentara Martha Jefferson hospital systems are coordinating their own vaccination efforts.
To put into perspective the figures revealed by Dr. Bonds, consider that the Blue Ridge Health District serves more than 250,000 people in the city of Charlottesville and in Albemarle, Greene, Fluvanna, Louisa and Nelson counties; the majority of these people are white, yet Blacks and Latinix people account for more than a quarter of the district’s total COVID case count, 43 percent of COVID hospitalizations, and 22 percent of COVID deaths, according to data gathered from its website on February 13.
Although the area’s vaccine distribution has been admittedly hampered by limited supply, and hiccups at the state and federal levels, the process, spearheaded by the Blue Ridge Health District at the direction of the Virginia Department of Health, “has clearly been lacking,” says Dr. Ebony Hilton, an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the University of Virginia, a problem she attributes to a “trickle-down” impact from the flawed federal vaccination response.
Dr. Ebony Hilton, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Virginia
“So we say, ‘Phase 1a and Phase 1b makes sense,’ but let’s examine that,” says Dr. Hilton, referring to the phases of vaccination set by the Virginia Department of Health, which determines which groups are offered the vaccine first. Healthcare workers and residents and staff of long term care facilities comprise Phase 1a; frontline essential workers, adults age 65 and older, people age 16 to 64 with preexisting health conditions that put them at greater risk of contracting COVID-19, and staff and residents of correctional facilities, migrant labor camps and homeless shelter round out Phase 1b. “Honestly, when we look at who’s dying most from COVID, who is being hospitalized with the most severe COVID symptoms, certain segments of the public – including Black [people] and Brown [people] and communities of color – are obviously at much greater risk.”
Additionally, cultural norms fueled by inequality may put these communities at a disadvantage concerning vaccination, says Dr. Hilton.
“Many of our [Black and Hispanic] elders are not living in long-term care facilities because many of their families don’t have the personal resources to access the care there. We know that Black families have less generational wealth than white families,” says Dr. Hilton, due to financial inequities that were present long before the pandemic. “So, often, these older folks of color are at home, sometimes living with multiple generations of their family under one roof. That’s a higher risk for COVID-19, but these types of folks can’t get the vaccine within the current phasing guidelines.”
The Blue Ridge Health District, formerly the Thomas Jefferson Health District, changed its name at the start of the year. Removing the president and slave owner’s name from its moniker is reflective of the agency’s commitment to understanding and serving the diverse communities it serves, says Rebecca Schmidt, BRHD’s Director of Partnerships and Strategic Initiatives.
“It’s a symbolic change; it’s a signal that we’re committed to the work of improving equity in health care, but it’s not the end of the work,” says Schmidt. She acknowledges the community concerns that the vaccine is not being distributed equitably, and says that technology has contributed to this challenge.
“When we talk about equity, the IT systems that were built for [COVID vaccination] registration and appointments were not built with equity in mind,” says Schmidt. She says BRHD is working with its partners at UVa and Sentara – who are each leading their own vaccination efforts – to create a more localized dashboard that will include racial equity in its analysis of the vaccination process as it continues unfolding.
In the meantime, the BRHD says it is actively partnering with community advocates and organizations to host vaccination events throughout the district, in a targeted focus on improving Black and Latinx residents’ access to the vaccine. One such advocate, Myra Anderson, has been vocal about her community’s concerns, ranging from a perceived lack of transparency about who is getting vaccinated (hence her FOIA request) to issues with the way the district has disseminated vaccine information.
Myra Anderson pictured in the center giving out COVID supplies. Photo from original ‘Determined Series’
“The forms to register for the vaccine, they are all online,” she says. “If you don’t have high-speed internet access or even a personal computer at home,” a reality for some members of marginalized communities in the Charlottesville region and across the state, “online-only forms are a barrier for you. We really need … to be more inclusive in their thinking and planning of this process.”
Anderson says she, and a group of the area’s Black leaders, helped to plan a vaccination event originally slated for Saturday, Feb. 13 but rescheduled due to inclement weather. Several organizations, including BRHD and Sentara, backed the event, which was a targeted effort to vaccinate Black people and others of color in the region. Anderson says these events are also an opportunity for BRHD and other groups to build trust with the Black community.
Response to FOIA request by Myra Anderson
“Black people have a right to hesitancy! Especially with our history,” says Anderson, noting historic examples of the medical establishment’s mistreatment of Blacks, such as Henrietta Lacks. Lacks, a Black woman born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1920, unwittingly became the donor of “immortal” cells – taken from her cancerous cervix by white doctors without her consent – which changed the course of medical and scientific history. Lacks’ “HeLa” cells expanded research capabilities, contributed directly to a cure for polio, and were the first human cells sent into space; they remain an inconceivable gift to humankind. Lacks died in poverty in 1951 and was buried without benefit from the incredible cells taken from her body without her knowledge or permission.
Considering Lacks, and other chilling examples like The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Anderson says a little lingering unease towards medical authority is to be expected, and should not block Black people from accessing the coronavirus vaccine. If Black people in the region express hesitancy or distrust about the vaccine, BRHD and other agencies should not “think that it’s a hard no; think it’s a slow yes, and take every opportunity to show us you care about equity like you say you do.”
CVS is preparing for a nationwide rollout of the COVID-19 Vaccine
Schmidt says that the BRHD continues working to ensure its coronavirus vaccination rollout is as equitable and accessible a process as possible, and will build on the work it began with the publication of its MAPP2HEALTH report in 2019. The study highlighted the systemic, structural racism present in and supported by Virginia’s public health system since its inception, and pinpointed various means to mitigate these historic wrongs with the guidance and aid of its Black residents and other groups of color. Dr. Hilton has some suggestions for them, the state, and federal health agencies, too.
The vaccination Clinic planned for February 13 was canceled due to inclement weather.
“The first would be [to implement] age adjustment along the lines of race,” into vaccine phasing, she says. “We know what the numbers show; instead of saying a blanket age of 65-plus or 75-plus, when we know Black people are dying at an early age, it should be adjusted to reflect that.” She echoes Anderson’s calls for improved communication, including physically mailing vaccine registration information to all available addresses so that homes without reliable internet access don’t miss out, and collaborating directly with Spanish-speaking health workers to break down language barriers and increase access in Hispanic communities. Ultimately, local, state, and federal entities “need to build equity into every, single structure and strain of our health care systems.”
Beginning on February 16, 2021, the Charlottesville Inclusive Media Project and journalist Samantha Willis will revisit the previous Determined series and embark on a community storytelling project “Still Determined” to contextualize and explore the immediate impacts and long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Central Virginia community. This multimodal storytelling project employs art by Sahara Clemons, audio-visual content by Lorenzo Dickerson, and journalism to explore the realities of the pandemic, highlight stories of resilience and struggle, and examine the possibilities and difficulties of building a stronger and more inclusive community.
In this project, we have chosen to focus on the following 5 key areas:
Virus Vaccination
COVID Effects on Education
Mental Health Challenges
Economic Challenges and Opportunities
Long-Term Implications in a Post-Pandemic World
The stories will be co-produced by all partners of the CIM Project and appear on all outlets’ channels and platforms with the intention of building a larger, more diverse, audience than either outlet currently reaches. The reporting energy will center on how the social determinants of health operate in people’s lives and how people, systems, and processes play a role in creating the current and future conditions. The collective approach is designed to uplift a collective community voice that explores how systems should be equitably reconstructed in a post-COVID world.
by Jordy Yager
Artwork by Sahara Clemons
Photo by Lorenzo Dickerson
In closing the Determined series, we wanted readers to hear from Mayor Nikuyah Walker. Born and raised in Charlottesville, and having devoted much of her life to serving others, Walker is in a unique position that affords her daily conversations with the region’s most determined residents, and those who are often not prioritized by our systems and structures. She is also the only Black official on either the City Council or the Board of Supervisors.
In this conversation, we discuss many of the Social Determinants of Health that the series investigated — from the role of employers and the role of the University of Virginia, to that of affordable housing, and why she votes ‘No’ on some development projects. Walker also shares her thoughts behind the recently raised topic of removing school resources officers from Charlottesville City Schools, speaking about the broader role of education, and where it can better serve Black students.
And finally, she speaks about the City’s responsibility to continue shifting towards greater racial and economic equity, and the personal cost that comes with moving systems that have been entrenched and engrained in our communities for generations.
JY: When thinking about racial and economic equity in employment, what can be done to desegregate and improve the job force?
NW: I don’t know if that conversation starts with employment. I think it’s hard to get [racial and economic equity] if you’re an employee, especially if you work for people who meet their needs first. And I know that doesn’t do anything about larger employers like the City of Charlottesville or the University of Virginia, and the fact we need to pay a just wage, which is not $15 an hour either.
This is about valuing what people do on a daily basis. You also have to talk about what our school system is preparing people for. I think we see that the factory worker assembly-line type of output is not working. It’s not the economy we have today. It has failed kids for so long.
So then you get to a world that’s built on technology. We know people can figure out any technology placed in their hands, so I think we have to reverse how we think about that — if we can place a phone or a gaming system in someone’s hands and they figure it out with no problem, then what if we put the pieces of the technology in their hands, coupled with apprentice-style programs, could they also then build and create the game?
I think until we switch to that way of thinking, we’re going to have this level of inequality that we have in the job market. I mean we’re just failing everyone at every level. I think it starts with being a business owner and education.
JY: For business owners who have to hire employees, how can they better show that they value their employees?
NW: Everything from time-off to benefits, what are we offering you to work here? They need life insurance, health insurance, paid time-off, and vacation time. These are all things I have worked on since I’ve been at the City, to make sure people know we value them.
