WHEDco: Davon Russell

The Five-O-One is joined by Davon Russell, President of WHEDco (The Women's Housing & Economic Development Corporation), a community development organization in the South Bronx. WHEDco’s mission is to give the South Bronx access to all the resources that create thriving neighborhoods: from high-quality early education and after-school programs, to fresh, healthy food, cultural programming, and economic opportunity.

To learn more about this work visit www.whedco.org.

Talia: So let's dive right in to Davon. You've been with the organization for a very long time, let's start with your story and how you got there.

Davon: I grew up in Jamaica. Through high school I ran track when I was a kid and earned a scholarship to the University of Oregon. I moved to the United States when I was 19 to attend school at the University of Oregon. I went back to the University of Oregon for graduate school, and after graduate school, I got a job as an actor at a Repertory Theatre Company called the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I worked there for four seasons. And the summer after I had completed my last year there, I was introduced to a summer camp that was developed for teenagers who were dealing with teenage issues, plus other issues that relate to their mental health, and that experience changed my life entirely; It made me realize that being in the youth development field was my calling. It's what I should be doing with my life. I called my agent, and said, no more acting, and started to look for jobs within the youth development field. And then a friend of mine pointed me to the posting for this after school drama teacher job at this place called WHEDco in the Bronx, and I lived in the Bronx at the time. So I went to an interview for a drama teacher job. They liked me, they called me back for a second interview. And at the second interview, they talked to me about whether I would like to be the head teacher of this new after school program that they had started. Because WHEDco at the time had just opened its new affordable housing development, and there were families who had moved in over the summer, and they were realizing that come September, what are we going to do with kids after three o'clock. So I started there -- then there were 30 kids after school, we grew the program to 36 the following year, and then the third year, we partnered with a school that was being built right next door to our building, and we grew to a 300 kid program. So, I became the Director of youth development programs there. And then, over time, I was promoted to Vice President for programs, and then the Executive Vice President. And then in 2017, I was named President.

Talia: So let's talk about that community that you serve, the South Bronx. What's the community like, and how has the community evolved? 

Davon: I can't talk about the Bronx and speak honestly about it without talking about its history. Many new immigrants, to New York especially, lived in the Bronx -- Irish, Italian, Jewish, you name it. And there were people who were long standing, you know, New York City, Bronx residents, mainly black and brown people. And then there was an influx of immigrants over time. And what that brought in the 40s and 50s redlining and other issues and other policies that basically marginalized black and brown people. And then there was the white flight, and that continued into the 70s, where New York City experienced a fiscal crisis. Where the suffering happened most was in the Bronx, where literally people got up and moved. Property values fell. It was in the landlord's financial interest to have buildings just rot and burn. And that's what happened. And so, you're talking about a history where people have been disenfranchised forever. There was no true investment in lives or infrastructure for a very long time. That all changed roughly in the late 80s. Buildings began to recover -- folks were rebuilding the Bronx at the time. But the Bronx remains the poorest urban congressional district in the country, where 38% of the folks who live in the Bronx, still live below poverty. And that's the backdrop for a number of other things that are not good in terms of health outcomes for people who live in the Bronx -- we still rank last out of New York State’s 62 counties in health outcomes. Schools in the Bronx, the majority of them are showing outcomes for kids that are below 38%. Meaning if you have a classroom of 10 kids, three out of 10 of them are proficient, and the other seven are not. And that's a story that is being told, especially in the South Bronx, where WHEDco works. And it's obviously not all gloom and doom, but it's a challenge. And what is added to some of the challenge is the fact that there's a constant stream of new influx of foreign-born folks. So some people say, well, you've been working there for so long, how is it that things haven't changed, of course, things have changed. There's renewed spirit in the Bronx, they are very resilient people. And we can talk about the pandemic and what resilience has meant for them because of the pandemic… So there's a lot of positive, but you keep having to retool and redo because new people are coming into New York. And New York is a fast-moving ferocious city with a ton of wealth, that seems to be driving most of what happens there. So here we are, in this borough, that remains stuck to a degree in how well and how quickly its residents can advance. We have a lot of work to do.

Talia: So how is WHEDco serving this community?

Davon: We were founded by this incredible woman, Nancy Bieberman; she was working on this rebuilding in the late 80s, and the rebuilding was centered a lot around housing because that's what people think instinctively -- let's build so people can have places to live. What we strive to do is to build affordably, meaning that folks can move into one of our buildings, and they will never pay more than 30% of their income on rent. The developments are structured in a way where there's public money that goes into developing them, and so that kind of offsets some of what it would typically cost to build. And so if you're a family of three, and you make $60,000 a year, you can expect to pay no more than $20,000 of that $60,000 on your housing costs. That's the idea behind true affordability. People aren't paying more than that. And so that's the beginning. We think that that lends to stability, If people can rely on housing, they can rely on a place that they can show up to live and live affordably, meaning that they make enough money to cover rent. But one of the things that Nancy and I identified, and we continue to push is that the neighborhood can't just be about housing. You know, people need other resources that are reliable: they need dependable schools, where their kids can attend and be assured of the fact that they are on their way to college, if that's what they want for themselves; there's got to be reliable food, good food, nutritious food; there can't be too many liquor stores that are attractive --  so the fabric of the neighborhood is also important to our work. And that's what we've knitted across the Bronx. We now have three affordable housing developments, and within each, there is a set aside for community interaction where we support families, not only the ones who live in our buildings, but those who live in the communities around them. And  we are referred to at times as a community anchor. And that anchor is the resource providing entity for folks who live in the buildings and in the communities around them. So that's part of what our work is about. We partner with schools in the neighborhood, and we are the after school, academic, cultural, and sports provider. So when school ends at 2:30pm, we have a cast of people who go in and take over until 5:30pm.  We have social workers -- we have one social worker in in all of the three schools, where we have these partnerships. And the idea there is that we're supporting kids’ mental health, and we find that typically, when families are receiving or connected to particular sets of these resources, that they do better

