Richmond, Virginia

Richmonders are strong in the belief that they can only change their city’s future and improve health for all if they understand its past. Stakeholders from across the city are coming together to create agency and opportunity for all residents, empowering them to make healthy choices and forge pathways out of poverty.

“Richmond is becoming a place where regardless of the color of your skin, where you live, or how much you have in the bank, you can enjoy a healthy lifestyle,” says Mayor Levar Stoney.  

Reaching that goal means helping people build wealth after generations of African-American families were prevented from doing so by discriminatory lending and hiring practices. It means creating inviting, socio-economically integrated neighborhoods in lieu of the sprawling public housing developments of the 1960s and 1970s. It means making sure families that have lived in poverty for generations are not left to fend for themselves, but rather are given supports so they can thrive.

“Something that’s going on in another neighborhood ... is still my problem because this is an entire community—I think there's a growing understanding of that,” says Becky Clay Christensen, director of community partnerships at Bon Secours Health System, Richmond. “The quality of this community is not based on its individual parts being strong, but all of us being strong and taking ownership.”

In her nine years as the employee of a Richmond, Virginia, grocery store, Kiocia Wilkerson worked just about every job: cashiering, staffing the pharmacy, filing paperwork. But toward the end, she wasn’t getting the steady hours she needed to support her two young children on her own. Without childcare, she was unavailable for evening and weekend shifts. Some weeks, she had just four hours of work, or none at all.

It was a financial crisis for Wilkerson’s family, but also a crisis of opportunity. “The way I was getting paid, I was never going to move in life,” she says.

Poverty is entrenched in Richmond. About a quarter of residents and four in 10 children live in poverty. The rate is much higher in some neighborhoods, such as the Census tract that includes Fairfield Court, the East End housing development where Wilkerson and her children lived until earlier this year. There, more than two-thirds of families live in poverty.

In response to widespread intergenerational poverty, the city in 2014 made a bold commitment to reduce child poverty by 50 percent and overall poverty by 40 percent by 2030. Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building, the first office of its kind in the nation, was created that year to lead the charge.

“The thought was to put pieces of [poverty reduction] under one department so there can be a strategy to move thousands of people to self-sufficiency,” says Richmond native Reggie Gordon, the office’s director.

To lift families out of poverty, the city is working to expand employment possibilities, supporting individuals along the way. At the Office of Community Wealth Building’s Center for Workforce Innovation, participants are matched with intensive case managers who connect them to education, vocational training and job opportunities, provided through partnerships with local higher education institutions and businesses. The city also has opened “Future Centers” in every Richmond public high school to prepare students for college and careers through mentoring, college application support, and soft-skills training.

In the East End, the Peter Paul Development Center is taking a neighborhood-based approach to building assets in families that have had few educational and employment opportunities. The center works with more than 200 children and their families, providing out-of-school time and summer programming, and creating plans for all members of the family to achieve milestones and goals along the path to self-sufficiency.

Building wealth in families that faced discrimination for generations will take time, people here say. Wilkerson can attest to that.

But she feels herself moving forward, with help from the Center for Workforce Innovation and Building Lives to Independence and Self-Sufficiency, or BLISS. This intensive program, launched in 2015, provides similar supports to families that live in public housing.

Wilkerson got a job two years ago as a school cafeteria worker, and she and her children recently moved into a mixed-income neighborhood, becoming the sixth BLISS family to leave a public housing development. Eventually, Wilkerson wants a career helping people, so she’s studying human services at Reynolds Community College.

“Our whole reason for working with our families is to empower them to remove barriers they never thought they could,” says BLISS Program Coordinator Sandee Smith, who has worked with Wilkerson the past few years. “We put them in front of resources that make things happen.”

Al-Qadaffi's grassroots alliance is working in concert with a wide array of like-minded Richmonders intent on bringing food justice. For example, the Richmond Health District’s Healthy Corner Store Initiative has since 2015 worked with Shalom Farms, a local nonprofit produce grower, to put refrigerated displays full of fruits and vegetables in nine corner stores. A similar program run by Tricycle Gardens, a nonprofit urban agriculture organization, is in 21 corner stores. And Shalom Farms and RVA Food Collaborative—which is comprised of farmers, grocery store owners, and other public and private partners—in 2016 launched Grown to Go, a mobile market serving more than a dozen public and private housing developments.

Meanwhile, plans for a full-service grocery store in the East End are in the works, led by Richmond philanthropist and businessman Steven Markel.

To be sure efforts are addressing the wants and needs of residents, Richmond’s Institute for Public Health Innovation recently conducted focus groups in neighborhoods with poor access to healthy foods. What it found was a strong desire for cooking and food classes. Many Richmond organizations, including Bon Secours Sarah Garland Jones Center for Healthy Living in the East End, are obliging, offering free hands-on opportunities to grow, cook, and learn about food.

The momentum for change is building, as the city is studying policy changes such as creating incentives for grocery store development in food deserts and incorporating urban agriculture into the city’s master plan.

“We have to look at all the factors in someone’s life that support them living a healthier lifestyle,” says Elizabeth Theriault, chronic disease supervisor at the Richmond City Health District. To achieve that, she says, the city must help all citizens “find ways to make the healthy choice the easy choice.”