Last month I proposed we allow department directors to outline the details, but that once a month, we would allow 25% of the workforce to get a week off. That didn’t go well. But I was able to get employees two days off. So we did that on May 11 and May 22. One of those ended up being a 4-day weekend and the other was a 3-day weekend.
Part of the feedback I received, when I was advocating for that, was people saying, “But people are already home.” So there was a lack of understanding that even if people are home, they’re still working. And they’re not home with their feet up. They’re home trying to educate their kids, keep their job, and help people who are in crisis. And they haven’t even been afforded the opportunity to provide for their own families. And we have the resources at the City-level to be able to implement additional benefits to help people, to provide mental health assistance during a crisis, but other businesses probably don’t have that.
At the beginning of this pandemic there were businesses that, without the Payroll Protection Program, their first immediate thought was to lay people off. I’m not sure if they had reserves or not, but from what I saw there are major issues with them not having three to six months of business expenses.
This was a major crisis, so it’s not surprising, but it’s something people often say about low-income people: ‘Why do they overspend?’ But what we saw with the requests coming into the City from businesses, is that most people seem to be having this problem. And so I wonder if there is even a real understanding of the fiscal sustainability and management that’s needed to be able to give your employees those types of benefits that will help them.
JY: Do you think of the City government as a model for how private sector businesses and nonprofits should treat their employees?
NW: I don’t think we’re a model yet. But I think anyone can treat people really well, and then become a model for someone else who’s watching them. I would like for the City to be a model, but we’re not there at this time.
JY: Where does that inability to treat employees considerately and responsibly come from?
NW: It’s probably not intentional. I think when you’re talking about small businesses they probably don’t have the revenue coming in, but I don’t know.
When I’m talking about education and how we transform that system, I think what we value is important. If you can start training someone to be an electrician, they will always be able to take care of themselves. If you can train someone to be a plumber, they can always take care of themselves.
The transformation also requires asking people what they are interested in, and you don’t do anything differently if they say, “I want to be a mechanic,” or if they say, “I want to be an attorney.” You prepare them so that even if they’re becoming the plumber or mechanic they said they wanted to be, that they are able to be an attorney if they choose to.
And right now, because of the education gaps that have been created, we don’t have those types of services in place for our kids. Just because you go to a 4-year institution shouldn’t mean it’s more valued. There was a time when trades were paying more than some 4-year degrees earned hourly, but people were told that they shouldn’t or couldn’t go into that line of work, because it wasn’t valued by society. And that creates a situation where people say, “Well if I can’t do this, I definitely can’t see myself there.” And then nothing happens in their life, and the system is to blame for that.
JY: How does that system start to change?
NW: You have to have the resources — which we do, so that’s not a problem — but I think you have to be intentional about undoing the systems.
I’m not so sure our Black and Brown kids can learn in a system that wasn’t created for them. And people want them in these systems because they bring in revenue, but I don’t know if they’re really valued or offered the opportunities to really learn and unlock the things that are hidden in their minds.
JY: What are your thoughts on pulling School Resource Officers (SROs) out of schools?
NW: There are so many layers to pulling SROs out of schools. Until we truly fix the issues of poverty, there will be disruptions in schools that are caused by children who are in pain. We already have every social worker in town going into the schools or serving the same kids that SROs would be in the schools for. SROs aren’t in there just to keep people out who would do mass shootings — that’s an afterthought.
So now we have all of these people making demands, and they’re not really thinking through the demands. In my perfect world, there are no police in schools, there are no police anywhere. But that’s not the world we live in. So how do we make sure our kids get what they need?
That part is missing from the conversations that I’ve been a part of, and it’s been missing for years. And that means we just failed our kids on a bigger level.
JY: What are other things that would help the issues that SROs were put there to solve?
NW: I think what would be better are schools built on a foundation of cultural integrity, which public schools are not. Black kids who go to African-centric schools, where they learn about their history, they are not learning to love white culture or how to participate in white supremacy or how to be underemployed and provide services in rich communities like Charlottesville. Those students do better.
There is a public and a private experience in our public schools now, and so long as some people are comfortable with that, things will continue along those lines. If you walk into a school and you have the majority of advanced placement, dual-enrollment, and honors courses full of white kids, you have a private school system within the public school system. You’re failing a large percentage of the population. So even if they can walk past each other in the hallways while changing classes or going to lunch, they are not in this same school system.
People need significant amounts of resources so that we don’t end up with a lottery where 50 kids out of the 4,000 that we’re failing can come to this other school. Rather, you provide those resources and opportunities so anyone can go to these schools. But we don’t have these structures in Charlottesville, and we probably don’t have the people who could create them.
One of the thoughts we had when City of Promise started was to start a school for the kids. We would compare the data from our school to the data from the public schools, and because of the success we were sure we’d have, it would force the public schools to do something different. We would have the same kids from the same neighborhoods and we would be able to educate them and give them what they need. And so we’d be destroying the whole notion that, “People only do as well as they can do.” I hope that’s still possible, I’m very interested in it. It really comes down to state and federal funding.
JY: How are you feeling about the state of affordable housing here?
NW: Nothing has been resolved at this moment. We have some plans in place, but we haven’t fixed anything yet. We’re hoping to fix it, and I believe we would have started construction by now on Crescent Halls and South First Street if it hadn’t been for COVID-19.
What I’m hoping that COVID might do — since we need it to do something good because it’s been so destructive — is to make landlords possibly see for the first time that they don’t have this guaranteed source of income with UVA students, and that it may be beneficial for them to rent to local families. Those types of changes are necessary so people can live within the city limits and right now I think COVID-19 gives us an opportunity to have landlords who have forever thought that, “I have this guaranteed source of income,” to maybe reconsider that. It’s probably the only shot we will ever get to reverse that tide.
JY: Is that a conversation that’s happening?
NW: I’m having it. I’ve had it with our housing specialist and with Home to Hope staff so they can add it to their pitch when they’re talking to landlords. I have not picked up the phone and called the landlords to say, ‘Hey,’ but I’ve been having this conversation with the City’s housing program coordinator too. I know that one of the potential areas we’re thinking of funding is to provide rental assistance directly to the landlords on behalf of people. I’m still debating how I feel about that.
JY: Why do you sometimes vote “no” on developments that do not promise to build units priced below 60% AMI, or those that pledge to price only 10-15% of their units below market-rate?
NW: If you truly understand that there used to be more Black people here than white people, and now there are more white people here, and you start having that conversation about “Why?” and then you say, “I’m going to build 100 units here, 400 units there, 30 units here,” — and every time you say, “I’ll give 1-3, or 1-5 affordable units,” I don’t think the math adds up.
You will always have a greater percentage of the white and higher-income people in the area because they are attracted to the area, so if you’re even pretending that you’re committed to affordable housing, then I’m going to stretch you a little bit there and I’m going to ask you to prove your commitment to affordable housing is authentic.
If you can only build 20 units by-right, and you come and say, “Oh, I want to build 100 units on this,” based on the same laws that you want me to follow, the laws that you’re now trying to figure out a way to circumvent, I can, in my world, ask you for something else. You want something to now apply to you that doesn’t apply to you by-right, so I’m going to ask you to include more affordable housing.
I don’t think it really works though, because people don’t want people to live in these buildings or in these homes or in these neighborhoods, so we still have that issue. You’re basically pleading for someone to believe in affordable housing where you’re going to set them up potentially for failure because they’re going to be living amongst people who don’t find any value in them. So that’s another thing that I’m often thinking about: even if we get someone who makes 50% AMI into 600 West Main, are they going to be happy in that building? The answer is: probably not.
So those are the types of things that I’m thinking about when people are offering crumbs. I know they are benefiting from building more units, or they wouldn’t be asking us for an SUP. If it worked out for them, in their board rooms and around their round tables, they wouldn’t come before us and ask, especially since they have to deal with the headache of me.
JY: Where does UVA fit into this conversation, in terms of being a better neighbor?
NW: One thing I hope that doesn’t get lost in this pandemic is UVA’s commitment to workforce and hopefully low-income housing — the 1,000-1,500 units they promised to build over the next 10 years. I hope we get more than that, because they owe more than that, but I could see them feeling the need to come out of the economic crisis we’re in, and will be in for a while, and say that it will take them 10 years to rebuild.
If people are putting equity issues on hold until they feel they’ve arrived back at whatever status they were previously at, then that means we’ll have another decade and another generation of people who won’t have access to resources they need to transform their lives. That’s one thing I’m most concerned about, because those conversations are happening in the city and there’s a complete disregard for people’s lives. The common themes throughout the conversations are, “How can we stay afloat?”
Even at the City, we have pots of money we haven’t touched. While no one wants to use every dollar that they have, and we understand it’s important to have reserves, it’s also important to understand that if people are in a worse situation than they are in right now, which is already pretty bad — it’s a horrible situation, the poverty levels, the miseducation, the current health outcomes — if we allow them to become worse in an attempt to survive the pandemic, which we’re going to survive anyway, then I think we will have failed people. And I think that’s what UVA might do. They might say, “We have to get back whatever we feel we lost,” and they’ll lose sight of all the things they said they would do to become not just great but good — nobody told them they were great in the first place.
JY: A big takeaway for me in reporting the Determined series was seeing how well programs and efforts work when the people who are most impacted and most affected are put in positions of power, and in decision-making roles. And yet, a lot of people are wedded to the status quo, which does not always prize those skills and expertise as much. How do you deal with that?
NW: That’s something that I’m struggling with now. I really think I’m wasting my time, because even people who think they get it, really don’t get it. They don’t know how to really create the solutions to the problems we’re facing. They bring in what they think they know to be true, but they don’t know how to unpack that and question themselves about why they feel the way they do. And those individuals are usually the people with the power, and are either the resources themselves, or are the access points for the resources, so they won’t destroy the foundation they created, and they won’t get out of your way so you can create new foundations. And if you don’t change that part of the equation, of who has access to resources, then you are dependent upon people who have this savior-type mentality. So I don’t know, I really don’t know.
I appreciate being in this world, but I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here at this time. I’m way ahead of something, and being in this position on Council has shown me that in a way that nothing else ever has. As long as the resources remain with the people who currently have them, or the people who make decisions about the resources but who don’t really get it, or only think they get it, we have a problem. I don’t know how to redirect that because I’m only one person, and I’m exhausted.
by Jordy Yager
Artwork by Sahara Clemons
Photos & Video Montage by Lorenzo Dickerson
Stacey Washington feels blessed these days. She’s 41 years old, has six healthy children — five adults and an 11-year old — and three grandkids. She works for the city of Charlottesville’s Office of Economic Development and makes a decent amount of money. She’s got some savings and a place to live.
“Don’t get me wrong, I won’t complain because I have a place to live, but I would like a nicer place,” said Washington. “I feel I deserve it, and I can afford it.”
But it’s not that simple. Townhouses, apartment complexes, private landlords — each time, she pays a fee, submits a rental application and they tell her it looks good.
“But as soon as they run my criminal background they say no” she said.
Washington has several past larceny convictions. So she explains this to prospective landlords. “They say, ‘Well, OK, we’ll see what we can do,’” she said. Then, she gets an impersonal email from them saying her application was denied.
What’s worse is that now she makes too much to qualify for low-income subsidized housing, and if Washington’s current landlord decided to sell her place, which she could do at any time, she’d be homeless. “With all of my money, with my good job and everything, I’d be homeless, because I don’t have the option to just go and rent a place,” said Washington.
Washington is a peer-navigator for the city’s recently created Home to Hope, a resource program for people returning home from jail or prison. She sees these barriers at almost every juncture — housing, jobs, access to healthy food. It’s part of why Home to Hope exists — to give a fighting chance to people whose pasts are constantly held over and against them, said Washington.
“I’m very intelligent, I’m articulate, I just come with a little bit of baggage,” she said. “I can put that baggage down if you allow me. But you’re the one that keeps making me pick it up every time you ask me these questions.”
Washington also knows that if she, with all her success, still faces these barriers, that it’s much harder for program participants who haven’t made it this far yet.
“I know what my participants go through, because I’m going through it myself right now,” she said.
Growing up in Charlottesville, the only resources people told her about were the Department of Social Services and the Women, Infants and Children program. Washington said she’s been incarcerated in every women’s prison in the state, and none of them offered her resources.
“They don’t tell you about them,” she said. “They keep them hidden and they give people preferential treatment. A lot of resources are through nonprofit organizations, but if it’s not-for-profit, why do I have to be so privileged to know about the resources? Why are agencies not telling me?”
Home to Hope Peer Navigator Stacey Washington
While Washington was incarcerated, her daughter connected with Ridge Schuyler, the dean of Piedmont Virginia Community College’s community self-sufficiency program, who also helped found the Network to Work job skill training and placement program. There, her daughter trained to become a certified nursing assistant. The program is amazing, she told her mother.
When Washington was released, her daughter introduced her to Schuyler and Frank Squillace, the director of Network to Work. She was interested in the weekslong program but needed a job immediately. Nobody would hire her, though, because of her criminal record. But she knew the manager at Panera Bread, and got a job. There, Schuyler would come in for lunch, ordering the strawberry poppyseed salad every time. “From that day forward we built a relationship,” she said.
Now, Home to Hope has a seamless partnership with Network to Work, as they work with some of the 90 program participants to lay out their path forward. Life is like driving a car, Washington said. It’s important to check the mirrors to make sure the past doesn’t creep up from behind. “But if you drive your car looking through your mirrors, you’re going to crash,” she said.
“You could not bring him back with you”
As a child, Mayor Nikuyah Walker went with her great-grandmother to state prison to visit her youngest son, Walker’s grandfather. Back then, they were allowed to bring picnic baskets of food.
“I remember her heart breaking each time she was preparing the food, and when she had to leave him there, because while you could take him all of his favorite foods, you could not bring him back with you,” said Walker. “And I remember just that quiet, intense sorrow.”
As a teenager, Walker watched cousins, her same age, get incarcerated, spending more than a decade in prison. She remembers sitting in a Charlottesville courtroom and seeing the judge call her cousin “garbage.”
“From the bench, this white judge said, ‘You’re garbage’ and no one did anything,” said Walker.
Walker has been the main driving force behind launching Home to Hope, drawing inspiration from these memories, though the program’s real genesis, she said, is owed to former City Councilor Holly Edwards, who died in 2017 but first saw the need and envisioned it.
Walker wanted the program to do two things. She wanted the peer navigators, who themselves have been locked up, to be the first people participants see when they’re released — to build relationships and trust and advocate for them. There are other re-entry programs in the Charlottesville area — Healthy Transitions, the Offender Aid and Restoration program — but Home to Hope is the only one whose entire staff has experienced incarceration.
Walker also wanted the program to allow navigators and participants to learn that, on their own journey of healing from deep levels of trauma, they could help others heal as well, while also earning close to a living wage with a starting hourly salary of $18 an hour, she said.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, at least twice a week Home to Hope staff went to the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail (ACRJ) to talk with inmates about their upcoming release — to develop short and long term goals, and discuss what’s called a Wellness Recovery Access Plan (WRAP).
“We are not only asking people with Home to Hope about jobs, but we are asking them about careers and those dreams they have probably given up a long time ago,” said Walker. “It’s been something that I have hoped for a long time someone would fix.”
“It feels very deflating”
Whitmore Merrick, a Home to Hope peer navigator, said much of Home to Hope’s efficacy lies in its ability to connect one-on-one, and in-person, with participants. But since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ACRJ, to prevent an outbreak, has not let outside visitors other than attorneys in, making it more difficult to connect with people in jail, he said.
Merrick would also normally have spent the last two months introducing participants to outside partners, helping them build their own networks. Peer navigators had planned to host a giant in-person event called “Hope Starts Here” to do exactly that, but with the pandemic, they switched to a virtual Zoom version.
Several dozen people showed up, including area housing and resource providers. Washington relayed some of her life experiences, explaining how rules and regulations have prevented her from moving forward. Merrick agreed, saying there needs to be more ways to hold boarding house landlords accountable. The units are old and neglected, having not been renovated in decades, but because housing is scarce, they get away with it.
“We’re dealing with slumlords, to be quite honest,” said Merrick.
(From left to right) Home to Hope Peer Navigators Whitmore Merrick, Stacey Washington, Ramanda Jackson, and Shadeé Gilliam.
Peer navigator Ramanda Jackson raised another key issue. When people return from jail or prison, they often go back to whatever support structures they have — family, close friends — especially to find a place to live. But, she said, it’s almost impossible to get a person with a criminal record added to a lease.
One participant in the program currently lives at the Salvation Army, she said. He’s working and has a housing voucher.
“He went to all these different landlords, and even though he had the money to move in, and the voucher to back him, because he also had a record, they denied him,” said Jackson. “I don’t care what kind of money or voucher you have; you cannot live in this neighborhood in Charlottesville.”
Jackson told him to keep trying, that all he needs is one person to say, “yes,” but it’s hard, she said. “It feels very deflating,” said Jackson, who has a felony conviction from 26 years ago. “I paid my debt to society, and now you’re telling me that I still have to fight this just to have somewhere to go?”
Shadeé Gilliam, also a peer navigator with the program, said he’s talked with some landlords who have had outrageous requirements for prospective tenants, imposing rules on when and how often they can have guests or the hours they have to keep.
“It made me question whether the landlord even saw the participant as a human being,” said Gilliam. “You’re not outright telling me no, but you’re putting me in a position where I definitely don’t want to be here.”
All navigators agreed that housing, especially for those with criminal records, who also don’t have savings or living-wage jobs, is nearly non-existent in Charlottesville, especially with the pandemic cutting down on the number of people moving.
Washington said that despite these obstacles, she sees participants’ determination. She’s been working with a woman she was incarcerated with. She was released from jail into Region Ten’s Women’s Center at Moore Creek, a residential substance treatment facility, where she stayed until her insurance ran out. She had nowhere to go, though, so Washington and the Home to Hope team got her a hotel room until she was able to move into one of the homes maintained by Oxford Houses, another recovery program.
Now, she’s in drug court and passing the drug screens, she has a job and is doing well, said Washington. “She could have gotten high and given up after the Women’s Center, but she didn’t, she contacted me,” she said. “She didn’t have to go to the Oxford House, but she did. That’s a success.”
Eddie Harris, the head of Ready Kids’ Real Dads program, has worked with incarcerated fathers for years, and serves as a mentor for many Home to Hope participants and peer navigators. As good as these outcomes are, Harris said, the work isn’t done until the system is changed.
“Until there are opportunities for everyone, I think it’s really hard to point success out,” said Harris.
“That’s the problem”
Legal Aid Justice Center community organizer Harold Folley
Years ago, Harold Folley applied for a job at the University of Virginia Medical Center to clean rooms at the hospital. He was acing the in-person interview, but the interviewer’s body language shifted when he saw Folley had checked the box asking if he’d been convicted of a felony. His interviewer paused, and told Folley, “I don’t think we’re going to hire you, because the nurses will probably think you’ll steal some drugs off their carts,” recalled Folley.
For the last two years Folley has worked as a community organizer with the Legal Aid Justice Center’s Civil Rights & Racial Justice program. For the last three years, he’s worked as a facilitator with the People’s Coalition, a grassroots organizing group that pushes for transparency and accountability in the criminal justice system.
