BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — Community leaders have teamed up with UB professors to take action to better neighborhoods in the East Side of Buffalo.
“Hopefully this wakes us up so we can do something for ourselves. That’s the most important thing,” says Grady Lewis, a Buffalo East Side resident. “We can’t sit around and wait for them anymore. That day is over with. So we got to help ourselves.”
Marc Hennig works in the East Side of Buffalo with people and children living with developmental disabilities. He came to the UB Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences to be part of the change.
“The city had progressed many ways, but ended up leaving the East Side behind. So my agency and others have worked to try to mitigate that,” Hennig says. “We just need to keep pushing. To make things happen and to get equity in the city.”
Dr. Henry-Louis Taylor Jr. is a professor at the University at Buffalo. He and Pastor James Giles of the Peacemakers WNY are in charge of launching a pilot program to redevelop the East Side.
“When you look at the community over the last 30 years there has been no progress,” says Dr. Taylor. “One is unity, shared ownership, collective economics, building a collective community of wealth and inclusiveness and belonging as a way to pull and connect people together.”
Giles tells 7 News reporter Yoselin Person investment is the key to redeveloping the community.
“It’s about this point pulling in stakeholders, listening to a plan that’s different from other plans,” he says. “So that we can now begin to present something that’s obtainable in order to be sustained.”
And health disparities are one of many that community leaders and others plan to tackle.
“I think this is the beginning of the conversation about the importance of health equity and the importance of having these conversations,” says Allison Brashear, Dean of Jacobs School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences. “I’ll also say that there’s a real importance about doing research in this area where we can actually prove interventions work.”
The pilot program has field workers going door to door all over the East Side of Buffalo for neighbors to take part in surveys.
This initiative is going to happen for the next five months.
