Brownsville Town Hall Tackles Health Disparities, Food Apartheid, and Community Concerns

By Nayaba Arinde
Editor-at-Large
“My goal is to continue to create a safe space for our community members, and build that relationship with everyone, so they know that this is a hub for wellness,” Brooklyn health champion Jessica Joseph told Our Time Press. On a sunny Friday afternoon last week a room full of neighbors from elders to youth came out to a Brownsville Wellness Program Community town hall held at the Brownsville Community Culinary Center (BCCC) to talk about health-related issues affecting residents.

Joseph, manager of the BCCC Diabetic Wellness Program hosted the event.
As the attendees lunched on vegan and jerk chicken wraps they shared their health journey stories, heard from each other,and told moving and deeply personal stories.
Community activist Sadie Sanders told the paper, “I come to the workshops and town halls because I learn a lot about our health, and then because I’m an advocate when it comes to people dealing with health challenges like breast cancer and cancer in general, I come to share the information. This town hall is definitely needed. Jessica has been very, very good about bringing information to us, and I encourage her to keep doing what she’s doing.”

Jessica Joseph said, “I’m making space for you guys. I know what I think the community might need sometimes, but if I don’t hear directly from you, I go into strategy mode – like who do we need to partner with, and what more information do we need to bring into the space. I would be doing a disservice everyone, if I didn’t ask you ‘Hey, what is that you need?’”
A new mom, the Brownsville native assessed, “There’s a lot of work to be done. In light of all of the milestones, we still have a long way to go as it relates to just dispelling a lot of health issues, and identifying barriers in the community as well.”

Gabriel Zeltser, a registered dietitian, told Our Time Press that after he spoke before the group, and heard their responses, concerns raised by the community that afternoon included, “Mental health, men’s health, and support for people diagnosed with living with cancer, healthy eating, access to affordable healthy food.”

Some immediate solutions?
Saying that “understanding how people learn,” is key to imparting key information, Zeltser replied, “I think that they need to access the foundational knowledge so they can feel comfortable with making decisions for themselves on a daily basis. I think in this community in general there is the lack of awareness of agriculture nutrition, like how to take care of our bodies, like how our food is grown, like what we’re eating and how it benefits us. I think many adults would benefit from a refresher, and have got to gain financial knowledge, and then understand why they are making the decisions that they’re making.”

Elizabeth Hunt said she usually visits the center for their exercise program, and to teach folks about life insurance, and the “importance of it, which our people are not fully educated on, and also to create generation of wealth.”

So the meetings and town halls inform members of the community on a variety of essential topics, Hunt told Our Time Press, “It’s not only what we can do to help people, but what people are willing to let us help them with. Especially young women having babies too early, not taking care of themselves. Children are having children so early, and they’re not educated, or ready for that responsibility for themselves. We need to help educate them at town halls like this.”

Calling the town hall “very insightful,” Joseph said, “I feel like we heard an overview. I had an understanding of what the community needed, but hearing more about men’s mental health, men’s overall health, that’s important, and those are the things that can often be overlooked. We were just talking about how cancer can be overwhelming, and how taboo it is in our community, and marginalised – like breast cancer, and prostate cancer in men.

Sanders agreed, “When somebody gets breast cancer in our community, they try and hide it , ‘No, I don’t want nobody in the community, or even my family to know.’” She announced that her own daughter had battled breast cancer, and Joseph said that she has shared that her father is going through prostate cancer. “We found out last year, and it was like hush-hush. A lot of people don’t know how to interact or how to show up for you. How can we as a caregiver, as a daughter show up for this person in a way that they need us to show up?”

Impressed with the event was Hassan ‘Dr. Pooch’ Diop, Peer Health Educator, a holistic practitioner. He works with Meyer Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medicine, and schools and community spaces. Noting that the community discussion focused on the concerns over the very unfortunately too common ailments, he told the paper that education and access to holistic care is vital.

“I write health-orientated children’s books–’Get Well Johnny Early Holistic Health-Literacy’ series. My goal is to educate the next generation of young minds and initiate them into the world of holistic health and preventative health. I have a holistic program that works, it deals with nutritional, environmental, social and emotional health. Our goal is to create holistic health-literacy, curriculum and entertainment around basic holistic health topics that children are excited about. In turn this will be a catalyst and motivator for adults to create new healthy habits for a healthy future.”

Diabetes and Food Deserts
Worth repeating Joseph once told Our Time Press, that food apartheid and diabetes are major issues in traditionally underserved communities. “Brownsville has the highest incidents of diabetes throughout all of New York City. There is a definite increase in onset diabetes in both Type 1 and Type 2.”

Causes she said include, “As we move into a more sedentary lifestyle…more consumption of processed food, and we’re taking more medication that has an adverse effect, and now you may have uncontrolled blood sugar as well. Lack of education around diabetes. I would say genetics, but, I feel that is very broad, but it does influence onset diabetes.”

There’s more…
In areas like Brownsville, she said, “We have a lot of food deserts. Food Apartheid means there is a structural reason why folks have inadequate access to good food.”
More affordable, healthy fresh food needs to be available in the Brownsville area, said Joseph, an expert in nutritional sciences.

“This BCCC community wellness space is open to everyone,” Joseph declared that the programs are open to anyone citywide. “So, come as you are. One of the facets of our programming now is we’re going to be launching the Social Care Network, and a partnership with Public Health Solutions. So, our medicaid members, in addition to all of our other community offerings and services, will also have access to social care navigation if they need additional resources, if they need individual nutrition counseling, medically-tailored meals, food access such as produce prescriptions.”