Since the pandemic, Folley’s been crafting a series of recommendations to the City Council in response to a 135-page study released earlier this year by the MGT Consulting Group that looked for racial disparity in a 2014-2016 chunk of data from the ACRJ. At almost every juncture, the study found disparity with how Black inmates were treated as compared to white inmates — they serve twice as many days in jail when convicted for comparable crimes with similar criminal histories and similar accompanying charges; they are 31% more likely to be found guilty for the same charge; they are more likely to be charged with accompanying crimes; they are more likely to be denied a bonded release.
Photo credit: MGT Consulting Group
The study showed what happens to people after they are charged, convicted and incarcerated, but Folley wants to know about the front-end — what about the American legacy of policing, and criminalizing race and economics?
There are multiple points along the criminal justice system where the discretion of law enforcement officials is key — police, magistrates, commonwealth attorneys, judges, probation officers — they all have leeway to make a range of decisions, inevitably informed by their worldview. But officials who oversee many of these critical junction points did not provide the research team with data.
“That’s the problem, the first contact in the criminal justice system is the police department,” said Folley.
In 2016, however, a city-funded study of the juvenile criminal justice system revealed significant levels of racial disproportionality. Black children were reported, arrested, placed on probation, sent to court,and stopped and frisked more often than white kids.
To shed more light on how police-level interactions contribute to the racial disparity and disproportionality in the criminal justice system, the University of Virginia Equity Center’s Michele Claibourn and Sam Powers created a new website and map for the “Determined” series. With Charlottesville Police Department data from 2012-2014 and 2016-2017 gathered through Freedom of Information Act requests over the years from attorney Jeff Fogel, the site details the racial disproportionality that exists when police stop residents on the street.
The Equity Center analysis found that police conduct an average of 11.9 stops per month, and that 65% of these stops result in a search or frisk. Racially, it found that for every two white residents police stopped, they stopped five Black residents.
Photo Credit: UVA’s Equity Center
The data are reliably broken down between only Black and white residents — no other races or ethnicities. When Charlottesville’s total population is similarly broken down, removing all others, Black residents make up 21.2% and white residents 78.8%, according to the U.S. Census. But, according to the Equity Center analysis, Black people made up 68.3% of the people police stopped without frisking or searching them, and 72.4% of those they stopped and frisked — nearly four times what is racially proportionate. The site details the reasons that police cited for the stops as well, careful to stipulate that the nature of a stop does not mean a crime has been committed, nor an arrest made.
The data speak to a reality Black residents have long relayed, that their communities are over-policed. In the Orangedale and Prospect neighborhood, where 57% of the population is Black and life expectancy is 6.2 years less that of white residents a mile away — Black residents make up 77.2% of the people police stopped.
Photo Credit: UVA’s Equity Center
In the Ridge Street area, which includes the Sixth Street and South First Street public housing neighborhoods along with Friendship Court, 40% of the population is Black and life expectancy 8.9 years less than nearby white neighborhoods. There, Black people made up 91% of the people police stopped — 51 of the 56 stops. In the Locust Grove and Martha Jefferson neighborhoods, where 90% of the current population is white, police stopped people just three times over the same time period: two white, one Black. This means that police stopped people in these white neighborhoods, which historically contained racist covenants preventing Black people from living there, more than 19 times less than in the Ridge Street neighborhood a half-mile away. This pattern holds true for other historically racistly restricted neighborhoods as well: Fry’s Spring, North Downtown, Little High, Rugby, Jefferson Park Avenue, and more.
The MGT Consulting Group study strongly recommended the formation of a “fully functioning, independent” Civilian Review Board (CRB). Earlier this year, City Council approved an initial CRB, which has gone through many trials to get this far but stopped short of granting it investigative reach or the disciplinary power advocates wanted. Folley said he’s holding out hope because the council funded it with $150,000 in the recently passed fiscal year 2021 budget, and incoming CRB members can redraft the groups bylaws, potentially opening the door for more authority later this year.
But beyond a CRB, the racial disparity report’s first recommendation was to fund re-entry programs, like Home to Hope, to assist people coming home “with housing, education and job training so those labeled as ‘criminals’ can realistically obtain higher-paying jobs and viable, rewarding career paths.”
And while any future data from the police department, magistrates and courts will surely be the ultimate lens of how personal racial bias exists in each areas, the report highlights what sociologist Joe Feagin called, “indirect institutional discrimination” — the laws, public policies and procedures enforced by law enforcement that appear to be race-neutral in their language, but which are racist in practice.
“I just hope we can make more change”
As uprisings, marches and protests have erupted through the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, Whitmore Merrick has watched closely, looking for ways that greater systemic shifts might occur. “I feel there’s so much overwhelming pain,” he said. “I just hope we can make more change.”
As someone with a felony conviction, Merrick said he’s felt disregarded by many decision-makers over the years. So he finds hope when, like earlier this week, he gets to talk with someone like Democratic Del. Sally Hudson. He told her he’d like to see three significant changes from the state.
Merrick wants an easy way for people who have served their sentenced time to have the chance to expunge their records. He also wants a way to ensure that drug-related convictions don’t prevent people from accessing government funded benefits, such as housing or financial aid for school. And his last big push is to ease child support requirements for fathers while they’re incarcerated. All three of these have a bevy of ripple effects, he said, that cost the greater society, all in an attempt to continue punishing individuals already being punished.
Hudson too relishes opportunities like these to talk to people like Merrick who are on the ground doing the hard work. “You don’t have the governor’s staff in your cell phone, but I do,” said Hudson. “My job is to be a funnel for those voices in the community.”
Merrick’s also had positive conversations with the city and county commonwealth’s attorneys and the local sheriff’s offices about making significant changes and incorporating Home to Hope into their network of solutions for those facing charges.
“I speak to the people,” said Merrick. “So to be able to pass that on and to have those conversations with the people able to make change, that gives me hope.”
In early April, Hudson and 16 other delegates penned a four-page letter to Gov. Ralph Northam, calling his attention to the more than 57,000 incarcerated Virginians — 58% of whom are Black. The lawmakers asked Northam to release children held by the Department of Juvenile Justice, as well as adult prisoners through geriatric parole, clemency and the power of the pulpit. He should call on commonwealth’s attorneys to reconsider bond and release all eligible pre-trial prisoners, nearly half of the state’s jail population. To date, the state has released only about 200 people in response to the pandemic.
Instead, prisoner release has fallen to local leaders. Since March 17, Folley and a team of activists and local law enforcement officials have worked to figure out how to reduce the number of people police arrest and the number of people being evicted from housing while increasing the number of people being released from jail.
“It’s a deathtrap for people who are incarcerated,” said Folley. “Folks in jail don’t come out and get COVID, people who work in jail bring it in with them.”
He’s still working to get the last eligible people, about a dozen inmates, out of the ACRJ, he said. He asked UVA to temporarily house them in some of its empty dormitories, but they said no, adding that they needed to be renovated instead, he said.
“Voters get lost in the crossfire”
At the core of much of the structural and systemic racism occurring throughout the state, said Hudson, is a very strong governance tension between where the state should step in — by setting the tone or providing resources or guidance — and where it should step back and grant more authority to local governments.
Localities like Charlottesville are clamoring for change — whether it’s taking down Jim Crow-era statues, or tasking a CRB with subpoena power, or revamping its affordable housing strategy — but the Dillon Rule says localities can only do what the state expressly says it can. Hudson said this is “maddening” for those who want things to change. “But people who want to preserve the status quo love those binds because it lets them off the hook,” she said. “They say, ‘I would if I could, but I can’t, so I won’t.’”
For instance, localities want law enforcement to stop criminalizing poverty and over-policing Black people, but a significant part of over-policing, and the resulting racial disparity, stems from counties and cities raising money through the fines and fees that result from those policies, said Hudson, adding that this comes, in-part, from a lack of state incentives and funding.
Or, take sheriffs and commonwealth’s attorneys — two of the major decision-points within the criminal justice system. Both positions are required, under the state constitution, to be elected to office. This strongly encourages these officials to act as extensions of the political parties, said Hudson. “It concedes from the outset that justice is a political tool,” she said.
This structure finds its roots in the 1902 constitution. The same constitution, written by white men, which codified a poll tax to vote, and implemented literacy and property requirements, reducing the more than 146,000 eligible Black voters to less than 15,000 the next year.
In 1971, the state constitution was rewritten and re-ratified, supposing to be the first colorblind constitution. But in it, these locally elected law enforcement positions were more firmly cemented as, again, local governments depended on them for revenue to operate. “We really do have justice by geography, and it all sits in the hands of a handful of local elected officials who have enormous discretion to do what they want,” said Hudson.
Because the General Assembly is normally only in session for two months each year, it makes it difficult to keep pace with the amount of authority and discretion localities are increasingly wanting, though they make efforts. Earlier this year, Northam signed a bill that Hudson supported. It gives school principals the discretion to not report students for misdemeanor offenses.
“Everybody else in the justice system has discretion, teachers are just asking for the discretion to decide what’s best based on what they’ve seen,” said Hudson.
Many Republicans opposed the measure, saying that some forms of sexual violence against girls could be considered misdemeanors and should be required to be reported. Hudson pushed back, saying this was weaponizing people’s biased fear. She pointed to the thousands of times white people have attempted to justify lynching Black men by citing unproven, and often false, accusations of sexual assault. With this new discretion, she said, there are more opportunities to intervene at a local school level, to avoid letting people’s racism and bias determine Black children’s outcomes, sending them into the criminal justice system.
All of this back and forth over who exactly has the authority and power to change these hidden and seemingly small, but practically huge, decision points, can be confusing, Hudson said, which further perpetuates existing racist systems.
