VOICES: Imagining Community Symposium offers sampling of leaders who ‘spark forward movement in our city’

The theme for this year’s Imagining Community Symposium arose from an expressed desire by many community members for shared learning and action planning on health and environmental justice. Environmental justice is the collective movement to address environmental injustices, such as high soil lead levels and placement of landfills, that result from legacies of racial, gender, and class discrimination and how these intersect with each other. Similarly, health justice is the movement to address health inequities, such as high rates of Black infant and maternal mortality and unequal access to medical care, that result from legacies of racial, gender, and class discrimination and how these intersect with each other.

That Dayton is primed to work toward a healthy and environmentally just region is not surprising considering that Dayton hosted the first and only US EPA Region 5 Environmental Justice Academy Fall of 2021 through Spring of 2022. The alumni from this academy continue leading the twinned efforts of environmental and health justice. Importantly, alumni from the Environmental Justice Academy share their knowledge, work, and activism in the opening plenary on April 11th entitled ”What is EJ: Past, Present, and Future of Environmental Justice Creating Healthy and Equitable Environments.”

In Dayton, the impact of health injustice is nowhere more gravely felt than in the high rate of Black infant and maternal mortality. Dayton has the highest rate of Black infant and maternal mortality in Ohio and one of the highest in the country. The screening of the documentary “Birthing Justice” in the Tank in that late afternoon of April 11 is the result of a collaboration between Dayton and Montgomery County Public Health, Dayton Children’s Hospital, Queens Village, and the Ohio Commission on Minority Health. Through this documentary and additional engagement, the collaboration also provides the opportunity for health professionals to earn CMEs as part of the Black Maternal Health Equity & Cultural Competency Programming Initiative. “Birthing Justice’' centers the experiences of Black birth mothers and interrogates the systems that disproportionately harm Black babies and mothers in the U.S.

Friday morning, the Imagining Community Symposium opens with the plenary session “Dayton as a Human Rights City in 2025: Community and Government Roles for a Clean, Healthy, and Sustainable Environment.” Through uplifting civic voices, this plenary session builds on the 2023 resolution passed by the City of Dayton to commit to become a Human Rights City by 2025 by framing the actions and opportunities to achieve this commitment.

The keynote, “Science, Research, and Advocacy: Necessary Partners” by environmental and health justice scholar and activist Monica Unseld, concludes the two days of shared learning and action planning. Dr. Unseld, the founder of Until Justice Data Partners, advocates for the use of data in justice work and actively generates partnerships between universities and local and national to move forward environmental and health justice goals.

We hope that participants will be equally inspired this year by the Imagining Community Symposium as they have been in past years. A common theme among this year’s presentations is that participants will leave learning not only the power of partnerships for positively impacting health and environmental justice, they will learn practices, strategies, and resources to make change.

Please join us at the Imagining Community Symposium: Health and Environmental Justice for two days of shared learning and action planning. To learn more about the symposium and to register for it, visit the Imagining Community website at https://udayton.edu/artssciences/ctr/fitz/ic-symposium/index.php.

We are excited to share space and time with you to work toward a more equitable Dayton.

Sharon Hawkins, MPA, MSN-Ed, RN, is Director of the Health Equity Activation Think Tank in the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community.

Nancy McHugh, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton.