A New Lens on Poverty: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States

Contents Podcast Panelists Additional Resources Transcript   In the fall of 2023, we kicked off our three-part Place Matters webinar series with our first installment: “A New Lens on Poverty: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.” The webinar discussion featured the work of Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, MPH, FAAP, whose research uncovered the water crisis in Flint, H. Luke Shaefer, PhD, co-author of the new book The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America, and their groundbreaking new program, RxKids, an innovative effort to address child poverty and improve health equity. This conversation, moderated by our Chief Science Officer, Lindsey Burghardt, MD, MPH, FAAP, has been adapted for the Brain Architects podcast.   Panelists Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, MPH, FAAPFounding Director, Pediatric Public Health Initiative  H. Luke Shaefer, PhDProfessor of Public Policy and Director of Policy Solutions, University of Michigan  Lindsey C. Burghardt, MD, MPH, FAAP (Moderator)Chief Science Officer, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Rebecca Hansen, MFA (Webinar Host)Director of Communications, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Amelia Johnson (Podcast Host)Communications Specialist, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University Additional Resources Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundations of Healthy Development RxKids The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City Transcript Amelia Johnson: Welcome to The Brain Architects, a podcast from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. I’m Amelia Johnson, the Center’s Communications Specialist. Our Center believes that advances in the science of child development provide a powerful source of new ideas that can improve outcomes for children and their caregivers. By sharing the latest science from the field, we hope to help you make that science actionable and apply it in your work in ways that can increase your impact.  In October, we kicked off our three-part Place Matters webinar series with our first installment: “A New Lens on Poverty: Working Towards Fairness of Place in the United States.” During the webinar, Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, our Chief Science Officer, moderated a discussion between Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, whose research uncovered the water crisis in Flint, and H. Luke Shaefer, co-author of the new book The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America. The resulting explores how the qualities of the places where people live are shaped by historic and current policies, which have created deep disadvantage across many communities with important implications for the health and development of the children who live there. We’re happy to share these insights with you all on today’s episode.  Now, without further ado, here’s Rebecca Hansen, the Center’s Director of Communications, who will set the stage with a brief overview of the webinar series.  Rebecca Hansen: Alright, hello, everyone. My name is Rebecca Hansen, and I’m the Director of Communications here at the Center on the Developing Child. And I’m very excited to welcome you all to today’s webinar, A New Lens on Poverty: Working Toward Fairness of Place in the United States. This webinar is the first in an ongoing series designed to examine the many ways that a child’s broader environment, including the built and natural environments, as well as the systemic factors that shape those environments, all play a role in shaping early childhood development beginning before birth. In this series, we will explore various environment tool influences from both scientific and community-based perspectives, including strategies to work toward fairness of place and improve existing conditions to allow all children to thrive. I want to thank everyone who submitted questions for our panelists today. We received hundreds of questions, and we will turn to some of those in the second half of the conversation. And with that, I am excited now to hand it over to Dr. Lindsey Burghardt, who is the Chief Science Officer at the Center on the Developing Child and a practicing pediatrician in the community outside of Boston. Lindsey, I will pass it over to you to introduce our panelists and get the conversation started.  Lindsey Burghardt: Thanks, Rebecca. And thanks to everybody who took time out of their day to join us here. And before I introduce our fantastic panelists, I’m just going to start by giving some context and some background for our conversation, and then we’ll jump right in. And I think we’ll have a great conversation together today. So earlier this year, the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child published their 16th working paper and they called it Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundation of Healthy Development. And that working paper laid out a framework for how the child-caregiver relationship is critically important and just as important as it’s ever been. But in shaping early childhood development. But that relationship doesn’t exist in isolation. And the places where people live affect what they’re exposed to. And that in turn affects maturing biological systems. And those effects can be positive or they can be negative. And that’s what we mean when we say that Place Matters. So the physical environment that surrounds children, their built environment, their natural environment. Both of those are shaped by human actions, including very intentional decisions around policies that shape the environments where kids live and the quality and the conditions in the environment where children live. They’re not evenly or randomly distributed. They’re shaped by and they’re deeply rooted in public policies and social history that we’ll talk about today. So for many families, both these historical roots, as well as present day policies and decisions being made, are resulting in really an uneven distribution of risk and opportunity in neighborhoods and in the places where families are raising young children. So I am thrilled just completely thrilled to introduce two really special guests who are going to talk more about this today and who are really deeply committed to reshaping children’s environments to support their healthy development. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a fellow pediatrician. She’s an activist and author. Just an amazing person who leads an innovative program called Rx Kids, which aims to address child poverty and health equity. And it does it through unconditional direct cash payments to residents of Flint, Michigan, during pregnancy and throughout the first year of their child’s life. Our other panelists, Dr. Luke Schafer. among many things, is the Hermann Amalie Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy and the inaugural Director of Poverty Solutions. And he’s partnering with Mona to launch Rx Kids. Luke has a new book that came out this summer, The Injustice of Place, and it provides what I think is a really sweeping understanding of extreme poverty in the United States. And it puts a new lens on poverty, I think, because of the unique multidimensional measures, Luke, that you used in the book, as well as the way that you engage the communities when you are conducting research for the book. So Mona and Luke, welcome. I’m really excited to have you here. Mona Hanna-Attisha: Thank you so much for having us.  Lindsey Burghardt: So the two of you are working in really close collaboration with the community in Flint to address poverty in really actionable ways. And what I’m hoping today and what we talked about before when we prepared for this webinar was really focusing on the innovative approach to solutions that you guys have taken and so that those who are listening can apply anything that resonates in their own contexts. Sound good? Awesome. All right, let’s do it. So first question for Mona. We have some international listeners and some who may not be as familiar with maybe how your really specific engagement in this area got kicked off and your work related to the Flint water crisis and you really helped to shine a spotlight on a key example of how community disadvantage and underinvestment influence exposures that s