“Voters get lost in the crossfire,” she said. “They have a hard time keeping track of who has power over what so they can hold the right people accountable. That confusion favors inaction which again preserves the status quo.”
“It’s going to be beyond powerful”
What Hudson is proposing, giving localities more autonomy with state backing and funding, is in some ways a scaled-up version of what the pandemic has brought for Charlottesville’s most determined communities — whether its access to jobs, mutual aid, food equity, affordable housing, anti-displacement strategies or philanthropic models based in solidarity not charity — people are prioritizing taking instruction from those on the ground, people who are going through the struggle themselves, and then supporting them, through resources or advocacy, to craft solutions.
Recently Hudson said she’s seen an increasing willingness in the government to focus on the economic inequality involved in criminalizing poverty, but not the racist part. She points to recently passed measures that decriminalize marijuana possession, or the increased threshold for grand larceny, or the waiving of home electronic ankle monitors fees.
But these measures are half-hearted, she said. If, instead of jail time, people possessing marijuana are fined, “it means it’s legal, but only for rich people for whom that penalty is not burdensome,” said Hudson. If a charge doesn’t have jail time attached to it, people aren’t required to be given a public defender, she said. “It lets us deal with the financial component of it, but not with the racist part, which is that Black kids are still getting stopped because they’re over-policed,” said Hudson.
Folley said the pandemic has opened the window for defining what a new “normal” can be. “Now we know that all this stuff we’ve been fighting for is possible, the only way we go back is if we get amnesia,” said Folley. “We can’t let this momentum die out. What happens after the marching?”
Hudson said the proof of a community moving towards anti-racist policies and practices will be in the budget. During the Great Migration, when more than 6 million African Americans moved north from southern states, recent research by Princeton University’s Ellora Derenoncourt shows that the only increase in spending on public services for the major destination cities was in police. To undo that legacy, Hudson said, Virginia needs to be intentional.
“We now understand collectively that when you have enormous historic debts to be paid you can’t make things fair without proactively righting racist wrongs,” said Hudson. “Taxes are an investment in each other, and in the society we all want to live in together.”
This week, in a government-wide move to reassess the Charlottesville City Schools’ partnership with the Charlottesville Police Department (CPD), officials announced a community-oriented process to reassess what safe schools look like, specifically without law enforcement. To back that process, and the resulting safe schools model, officials pledged the $300,000 in funding it was using to pay CPD.
Similarly, in the recently approved fiscal year 2021 budget, councilors voted to fund Home to Hope with $350,000, though this was $55,000 less than Walker wanted. And Hollie Lee, the city’s chief of workforce development strategies, who has helped build the Home to Hope program, said that the city is exploring moving some of housing-related funds into the program’s budget, to help participants find better homes.
Former Councilor Wes Bellamy, towards the end of his four years on City Council, reflected on the promise that Home to Hope and similarly structured programs will have on Charlottesville. “I think we don’t all quite get it right now,” said Bellamy. “We don’t understand the power. And I mean, we as a community. It’s going to be beyond powerful. It swings the pendulum in another direction and one towards true equity.”
Washington sees the vision. In the future, she pictures the group of peer navigators speaking across the country, at a convention perhaps, on a stage, behind podiums. People from all over will come hear how Home to Hope works, she said. “Because they want to incorporate this type of program into their re-entry, into their system,” she said.
And Merrick too, he sees it. “We want to make a movement,” he said. “We want people to see us when we’re not together.”
Together, they’ve built a home for hope.
The Lesson (Artwork by Sahara Clemons)
Artist statement: This image of a mother helping a child with school work exemplifies the new dynamics in education and parenting that many are experiencing during COVID-19. There is uncertainty about what is in store for the upcoming academic year, but we also see disparities in access exacerbated by unequal distribution of resources. Internet access, parents’ work schedules, family structure, and intellectual capital are unevenly dispersed, which will likely have profound effects on sustaining and accelerating academic progress.
by Jordy Yager Artwork by Sahara Clemons Photos by Lorenzo Dickerson
Last September, Rachel Gregory went to the doctor. She was working at a local assisted-living facility and for months her left hip had been hurting. Since she was 17 years old, Gregory, like her mother before her, has worked in nursing and geriatric care.
“I love the joy of seeing their faces when I get them up in the morning or put them to bed,” she said of her patients. “The satisfaction of taking care of someone else, making sure they’re clean, they’re fed, they’re taken care of — it’s what I would want someone to do for my family.”
Gregory’s work is incredibly physical, she’s on her feet almost all the time. Ten years ago, she had her right hip totally replaced — she’d worn down all the cartilage until it was just bone rubbing on bone. So she was worried about the pain her left hip had recently been giving her. She was in so much pain that she couldn’t stand for longer than 10 minutes. But she dreaded what bad news might come from a doctor’s visit. “I love my work,” she said. “I didn’t want to stop working. I’ve got some years left; I don’t want to retire at 48. I want to retire at 68 or 78.”
The doctor said the pain was coming from a torn labrum, the cartilage that protects her hip socket. OK, she thought, I’ll have surgery to repair it. But there was a catch, it would require drilling into her left hip. “They said my hip bones are so fragile that they’ll just crumble if I have surgery,” she said. OK, she thought, I’ll get this other hip replaced first, and then repair the torn labrum. But again, a catch. “I still have cartilage in my hip, so my doctor won’t do the hip replacement,” she said.
Gregory broke down crying in the doctor’s office. “Please,” she said. She needed to work, to pay her bills. The doctor said that without private insurance, and with active cartilage still there, he couldn’t approve a hip replacement. Instead, for the last nine months she’s lived with the pain, slowly wearing down the cartilage until she can replace her hip, to then repair her labrum. She takes Tylenol for the pain.
“But it doesn’t help,” she said. “It’s like taking a Tic Tac.”
So, unemployed, she applied, for the first time in her life, for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps, she said, but it’s not enough. On the 21st of the month, the $6 remaining on her card had to last her nine more days. She also applied for disability benefits, but her initial application was denied. She had a letter from her doctor saying she couldn’t work, but the Social Security Administration (SSA) argued that she could work. She appealed the denial, but with the pandemic, the SSA has been slow responding, so she enlisted the help of a private disability advocacy firm. They are currently fighting for her appeal.
Gregory said all of this feels incredibly uncomfortable. She’s never reached out to organizations for help before. “I’ve always worked, I’ve never needed them,” she said.
This was before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Then businesses closed and grocery store aisles emptied. It made the already difficult task of looking for work that she could physically do all but impossible for Gregory. It made it impossible for her to afford private insurance to get her hip replaced to fix her labrum to go back to work. It further delayed her disability benefits.
“Day to day is rough,” she said. “It’s been like hell. I’m at my wits end.”
“It was meant to be a bridge”
On the afternoon of March 12, the day Gov. Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency, Eboni Bugg walked the two blocks to CitySpace from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation’s (CACF) offices. Bugg, who is CACF’s director of programs, joined a room of city and county staff, first responders, journalists and concerned residents as the Health Department told everyone what to expect from the coming COVID-19 pandemic and to not panic.
The next day, CACF created the Community Emergency Response Fund (CERF). “As a region of interconnected people, we have the opportunity and responsibility to care for one another,” said Brennan Gould, CACF’s president and CEO, in a press release. Thousands of people were about to lose work, hundreds would soon apply for SNAP benefits and visit food pantries and many would plead with landlords and banks to accept late or reduced housing payments. The CERF would help all these people, and more.
Within a week, the CERF had raised more than $2 million from more than 150 donors and it needed a way for people to get the money. So it launched the CERF’s household grant program and, in an unprecedented move, formed a five-way partnership with the community organizing group Cville Community Cares, the United Way of Greater Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the city of Charlottesville.
“We proposed to try to build on the strengths of each organization,” said Bugg.
The city and county had staff who weren’t working and could answer calls over the specially created COVID-19 Emergency Response Helpline. United Way and Cville Community Cares could process and disburse a high volume of payments. And Cville Community Cares was deeply connected to communities being hardest hit and had an army of active volunteers. (Before the partnership, the group of organizers and activists provided financial support to more than 130 households in just five days.) And then, of course, CACF had the money — the CERF.
Any household in the city and surrounding counties could apply. They could only receive one payment, but it could be for as much as $1,000, depending on its need and size. An applicant would call the helpline or fill out an online form, detailing their circumstances and needs, and after a time-consuming verification and de-duplication process, they received a payment.
Initially, the program was only supposed to last 14 days.
“It was always meant to be a bridge to get people through a two-week quarantine period without feeling like they had to take unnecessary risks with their lives to work,” said Bugg. “It was meant to be a bridge to unemployment payments or stimulus checks. And it was for other folks who didn’t have a choice, to at the very least help them buy protective equipment or pay for rent or childcare. This was really about triage.”
But the need was vast, Bugg said, and the donations kept coming. Over the eventual eight weeks it was active, the CERF raised more than $5 million from 830 donors — 82% of whom gave $500 or less and 68% of whom had never before given to CACF, according to Brendan Wolfe, CACF’s communications manager.
Though African Americans make up just 12.4% of the combined population in the city of Charlottesville and the counties of Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa and Nelson, they made up the majority — 56% — of applicants to the household grant program, Bugg said.
The average payment was $750, and the vast majority of applicants used the funds to cover housing and food costs. In total, the CERF gave $4.56 million to the COVID-19 Emergency Response Helpline, funding more than 5,000 household requests, and helping more than 18,000 people, Wolfe said.
One of those people was Rachel Gregory. With nowhere else to turn, she applied to the CERF and in April got $500. “I never have had to ask for help before,” she said. “But now with COVID, I needed it.”
