Health Equity Summit Falls Short

If you were one of the organizers, forgive me for saying this

You know you've been putting together public events for a while when you begin to see just how badly opportunities are missed when you attend functions. It's like knowing how to cook a meal, then eating at a restaurant and saying to yourself "for heaven's sake they left out the most important ingredient..."

I attended yesteday's Tacoma Health Department Health Equity Summit with high hopes. I'd read all the pre-conference materials, done some research on the net, and even watched the video "Unnatural Causes" on my own time so that I'd be ready to be an effective participant.

We filed into one of the theaters at the ever more beautiful University of Washington Tacoma campus, and I was pleased to see myself and JJ in a crowd of about 200 people, most of whom I'd never met before. Nothing against the old usual crowd, but it's nice to enter a group of people anxious for positive change who you've never met before.

We chatted in the theater, and I know that I wasn't the only person who'd done some preparatory reading and who was excited about the possibility of being on the ground floor of a movement that will resolve some of the inequities that have no place in our great country. We watched the first installment of the video, and I recommend this movie to anyone and everyone interested in race, health, economics and inequality. The next segment will air on KCTS-9 on Wednesday the 2nd at 11pm.

The Summit was to proceed according to the standard format from this point on. Two speakers would gear us up, we'd move to breakout groups for a working lunch and small group discussions, then come back together for post-workgroup summaries. This was when the Summit began to fail.

The first speaker was a wonderful woman, whose name I won't report. She is a breast cancer survivor and has a message of inspiration. It was a message that had absolutely no relevance to the video we had just watched however, and marginally little to do with the topic of the day's summit. I'm not sure that she had even watched the preview or the trailer for the movie. 200 people lost thirty minutes that could have been used to make us passionate about the topic. The potential for focus for the workgroups was squandered.

State Senator Rosa Franklin then got up to talk about her past, and recent state efforts to address health inequities. Senator Franklin is a woman of accomplishment, a woman to be respected. Senator Franklin, if you read this, please forgive me for what I'm about to say.

It was the wrong message. She should have gotten in front of the crowd and said the following, in her own words of course;

"I care about this issue a great deal. I'm a woman and African-American, so I am doubly affected by the issues raised in the video. We need to do something about this inequity; it has no place in the America that we call home. I commit myself to helping this group make change for the better. Please, go to your workgroups confident in the knowledge that I will help carry this issue forward. Do good work, give me good ammunition for the fight that will result from our efforts here. And please stand with me as we fight for what's right."

Instead we got thirty minutes of "I've done this" and "We've done that," and that's all well and good, but this wasn't the place for that message, if I may be forgiven for saying so. One minute of motivation (and her presence in the workgroups) would have been much much better.

The workgroups went fine, but clearly there was no plan for turning this group of 200 or so interested actors into agents for postive change. Instead I gather that we are to take the message home and think about it, and there is no indication that the group who set this Summit up will attempt to turn it into a movement any time soon.

Sigh.

Well, live and learn. I see myself sending out a "post-summit" email to the potential agents of change inviting them to take part in our planned Pierce County Food Policy Council. We'll try to make our part of the movement take life at least.

PS: Think that I'll spend the next few days picking out individual messages from the video that really resonated for me...