And our own Jerilyn Church, ILPC’s former program director!

Here:

DETROIT – It’s hard to communicate the failure of public policy in this great American city (especially in a few hundred words). A drive around town highlights the consequences from decades of neglect: Abandoned and burned out homes, office buildings as ruins (and dangerous playgrounds), near-permanent unemployment, and thousands of empty lots capped with mounds. These mounds are burial sites of sorts because when a building was destroyed the rubble was left in a pile until time and grass shaped each into a small hill.

Yet the geography of despair includes many seeds of hope.

One east side neighborhood is transformed by inspiring folk art that brings humor and zest to several city blocks through The Heidelberg Project. Or there is the Community Health Awareness Group’s efforts to exchange needles so that drug users on the streets won’t as easily share disease. The program resulted in a drop of HIV infections from drug users from 33 percent to 17 percent. (And that, too, is the paradox because while an exchange is effective, it’s also difficult to fund). Then there’s the Earthworks Urban Farm. Detroit is a city without large chain grocery stores – only discount stores and “party stores,” or neighborhood enterprises that sell more liquor than protein. Access to fresh fruit and vegetables is a regular barrier for a family trying to eat healthier. But at Earthworks more people – at least in this one neighborhood – are growing their own access to healthy foods.

The trip was a Kaiser Family Foundation site visit for media fellows. We looked at Detroit and its health system in depth. Before the trip, I expected the unfamiliar, an urban landscape that was different and bleak. But I quickly found there is a connection with the policy failures found here with those from Indian Country. At the end of that rope: Deep, structural poverty and a health system where disparity is dismissed casually, as if it’s a fact that must be. To me that reflects a serious shortage of money from the state and federal governments – and just as important – a policy deficit where ideas, innovation and execution don’t get the support that’s needed.

Consider the tale of two clinics.

American Indian Health and Family Services helps the 57,000 Native Americans living in the greater Detroit area. Services are delivered at an old church and rectory donated by the Detroit Archdiocese in 1993. Jerilyn Church is the executive director of AIHFS. She’s Minnecoujou Lakota, born and raised on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation in South Dakota. When she moved to Detroit she says she “wasn’t prepared” for the same type of unemployment as back home on the reservation.

“Yet despite our surroundings, we get a lot done with little resources,” Church says. “We could write a book about it.”

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