“We have to trust them”
More than 5,000 applicants brought an enormous amount of data, and one of the conditions that Cville Community Cares had before partnering with the other four groups was that CACF would hold that data, not the city, not the county and not the United Way.
Over the last three years, CACF, one of the largest community foundations in Virginia, has shifted from being a majority white organization to majority Black, with two Black women at its helm. With that, has come a fast and direct shift towards principles of racial and economic equity that have been implemented across the board, from its eliminating barriers to application process to doing intentional outreach and encouraging specific groups to apply for funding.
Cville Community Cares’ request was an acknowledgement that the organization had, more than others, been pushing the greater region towards dismantling white supremacist structures and practices.
“The folks who are running the largest philanthropic endowments in the country are overwhelmingly white, and there is just no way that those foundations and funds are going to be able to have a lens into our Black and brown communities if they don’t look like, and come from, those communities,” said Christina Rivera, a Cville Community Cares member.
In Charlottesville, data has been misused again and again. With more than 200 nonprofits in the area — only a handful led by people of color — there are frequent reports of white-led organizations using data to track and police applicants, telling them how they can and can’t use resources they have been given.
The CERF, Bugg said, was deliberately set up to not do that. “It was important to us to respect the fact that people know best how to apply their resources in the ways that they need them the most,” Bugg said. “We have to not make people jump through five zillion hoops to get whatever it is they need, and we have to trust them. We have to get rid of notions that by giving you have the power to decide how somebody uses a resource.”
This devotion to human dignity, and CACF’s intentional listening to Black and low-income residents, is an example of what’s increasingly being referred to as “solidarity, not charity.” It’s perhaps most clearly seen in the structure of mutual aid, where groups of people look after one another.
“The goal of mutual aid is to not wait around for governments, to not wait around for traditional nonprofits, and to take the lead and model what a supportive social system looks like,” said Ibby Han, a Cville Community Cares member.
In the face of relentlessly racist and discriminatory practices, Black residents have been looking out for one another for centuries. Mutual aid is an old and revered practice in the greater Charlottesville region’s African American history from the Piedmont Industrial Land Improvement Co. that served as a shareholding, credit lending, community organizing and property purchasing organization to the myriad social clubs and fraternal organizations, such as the Prince Hall Masons at Jefferson Lodge #20 or the Order of the Eastern Star.
Formerly organized in March, the Cville Community Cares group points to the terror attacks of 2017 as its most recent origin point, when those who would come to form the group helped organize hundreds of activists, providing them with food, water and medical supplies and services. “The relationships and trust that have been built over time is a large part of what continues to make this successful,” said Rivera, who is also a member of Congregate Cville, which works closely with Cville Community Cares.
Over the last three years, members of what is now Cville Community Cares have held multiple community actions, many focused on providing aid and shelter to people seeking asylum, who, denied legal U.S. documents, are forced to remain hidden.
“There are crises in our community all the time, it just might not be so apparent,” said Han. “I think of mutual aid as a muscle, it’s an infrastructure that we exercise whenever a need or a gap arises.”
Their work would not be possible, said Han, if the group wasn’t guided directly by those most affected. Many predominantly white charity organizations and nonprofits are increasingly hiring people of color in an effort to get a more diverse-looking staff, but Han said it can’t stop there. “It’s not just a matter of hiring a representation from those communities, it’s about actually taking direction from them,” she said.
Bugg agreed, saying there needs to be a fundamental shift in how people think about their roles. That power and control is at the center of the current structures. “Solidarity-not-charity really focuses on listening to the wisdom and experiences and suggestions of people who are most proximate to an issue,” Bugg said. “It’s really about recognizing that we are all interconnected, and that we’re all givers and receivers in the system.”
“Somebody really needs to do something
All week, Jay James and the team at the Bridge Ministry have been interviewing men at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail (ACRJ), where African Americans are overrepresented and more at-risk for contracting COVID-19. They’re trying to find 25 to 40 men with non-violent and non-sexual charges who could be released into the nonprofit group’s care. For the last 25 years, the Bridge has operated an 18-month recovery and skills-training program for men just getting out of jail and prison on its 17-acre campus in Buckingham County. “With the threat of the virus, we’re working as hard as we can to get as many individuals out of that jail as possible, as soon as possible,” said James, the Bridge’s assistant director.
According to a study of the justice system released in January by the MGT Consulting Group, from 2014-2016 more than 51% of the people booked in ACRJ were African American men in Charlottesville, though they make up just 8.5% of the city’s population. That’s a rate of more than six times what is racially proportionate. Even more disproportionate is in Albemarle, where Black men make up 4.4% of the population, but 37.5% of the people booked into the ACRJ. That’s a rate of 8.5 times what is racially proportionate.
The Bridge has an 86% success rate of men who complete its program never going back into jail or prison again, James said. Part of the success is the group’s staff, including founder William Washington, being able to listen to and relate to its program participants. They’ve battled with addiction; they’ve been incarcerated.
“This should be one of the first places that is thought of, from what it offers these men to empower them to take back their families, to employ them with a guaranteed 100% chance of a job and then to get treatment for their addiction, to acquire new skills, to be on a 17.3 acre property that is secure, that is safe,” he said. “This definitely should be the norm because you can’t lose. You just can’t lose.”
The Bridge was able to do this with a grant from CACF. It was one of 28 it facilitated through the CERF, supporting nonprofits with a total of $847,195.70, according to Wolfe. The majority, 52.2%, went to funding housing needs, helping nearly 1,000 households, including $143,748 to cover two months of rent for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville’s Southwood residents, and $101,000 to cover a month’s rent for Piedmont Housing Alliance’s Friendship Court residents. Other grants paid for food distribution, social distancing and quarantine measures, prescriptions and telehealth services. “The criteria were very specific,” said Bugg. “They had to be filling an essential need to a vulnerable population that exceeded their current capacity to do so.”
Several weeks into the pandemic response, Myra Anderson was glued to the news. Every day, new catastrophes emerged, and it became immediately apparent that COVID-19 was disproportionately affecting Black people.
“I’m seeing people that look like me, look like my brothers, look like my aunties, dying from this in alarming numbers,” said Anderson.
One night, she went to bed feeling helpless and frustrated that many Black people were having difficulty getting masks, a piece of equipment essential to their protection.
“Somebody really needs to do something,” she remembered thinking. “By the next morning, I’d resolved that perhaps that somebody was me.” She put out a call online for partners to help her distribute 5,000 masks to Black communities in the area, and the response was overwhelming. Soon she had partnered with the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and launched the Mask Up effort, which, with a grant from CACF through the CERF, has been distributing masks ever since.
Anderson also leads the Black-centered, Brave Souls on Fire mental health resource group, which in May also received a CERF grant to distribute 300 “Bags of Hope,” each containing a face covering, stress ball, journal, fidget gadgets, Play-Doh, tea, snacks, gum, candy, self-care advice, adult coloring sheets, word searches, affirmations, humor and other local mental health resources.
Bugg said many larger local nonprofits successfully received funding through the federal Paycheck Protection Program, which freed CACF up to better leverage the CERF funds for grassroots, citizen-led and nontraditional groups, which the foundation intentionally kept in mind as it structured the grant’s application process to be as easy as possible, reducing potential barriers.
“That means an all-capital-on-deck approach”
As CACF has been working to change the way financial supports are structured and how people access them, there is another key component to the equation of equity and massive system change: the wealthy.
The year before he died, in 2010, John Kluge had a net worth of $6.5 billion. After his death, Kluge instructed that much of that money be given to health research efforts, scholarships and a foundation that had to spend its funds in 10 years, said his son John Kluge, II.
“Everything has been sold except for the medical companies that he funded to do research,” said Kluge Jr, who inherited a piece of property and a last name.
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” he said of the Kluge name. People assume he’s a millionaire, he said, but it also gives him access to people he might not otherwise have — specifically, wealthy people. “There are too many inactive participants,” said Kluge of wealthy, largely white, Virginians he knows. “They’re living in their bubble, or their world, and not engaging at all. We can’t afford to not engage. The challenges we’re facing at a very local level, and at a macro-global level, are complicated. They’re difficult. And they really require an all-hands-on-deck approach. And that means an all-capital-on-deck approach as well.”
White Virginia wealth tends to be quiet and reserved, he said. Maybe, he posited, this comes from an old notion of what’s polite, but the effect is that the wealth remains fractured and isolated, and it can’t be operationalized to support people’s needs in significant, large-scale, ways. Typically too, wealth is given to a university or major research initiative and not people on the ground who are actively supporting the most discriminated and oppressed. Kluge II said that in order for system change to occur, people who are most impacted need to be in the driver’s seat.
Bugg said traditional philanthropic models give a lot of control to donors rather than thinking about how communities themselves want to solve their own problems. Sometimes that control takes the form of parameters and rules, and sometimes control is exerted in the very idea, the very desire to create a nonprofit, for example, or the belief that they know best how to solve a problem — food insecurity, affordable housing, over-policing. In those cases, privilege and hubris can overshadow solving the actual problem.
“It’s not about having an idea and bringing it to a community to see if you can get them on board,” said Bugg. “It’s about the idea being generated in the community and then people leveraging their resources to support it.”
