Jacksonville News January 25, 2010
They want people to stand up and demand better.
Better access to healthy foods, cleaner neighborhoods and more affordable health care - to name a few things.
In another era, they might have been called agitators. But now the ideas of social justice and health equity have become so mainstream that the movement's leaders are familiar names: the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission and the Duval County Health Department.
The two agencies launched a partnership last fall to host a series of community meetings intended to spotlight Jacksonville's unequal distribution of health and its causes. The ultimate goal, organizers say, is to inspire residents of the city's most afflicted neighborhoods to take up the movement themselves.
"What we're trying to do is develop leaders to pick up the mantle," said Charlene Taylor Hill, the Human Rights Commission's executive director.
The Ritz Theatre and LaVilla Museum provided the backdrop for Thursday night's meeting, the fifth of its kind in the series.
About 50 people, about two-thirds of them African-American, watched part of a four-hour documentary from the public television series "Unnatural Causes," which has inspired scores of town hall-style meetings nationwide, including Jacksonville's. That was followed by an audience feedback period with carefully worded questions like "Does your community promote or hinder health choices?"
Since the documentary's debut in the spring of 2008, Duval health officials have compiled report after report calling attention to the county's health disparities. Their underlying theme: Health equals wealth.
For example: A March 2008 report began with a brightly colored map of the county's six health zones that compared the areas' infant mortality rates with their percentage of residents living below poverty.
In the urban core, where the 26 percent poverty rate is the county's highest, the mortality rate was also the highest, 13.1 per 1,000 live births. The lowest mortality rate was 4, and it was at the second-least-impoverished area: the Beaches.
Shevada Dove, a 22-year-old stay-at-home mother who lives on the Southside, said she left the meeting "feeling amazed." She was reminded of a trip to a grocery store in a poorer neighborhood that had few produce items, mostly of poor quality.
She could see the connection now, she added, between the lousy lettuce and the surrounding community's health.
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