Realizing the importance of healthy people in Detroit’s revitalization

By Dennis Archambault

The debate between the relative importance of investing in people or business is ongoing, a little like what came first, the chicken or the egg. The simple answer is that you need a healthy environment to foster businesses, but you also need a healthy environment to foster people.

LaTrice McClendon, director of the Knight Foundation’s Detroit program, makes a valid argument for the importance of people in a Detroit Free Press commentary. “Detroit’s story is not just about physical transformation. It’s also about who’s making that transformation happen,” McClendon writes. “Progress in Detroit has never been a top-down story. It’s been written by the people who stayed. It starts because residents invest in their neighborhoods. It grows because artists, entrepreneurs and community organizers show up every single day.”

She notes that beyond the development of new buildings and renovating old ones, beyond corporate offices and franchise businesses, there is another layer of community that needs to be recognized. It’s a community of small business owners, production and skilled trades workers, students, neighborhood housing associations, urban farmers, artists, and developers whose focus is creating connectivity through housing, retail, and recreational development.

What is often overlooked in the discussion of the vitality of Detroit and other cities is health. Healthy people are fit for work, fit to learn and fit to contribute to the well-being of their community. This is made possible in no small way by the health infrastructure, beginning with neighborhood-based community health assets like Authority Health Centers family and school-based facilities. Health promotion initiatives like the Ruby Cole Community Kitchen, nourish the community at the local level through healthy cooking and nutrition.  The community health sector is essential to the growth and development of Detroit — and it needs investment like any other sector.

Many are aware of radical changes in the Medicaid program, which will prevent thousands of people from having access to a critical payment mechanism that expands access to health for many working families. Also, funding for federally qualified health centers will expire on Sept. 30, along with funding for teaching health center programs which are training physicians to practice in medically underserved areas. People in the community need access to quality health and social services to achieve their optimal potential.

Detroit has realized a renewal of business sector and is seeing a gradual gentrification of its neighborhoods. But this makes up only one layer of the community’s revival. The other is its holistic well-being: mind, body, and spirit of its people: young, old, and everyone in between who make up the social foundation of the city.

Dennis Archambault is vice president of Public Affairs for Authority Health.