Towards the end of March, Kluge approached Shantell Bingham, the program director for the Food Justice Network, about partnering with Frontline Foods Charlottesville, which he co-founded, and World Central Kitchen to pay local restaurants to provide food to frontline workers. Initially, most of the restaurants that were tasked with preparing the meals were white-owned and white-run, but Bingham pressed him to require a 1-to-1 ratio of white and people of color-owned eateries. As of two weeks ago, white-owned restaurants still made up 72% of meal allocations, with 28% going to minority-owned restaurants, said Kluge. But that’s changing. “This week 60% of meals are going to minority-owned restaurants, and 40% to white-owned,” he said. “Next week 70% of meals will be going to Black or minority-owned restaurants and we will keep that 70% as our baseline going forward.” Kluge said it’s been enlightening to take direction from Bingham, and that he’s bringing this model to the national Frontline Foods board, which he recently joined. “This is very much a work in progress, and we still have a lot of work yet to do,” he said. “Bias has showed up even within an effort that is intending to be equitable. We need to do better.”
And now, Kluge, Jr. is hoping to help shape the beginnings of something currently being called the Virginia Funders Network. It hasn’t launched yet, but the goal is to create more ways for funders to learn from and collaborate with communities across the state as well as each other, while also learning how to better leverage state resources with national partners and advance impact-focused policies, said Kluge. Kluge’s personal hope for the network is to use it to mobilize Virginia’s wealth for social justice causes, and as it forms he is pressing the network to bring more people from impacted communities to the table to help craft it. “There has to be a sustainable way to make sure that communities are part of the design and whatever is being created — that it’s part of the DNA from the very beginning. Community direction can’t be something that gets dropped in every once in a while.”
“This shows the extent of what’s possible”
On May 8, after eight weeks and millions of dollars, CACF closed the Helpline and its household grant program. Thousands of people, including Rachel Gregory, were able to eat and support themselves and their families because of the fund. For the last three years, Gregory has been staying with her adult daughter and two grandchildren, but it’s crowded, and she’d like her own place so she can give them back their space. “I just want to move up a step, just one time,” she said.
For Gregory, this experience has affirmed some of the things she knows about Charlottesville — that organizations who help people play favorites, giving certain people preferential treatment.
“If you know somebody who knows somebody, then you’re OK,” she said. “But if you don’t know anybody, you’re screwed. And I’m one of those who knows nobody, so I’m just struggling by myself.”
Part of the reason for this reality, she said, is because nobody calls attention to it. People who get overlooked, or given the run-around, don’t have time to make a stand. “They say, ‘OK, I’ll just figure out another way,’” she said.
Bugg knows this reality, too. It’s part of why, before CACF shut down the Helpline, it reached out to elderly, undocumented, rural and people of color communities through groups like Sin Barreras, Cresciendo Juntos and the Buckingham Mutual Aid Collective to ensure that people who didn’t feel safe asking for funds, or who didn’t know about the program or who otherwise fell through the cracks, still got access to the fund.
And though this most recent round of grants to nonprofits has finished, the CERF is still functional and taking donations. And Bugg said there is an upcoming round of grants CACF expects to announce in the next couple weeks that will focus on three main themes: “restore, sustain and build.”
“Restore” for people and organizations that experienced emergencies and now need assistance getting back on their feet; “sustain” for those getting by but need support to keep going; and “build” for people and groups in a position to create new and better realities. If ever there was a time for system change, said Bugg, it’s now.
“I think we’ll all need to stretch our imaginations,” said Bugg, adding that she’d personally like to see a major investment in rural broadband connectivity and a reexamination of the employer-based healthcare system.
Since the beginning of the pandemic response, local criminal justice officials ended pretrial detentions and released 90 people, or about 15% of the ACRJ’s incarcerated population, to house arrest, according to C-Ville Weekly. The move was an attempt to reduce the risk of inmates contracting COVID-19. And so far, not only has it worked — no prisoners have gotten the disease — but none of those released have been charged with new criminal offenses. Also, officials waived the fees typically charged to people on house arrest for the ankle monitors, said Bugg.
It has many people, including Ibby Han with Cville Community Cares, posing the question: Why did we do this in the first place? “I think this shows the extent of what’s possible,” said Han. “This shows the arbitrary-ness of incarceration. It was so easy to release people. We have the opportunity to define what the new normal is now, and not go back to the status quo.”
by Jordy Yager
Artwork by Sahara Clemons
Photos & Video Montage by Lorenzo Dickerson
Matthew Murphy needed to clear his head. The week before the response to the COVID-19 pandemic hit Charlottesville, the 43-year old took a job as a housing navigator at The Haven day shelter. All day every day, he has worked the phones, trying to find housing for people without any. The Haven finally has funding to pay for peoples’ first month’s rent and security deposits. Now, they have a different problem: landlords.
“You see, but don’t hear people’s reservations,” said Murphy about his conversations with landlords. “They’re never going to say, ‘No, we won’t do that for these people’ or ‘We don’t want to rent to these people.’ But that’s basically what they’re saying. We’re seeing it.”
For years, just one block away at the Downtown Job Center, Murphy helped many similar people try to find work. There too, when he’d call, employers found excuses not to hire people or not to pay them close to a living wage. “It’s frustrating,” said Murphy. “You see what’s out there. You see what could be.”
After weeks of this landlord rejection, which has largely played out along racially-woven economic lines — almost all his clients are Black — Murphy went for a drive. He drove through primarily Black areas of the city — Friendship Court, Westhaven, 10th and Page. It was quiet. Not many people were out. Then, he drove down Wertland Street, the University of Virginia’s transition into commercial businesses and student housing. Tons of people were outside, he said, jogging, hanging out in yards. Then, he drove home. He lives off East Rio Road, down the road from the new Lochlyn Hill subdevelopment, where homes have been selling for between $500,000 and $830,000.
“There are these beautiful, modern eco-friendly, million-dollar houses with no curtains,” he said, comparing them to homes in Friendship Court and Westhaven, both built on the heel of local urban renewal projects in the 1960s and ’70s. “It’s hard to explain, but you can feel the difference. Imagine sitting in this 3,000- or 4,000-square-foot house with 6-foot windows and sun flooding into the room. You’ve got a yard with a fence, and the kids are outside playing.” He paused. “I drove though Westhaven, and was like, damn, do they even get sunlight?”
PT. 2: “No property in this subdivision”
Study after study has shown that quality affordable housing is one of the most vital social determinants of health. It directly affects what happens to people at every stage of life: their educational outcomes, the types of jobs they get and how much they pay, their ability to access and afford quality food, their physical and mental health, their children’s safety and future.
Charlottesville has been in an affordable housing crisis for years now, made more imperative because of longstanding racial and economic systems of segregation that have denied successful life outcomes to many generations of Black residents while gifting many white residents with wide-ranging structural and policy supports.
This correlation between housing and health is most glaringly evident right now, as Black residents make up 12.4% of the health district’s population, but 26.5% of the 429 total people with COVID-19 and 21% of those it has killed. White residents are being infected and dying at disproportionately smaller rates. This is no anomaly. Pre-COVID, throughout the entire health district — which includes the city of Charlottesville and the counties of Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa and Nelson — life expectancy for Black residents was 74.7 years White residents lived to an average of 81.2 years old — 6.5 years longer.
On a more local level, this disparity becomes more stark. In the Locust Grove and Martha Jefferson neighborhoods, where 90% of the population is white, life expectancy is 81.3 years. In the Venable and Rugby neighborhoods, where 82% of the population is white, life expectancy is 82.6 years. Compare this to the Fifeville, Forest Hills and Orangedale neighborhoods, where 57% of the population is Black, life expectancy is 76.4 years — 6.2 years less than white residents a mile away. In the Ridge Street area, which includes the Sixth Street and South First Street public housing neighborhoods, where 40% of the population is Black, life expectancy is 73.7 years — 8.9 years less.
These primarily white neighborhoods have existed for more than a century. Earlier this month, the American Political Science Review published a paper showing that, throughout the country, the more white a city’s population is, the more likely it is to restrict land use. Charlottesville’s predominantly white neighborhoods have almost all contained racist covenants within their housing deeds, ensuring variations of “No property in this subdivision is to be sold to any person not of the Caucasian race.” And when, in 1968, the Fair Housing Act rendered these illegal, the racial segregation tools shifted to using restrictive single-family zoning, which today prevents more people from living on 70% of the city’s residential-zoned land.
PT. 3: “I know firsthand what it feels like to lose everything”
Yolunda Harrell is currently the CEO of the New Hill Development Corp., but on September 11, 2001, she was working for a major airline. After the terror attacks, she immediately found herself among tens of thousands of people in the industry without a job. She’d never before been unemployed.
“I didn’t know how to deal with that at all,” she said. “I was not financially prepared.”
She didn’t have any savings. She hadn’t invested in her company’s 401(k) retirement plan. “I just didn’t take all of those things into consideration because no one had ever explained it to me,” she said. “As a result, I learned a lot of hard painful lessons.”
She lost nearly everything, and set out to not just rebuild, but also learn more about financial health. By 2008, when the financial crisis hit the U.S. and she was working for a major hotel chain, she was in better shape.
“By that point, I had personally put money away and knew that if I did lose my job, no big deal, I could find a job and find a way to survive, versus the last time,” said Harrell.
But whereas in 2001 Harrell was just taking care of herself, in 2008 she was managing dozens of staff. “I had to think about how is this going to play out in their life,” she said. “What was this going to mean for them — if they need insulin and their insurance goes away? What are the local resources that could potentially help this person?”
She looked back on 2001 and found inspiration. “Had I not experienced that hardship, I don’t know that I would have had that level of thought for my team members,” she said. “I’d like to believe I would, but when you know what it’s like to be evicted and have cars repossessed, you don’t wish that on anybody.”
Like most crises, the one in 2008 hit Black homeowners harder than white ones. In the preceding years, Black borrowers were 30% more likely than white ones to receive higher-cost subprime loans. And in 2008, when the housing bubble burst, Black borrowers were 76% more likely than white borrowers to lose their home. What’s more is that in the following years, between 2009-2012, Black households that did hold onto their homes lost an estimated $194 billion in indirect capital as adjacent properties depreciated in value.
