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Community Well-Being: 'Running' Brownsville

Sheila Gordon and Dionne Grayman, co-founders of We Run Brownsville, a community-based organization that promotes health and wellness among women of color living in Brownsville through a walk-to-run program, talk about how they aim to bring health and wellness to their community during the pandemic.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, for this Thanksgiving week, we continue our 10-part end-of-year gratitude series. You can think of this as 10 heroes of community well-being in the year 2020. We're bringing on 10 individuals or leaders of community groups who may not get covered in the press very much but who have helped to make life livable in this year of so much grief and so much need and so much thirsting for justice and equality.

These are not the 10 heroes of community well-being this year. There are tens of thousands just in our listening area to be sure, but these are 10 who have been brought to our attention by colleagues and sources and friends and some of you on the phones. We will tell 10 community well-being stories for the end of 2020 as representative of how all kinds of people have stepped up this year under these extreme conditions.

We will also have a live Zoom event on Wednesday night, December 9th, to honor three champions of community well-being. The station is generously naming this The Lehrer Prize for Community Well-Being and you can make a free reservation if you want to join us on Zoom that night at wnyc.org/lehrerprize. Go to wnyc.org/lehrerprize and then join us on Zoom at seven o'clock, Wednesday night, December 9th.

Joining me now are Sheila Gordon and Dionne Grayman, co-founders of We Run Brownsville, a community-based organization that promotes health and wellness among women of color living in Brownsville through a running program. That's why We Run Brownsville, but it's really much more than that too. Welcome to WNYC, Sheila and Dionne. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sheila Gordon: Thank you for having us.

Dionne Grayman: Yes, thank you for having us. [chuckles]

Brian: I see that We Run Brownsville is an eight-week walk-to-run program as you call it that prepares runners to complete a competitive 5k race, but it's more than that too. Who wants to start and tell us what your mission is?

Sheila: I can start--

Dionne: Yes, please. Thank you.

Sheila: [laughs] I'll start just by telling our vision and then Dionne can jump in. We Run Brownsville's mission is to-- we actually wanted to create a judgment-free, liberated space for women of color in the community to take control of their health through adopting a holistic approach to wellness. We do that through running, through training, through mindful practices, through the traditional education and we actually operate our organization through our pillars of wellness. It is the physical, the mental, the social-emotional, and the financial because our goal is to support our members in sustaining healthy lifestyle choices.

Brian: Can you explain what-- Go ahead, Dionne. Pick it up wherever you want.

Dionne: No, I just was going to say, so like to your point, yes, We Run Brownsville. We do run in Brownsville, but also we're doing this as a way to support existing leadership that women of color already have in Brownsville so that women feel confident and competent in taking on leadership roles, whether it's at the PTA meeting or at the community board or running and operating their own business.

Brian: Has there been a particular 2020 expression of this considering everything that's going on in the world this year?

Dionne: [chuckles] Yes, so back in March, which seems oh so long ago when we went into lockdown, we belong to the Community Board 16. That's our local CB, their health and wellness stakeholder committee. The majority of that first call during that first week was around food access. We live in a neighborhood that is overwhelmed with food insecurity. A lot of organizations and agencies were directing their efforts towards that.

Towards the end of the call, we asked what was going to be done to secure people's mental health during this time. No one had a response and we're not saying that occurred to us in a non-judgmental way that no one had a response. We got to work and thinking about like, what could we do to start to secure people's mental wellness during this time that we knew would be fraught with fear, anxiety, frustration, not knowing that we were going to be dealing with COVID-19 alongside COVID-1619 and the racial reckoning that happens as a result of Mr. Floyd's unfortunate murder.

We got to thinking in the way that we do and contacted our partner, our champion, Nupur Chaudhury, at the New York State Health Foundation and said that we wanted to provide mental health counseling to community members and we wanted to pay for it. We don't want cost to be a barrier. New York State Health Foundation were wonderful and seeing our idea as a possibility and something they wanted to get behind and fund it. To date, we have-- how many hours, Sheila? I don't do math well, Brian.

[laughter]

Sheila: The thing that we created was an actual mental health wellness initiative. It was to allow community members to have access to free sessions of mental health. We started with the individuals and then we realized that their family members were also in need of counseling and we actually created a referral system. Currently, we offer six to eight hours a week.

We are just piloting this with the members of We Run Brownsville. Again, I have to just emphasize the point that Dionne mentioned earlier when she said that. We fundraise and get grants to cover all the costs of being a member of We Run Brownsville so that cost is not a barrier to participation in anything we do, whether it's the training for a race or these mental health sessions.

Brian: Sheila, did the running piece, the training for 5k races continue to play a role intersecting with the mental health piece for 2020's conditions that Dionne was just talking about?

