From left, Director for Arts and Equity Kendra Jones, Senior Advisor to the President Cynthia Newbille, and President and CEO Mark Constantine of the Richmond Memorial Health Foundation (Photo by Jay Paul)
Health does not begin in hospitals. It starts at home.
Just 20 percent of an individual’s health can be attributed to access to high-quality health systems, according to Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the VCU Center on Society and Health. Eighty percent depends on everything else: where a person lives; if they have a good job; if they have access to healthy food, transportation and places to exercise; and their relationships with neighbors.
A VCU study found that people in Richmond’s Gilpin Court public housing project have the city’s lowest life expectancy: 63 years. Five miles away in Westover Hills, the average person lives 20 years longer. “We’re making poor choices because our options are poor,” community organizer Lillie Estes told Channel 8 news in 2015. (She died this year, at 59.) Unsafe neighborhoods with a deficit of green space can lead to a lack of exercise and increased stress. One recent study found that social isolation — often linked to where you live — has a detrimental effect on health equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day.
When you examine Richmond’s history of racial discrimination — redlining, public housing practices, routing highways through black neighborhoods — it’s easy to see where some of these negative health impacts come from. “I think Richmond represents a challenge that particularly, but not exclusively, the American South has faced, in that we have not made significant investments in all members across the community,” says Mark Constantine, president and CEO of the Richmond Memorial Health Foundation.
The foundation is now trying to make up for those decades of disinvestment by taking a novel approach to giving money away.
The foundation is the lasting legacy of Richmond Memorial Hospital, a public hospital founded in 1957 that served Richmonders regardless of race or ability to pay. The hospital operated in Ginter Park until 1998, when it relocated to what is now Bon Secours Richmond Memorial Regional Medical Center. The foundation received its assets, which first were used to support the hospital. Then, the foundation expanded its mission: to support access to health care by underwriting Richmond’s safety-net clinics.
The foundation has about $70 million, of which it gives away about 5 percent ($3.5 million) each year. With that money, it continues to support local clinics. But a few years ago, the foundation’s leadership began to ask how it could address the underlying health conditions that afflicted so many of the city’s residents.
Instead of looking within for answers, RMHF's board recruited 18 Richmonders representing diverse organizations and asked them to help set its agenda.
Shekinah Mitchell, Neighborhood Partnerships Manager for LISC Virginia, was one of these Equity and Health Fellows. The members didn’t always agree, but they all learned from each other, she says. “It was challenging, it was convicting, it was inspiring.”
The fellows found that Richmond’s health inequities are deeply rooted in racial disparities and discrimination. They told the foundation to integrate racial equity into everything it does, to develop the next generation of grassroots leaders, to support advocacy efforts to change public policy and to support the diversification of nonprofit boards. “Racial equity is not a light switch,” Mitchell says. “It’s a process, like a thermometer. It’s something that’s increasing over time.”
Mitchell hopes the fellows’ work will influence how the foundation allocates grant dollars in the future. She says the RMHF should prioritize funding those organizations that may not be well-known but have demonstrated a commitment to racial equity. Because, she points out, “In the same way that people can be marginalized, organizations can be marginalized as well.”
Mark Constantine (Photo by Jay Paul)
Most Richmonders have never heard of the RMHF, and that’s fine, Constantine says. The nonprofit prefers to keep the focus on the work of the nonprofits and artists it supports. “Our job is to get money out there and lift up the people doing the work, and [make] them stronger.”
A Florida native, Constantine went to the College of William & Mary, then ran a soup kitchen in Philadelphia for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. He attended Yale Divinity School, where nun Margaret Farley inspired him to become a Jesuit priest. He eventually decided the priesthood wasn’t for him and instead went into philanthropy, working for the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund and other major foundations.
He has written two books (one about philanthropy, one about progressive religious leaders) and earned his MBA and Master of Divinity at Duke (yes, simultaneously). “I was always very interested in the intersection of money and God,” Constantine says.
He took the job for the RMHF because he found in Richmond the very thing he wants to create: hope. After spending years working in impoverished places like the Mississippi Delta, Brazil and South Africa, he was impressed by Richmond’s huge array of resources: world-class hospitals and universities, tightly knit neighborhoods, and community leaders who are willing to have tough conversations. “I see more hopeful things happen in Richmond every week than I’ve seen in most places in a year,” he says.
So how might the life of a child growing up in Richmond’s East End, or another low-income neighborhood, change in 10 or 15 years, if the foundation’s work is successful?
Constantine’s eyes light up. “I want the kid to know that she’s safe, that people care about her, that our public institutions serve her, that she has access to the right kind of resources and opportunities, and that her life matters and that she can be successful, in whatever that way is for her.”
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