In 1970, less than two years after the 1968 Fair Housing Act’s enactment, after generations of racist housing policy designed to prevent Black homeownership, 42% of Black households nationally owned their homes. Today, 50 years later, the current homeownership rate for Black households is 44% — in 2004, it spiked to 49.4% — whereas now, 73.7% of white households own their home. Furthermore, a 2017 analysis found that 19.3% of Black prospective homebuyers had loans denied, compared to 7.9% of white ones.
Now, with more Americans on unemployment than ever before and the economy in complete disarray, African Americans are being the hardest hit yet again. Harrell looks back on her own education and how it’s helped her weather storms. She wants to help others prepare for the next one.
“Crisis is going to come back again, whether it’s this or something else,” she said. “So let’s get people to better manage their position, no matter where they are on the economic spectrum.” Harrell and local affordable housing advocates are closely watching for the nearest sign of market collapse. This time, they said, they’re better equipped. This time, they have a plan.
PT. 4: “It impacts your worldview”
In March, the Charlottesville Low Income Housing Coalition (CLIHC) released a much-awaited 100-page report extensively detailing the region’s history of racist housing policy, connecting it directly to today’s affordable housing crisis. Between 2000-2018, the report found, the average cost of rent in Charlottesville increased by 88%. But, over this same period, the median income for white households increased by 103%, allowing them to keep pace with rising costs of living, the median income for Black households increased just 17%. Much of this is due to racially segregated and biased job sectors.
The report also contains the results of perhaps the most comprehensive survey on gentrification and displacement ever conducted within Charlottesville’s Black communities. One of the 129 survey respondents noted this income and cost-of-living divide, saying: “Sixty years later we are still being treated like we’re prisoners, but our only crime is that we didn’t invest our money, because we didn’t have any money to invest.” Another respondent called attention to the illusory signs of gentrification: “It looks more diverse, but in fact families of color are getting pushed out. [It’s a] cloak and dagger process of actually becoming less diverse.” And one resident took note of the surrounding landscape and the messages it sends: “There used to be Black-owned businesses. Bike trails don’t benefit us.”
Lacking affordable housing options, renters and homeowners alike are forced to move. From 2000-2018, the rate of Black homeownership in the city fell by 24% (from 982 to 745), meaning that one in four Black homeowners either moved or lost their home, while white homeownership increased by 20% (from 5,739 to 6,906).
The report also shows how this housing disparity affects people’s financial health — 9% of Black city residents make more than $100,000, whereas 88% of white residents make that much. As with all things, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this reality. Since Gov. Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency in March, at least 147 homes have been sold in the city — 64 of those, or 42.9%, sold for more than $400,000. Thirteen properties, or 8.8%, sold for more than $900,000 — 10 of these are in areas that were restricted for the first half of their history by racist covenants, including the most expensive: a $2.6 million, five-bedroom, 7,652 square-foot house in Meadowbrook Hills. Today, these houses are restricted by R-1 single-family zoning, and as assessments continue to balloon, so does their value.
“From racial covenants to single-family zoning to small area plans, Charlottesville has always found ways to keep wealth and power in the hands of a largely white minority of wealthy residents,” the CLIHC report states.
Homeownership is the primary U.S. tool for accumulating wealth, and a major reason behind the vast racial wealth disparity. In 2016, the federal reserve found that median wealth for Black households was $17,100, whereas for white households it was $171,000.
During a pandemic, Matthew Murphy said the effects of this wealth disparity are obvious. Many white residents are able to work from home during a stay-at-home order — keeping themselves safe and financially healthy. Or they’re able to temporarily reduce their work hours, while having savings to rely on. Or they simply don’t have to worry about mortgage or rent payments. And there’s a deeper, psychological effect too, he said.
“If you’ve got 300-plus years of people never having the pressure of coming up with money to pay rent every month, and never not knowing if they’re going to make it or not — never feeling that, never breathing that, never seeing it in their parents faces, never having to put your kids through that — it impacts your worldview,” said Murphy.
PT. 5: “Don’t be afraid of that”
Growing up in Alabama, Harrell said her mother stressed to her the importance of volunteering — that, despite living in public housing themselves, they should always look for ways to help those less fortunate. It was part of what drove her to start New Hill, an African American community development initiative focused on building “pathways of upward mobility in a city where wealth and prosperity abounds yet is secluded in plain sight.”
Harrell has structured New Hill — an homage to the Vinegar Hill neighborhood where Black businesses and dozens of Black-owned homes thrived and were destroyed by white city officials — around three pillars: financial literacy and coaching, economic development and affordable housing. Each of these, said Harrell, is deeply tied to every other social determinant of health.
“Wealth building is not just about money,” she said. “Wealth building is also about connection building. It’s about emotional health. It’s about physical health. It’s hard to focus on those things when you don’t have capital resources.”
With that in mind, and an eye towards impending foreclosures or home sales driven by financial hardship, New Hill is turning its attention to preservation — specifically, finding ways to prevent Black-owned homes from “getting gobbled up by those who have the means,” said Harrell. If a Black homeowner, particularly a senior homeowner, wants to sell their home, and if their family doesn’t want it, Harrell is creating ways to ensure it stays Black-owned, while also guaranteeing that the seller doesn’t lose money in the sale. “How do we get them to be willing to sell that property to a nonprofit that then sells it back to a first-time homebuyer?” she said, adding that the approach needs to intentionally focus on African American residents. “Don’t be afraid of that.”
Sunshine Mathon is the executive director of Piedmont Housing Alliance, which manages and oversees more than 600 units of housing in Charlottesville and the surrounding counties reserved explicitly for low-income residents. After the 2008 crisis, he said, the cost of land and homes plummeted, and he realized it would have been the perfect time for affordable housing advocates to buy properties and create a land bank. Now, he’s trying to do exactly that.
“We’re exploring every possibility to enable investment, whether direct or indirect, on behalf of communities to ensure affordable opportunities in the future,” said Mathon.
A land bank is a smart idea, Harrell said. Less clear is where the initial capital to purchase properties will come from and who controls the properties once they’ve been purchased. Whatever the design though, it needs to be cooperative, she said.
“I think right now we’re at the point where people are realizing that collaboration is gonna be key to long term success,” said Harrell.
In April, Mathon wrote an op-ed imploring people, who can afford it, to donate their stimulus checks to frontline organizations helping people, saying that if they did not, they would actually be harming themselves and their own families because of how interconnected society is.
“As COVID-19 so clearly illustrates, by simply hunkering down and shaking our heads at the injustice, we actually perpetuate the condition, compromising our own health and safety in the long run,” Mathon wrote. “We have never, as a society, had such a universal opportunity to honestly calculate the impact of our choices, to align our instinct for self-preservation with our moral conviction.”
This is what Yolunda Harrell’s husband, Quinton Harrell, the chair of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Minority Business Alliance, calls the “opportunity cost.” And it’s why many housing advocates argue that adding housing stock at higher price points, above $500,000, does not deter the wealthy from buying homes in the $300,000 price range, which they have been doing, taking them away from people with lower incomes. But rather, advocates say, it just entices more wealthy people to buy here and furthers existing inequities.
“A decision to fund beautification in predominantly affluent white neighborhoods rather than invest in basic amenities in predominantly Black neighborhoods is a racist choice,” states the CLIHC report. “Given the demonstrated correlation of economic and racial inequity, choosing to invest in middle-income housing over low-income housing means choosing to continue displacing Black people from Charlottesville.”
Elaine Poon, a lead author of the report and managing attorney for Legal Aid Justice Center’s Charlottesville office, pointed to the dozens of recommendations it details towards creating more equity: to better fund public housing, the city’s voucher program and the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund; to provide more tax relief for low-wealth homeowners; and to use taxes to disincentivize gentrification, to name a few. But more than anything, Poon said, she hopes the city listens to the voices of the historically ignored communities in creating future plans.
Six months ago, the city selected the firm Rhodeside and Harwell Inc. to lead a complete rewrite of the city’s Comprehensive Plan, affordable housing strategy and zoning rules. So far, the group has held dozens of meetings with area stakeholders, and recently launched a series of webinars to get further community engagement. By the end of 2020, it plans to unveil a new affordable housing strategy, and by March 2021, a revised Comprehensive Plan, which will then direct a rewrite of the city’s zoning rules by the end of 2021.
In its first webinar, RHI shared a slide deck with about 45 participants. “Land use planning and zoning have historically been used to create and maintain racial segregation,” stated one slide. Another read: “The growth of the housing supply is restricted by the high proportion of residential areas zoned for low-density housing.” It was the first time a consultant hired by the city had stated so frankly a racist and inequitable past that many have talked about for generations.
Yolunda Harrell is hopeful, too. Economic connectivity is starting to happen, she said, and the more it does, the more crises will be able to be weathered. Last year, with $500,000 from the city, New Hill waded into the collaborative environment, holding focus groups and community engagement sessions to complete a 77-page small area plan for the 47-acre Starr Hill neighborhood, prioritizing African American culture and community desires.
“Collectively, we can accomplish a lot more than if we’re all fighting individual battles on our own,” she said. “It has to be very intentional. We have to look at the bigger picture and connect these dots.”
It’s Harrell’s hope that the plan, which centers Black-owned and Black-run resources, can be a pillar of these citywide overhauls and reimaginings, but that it won’t end there.
“I think we can start to work at it from all fronts, understanding that sometimes relationships and social capital are what help you get to that financial capital,” said Harrell. “Once you get there, you can then help others and it becomes a ripple effect around the community, and we can start to see significant changes in the way we eat, the way we sleep, the way we interact with each other, the way we support one another.”