Sheila: It did. We still have Zoom trainings two or three times a week. We're still preparing the women to do that. We just actually had a walk at Shirley Chisholm Park last Saturday because we can't physically have races or put on our own race, but we actually had a walk/run [chuckles] in the park so that we're still intersecting those two things absolutely.

Brian: What is the-- Go ahead. Go ahead, Dionne.

Dionne: No, you go. I just want to say we've converted like everyone else to a virtual program and so we've been able to extend our training. We now also do yoga and boxing, cardio with a trainer from LA. We've been able to even extend and deepen our offering.

Brian: Even if not outside though, running is one of the things you can still do in a pandemic to maintain your health, right?

Dionne: Yes, and exercise. Yes, group exercise. That helps with the mental and the physical and the social so that we see each other as we're sweating, grunting, and cursing, and mainly me cursing.

[laughter]

Brian: Like you mentioned, boxing, you have people install little punching bags in their homes and they do it together on Zoom, something like that?

Sheila: Actually, no. Actually, we found-- because, Brian, just as an FYI, most of our trainers in our space are women, but I found this amazing male boxer and we actually punch and do the boxing footwork and the handwork all without a bag. It's the most incredible session they had ever attended. Dionne, not so much, but me, yes.

Dionne: [chuckles] Well, visually, there are certain people, certain occupants of certain spaces on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC that I had as a visual punching bag if you will.

Brian: [laughs] I thought this was a segment where we weren't going to talk about him.

Dionne: Well, we're grateful, we're grateful, we're grateful. We have so much to be thankful for.

Brian: When you talk about health and Brownsville, I know some of the stats. Some of them are on your website. Some of them I know anyway, but it has some of the most extreme health disparities in the city and is a supermarket desert as one of you was getting out a minute ago. How much is that the context?

Dionne: It's all the context, right? One, it's the persistently negative narrative about our neighborhood, which doesn't take into account ever the lived experience of people. I'm third generation here. I've raised three children here, right? This narrative about who I am doesn't align with who I really am, right? It's who I'm thought to be does not at all align with who I am. That can be true for the majority of the community.

In thinking about all of the disparities that exist and how the pandemic came and not only highlighted them but deepened the harm of people in this neighborhood who were already experiencing the pandemic of racism and anti-Black racism and white supremacy to have this once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic happen in the neighborhood that has never considered when thinking about how we support our community members and from the city leadership, what's being done to support a neighborhood like Brownsville to actualize, right?

All of those things happening inside of the pandemic, it just made sense that the first question that we ask is, what are we going to do to secure people's mental health, which is already fragile because of the intersections that happen in our community? What are we going to do? What is the most loving, restorative community forward thing that we can do? That was to bring in these mental health counselors and to extend our platform to also work with one of our local farmers, Brenda Dushane. We've been doing farm-to-table distributions so that people are exercising or having access to mental health and also eating well so that all aspects of health are considered.

Brian: That's correct.

Dionne: A lot of this happened also in partnership with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene under Dr. Torian Easterling's office equity. He's the new deputy commissioner of equity. We worked when Sheila said to create that referral process that happened in conjunction with his office and folks like Jackie Kennedy out of his office.

Brian: That is great, so--

Sheila: I just wanted to just add really quickly, Brian, that the negative narrative, the external negative narrative is what We Run Brownsville pushes against all the time because our name is really intentional. We run the narratives because just like Dionne said, she still lives in the community. I live a few blocks away, but I grew up there. That's our neighborhood and it's reflective of who I am, so nobody else gets to tell that story but us. I just wanted to say that. [chuckles]

Brian: Take our last 30 seconds to give that positive narrative about Brownsville a push.

Dionne: We run on never-ran-never-will energy, right? We will not give in. We will not be bowled over. We are rising. We are rising and we are reclaiming our neighborhood. That's what we're doing.

Sheila: We're celebrating our joy and our resilience. We celebrate our joy and our resilience.

Brian: We celebrate Sheila Gordon and Dionne Grayman, co-founders of We Run Brownsville as among our heroes of community well-being in the year 2020.

Dionne: Thank you.

Brian: Thank you so much for your work and for a wonderful conversation today. Happy Thanksgiving.

Dionne: Thank you.

Sheila: Thank you, thank you.

Dionne: Same to you and your family. Thank you.

Brian: Again, listeners, if you want to attend our Zoom event where we're going to give special honors to three people who contributed to community well-being in 2020, you can make a free reservation for Wednesday night, December 9th on Zoom at wnyc.org/lehrerprize, wnyc.org/lehrerprize. Thanks for listening today, everybody. We will be here live tomorrow morning for a Thanksgiving show. Talk to you then.

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