Talia: So you’re a catch-all for all the specific needs of this community.

Davon: That's what we attempt to be. So the structure of what we call our Family Support Unit is a team of social workers…there is an intensive case manager who deals with many of the very high needs cases, and then also makes referrals. So they are dealing with things that are not necessarily clinical. So for example if a family comes in and they're in need of food support, we are process applications for SNAP, or for housing vouchers…

Talia: You mentioned before the pandemic, and I'd love to talk about that. I know that the South Bronx has been disproportionately impacted, unemployment has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. What's your pandemic response been in order to help this community?

Davon: You know, I keep flashing back to March of 2020. And early March, we kind of heard that there was this virus happening and spreading quickly. And quickly, things started to tumble out of control. My first thinking was, we work with 160, predominantly black and brown frontline people. That's what our industry is, and that's what our agency is. And my first responsibility was to make sure that they're healthy and taken care of. So that's the first thing that we did, we just closed, everybody worked remotely, we started getting the word out to our clients that were close. But here's where we began to build the network for supporting them. So one way we thought that we could make food available to people was to purchase grocery cards. We partnered with two supermarkets that were in the neighborhoods where we work, and we purchased these cards in $50 increments. And we started to get them out to families, either by mail, or meeting outside where you're just kind of hand them out to folks with envelopes with their names already on it. Very light touch because this was the height of the crisis, and you don't want to be touching folks. But we felt like that was a way to give families some security -- they could go to the store, they could purchase whatever they needed, be back at home and do that safely. So that was one major initiative that was very successful. We also partnered with an outfit that was run through World Central Kitchen that was using our commercial kitchen to produce meals … 1000s and 1000s of meals that were then granted to folks that we work with. We distance learning, remote learning for kids’ preschool, and school-aged; we secured laptops and other devices. The Department of Ed tried its best to get these things out to folks, but it didn't reach all the families. So we secured over 300 or more of these Chromebooks and other devices that we were able to grant to kids and their families. As things progressed, we are in the habit of learning from the community, what it is that they need. So we administered a survey, and we reached over 1,100 folks, and what we learned was that over 50% of families were experiencing loss of income, either through their loss of work, or the businesses that they own closed. We knew that they were very fearful, 45% of them have not been able to pay rent, and we know that their kids were experiencing great anxiety, etc., So that was what really kind of affirmed for us what was going on, and pointed us to the things that were important for us to lead on, and make sure that folks were being taken care of.

Talia: Do you have any partnerships with the local government?

Davon: Yeah, we have a ton of a contracts with the city. If you think back to the onset of this, there was uncertainty everywhere. So you had a city that was thinking, wow, where's the revenue going to come from, and therefore we were put on notice, you know, you can expect a 20% cut in funding on your contracts to begin with, and that could balloon at any point without warning. So in the environment in which we were working, we were thinking, God, we've got to support families, we were the difference between folks going hungry. And then you have a city that’s saying, we can’t fund you for the work that you must do. But I really applaud the philanthropy community that stepped up, our individual donor base, we don't have a large one, but they stepped up in a major way. And we're able to fill some of these gaps, but city government was trying to do its best to kind of keep everyone afloat but didn't do a good enough job. They failed us at a time that was super critical.

Talia: Moving forward, what you expect to be the greatest needs the community.

Davon: Our priority now is vaccination. I looked this morning where the Bronx is in respect to the number of folks who are fully vaccinated, and we're still in the low 50s. And I get all the reasons why people are hesitant and apprehensive and fearful. But the mayor of New York has talked about the tale of two cities. And we're even in greater danger now of being a true tale of two worlds, where there's a world of the people who are vaccinated and those who are not. I am concerned that the folks who we work with are not going to be able to participate in a world that's moving quickly ahead. The other area that's a priority for us is civic engagement. We are constantly facing a world where people aren't engaged enough to a degree where they believe that representation matters, and that their voice can make a difference in the people who show up and make sure that they're taken care of. Our community needs to be better armed to participate in the civic life of their communities and of the nation. So that's something that's important to us as well. All this goes along with the work that we do every day to make sure that folks are taking care of themselves and living well daily. But the priority for us right now is How do we move the needle on vaccines? And making sure that kids are being primed for college, if that's where they want to go, making sure that all these childcare providers are solid and can provide childcare in a meaningful way for families, and making sure that all that work continues and will continue for a very long time.

Talia: If our listeners want to get involved, what are some things that they can do?

Davon: Well, I used to be shy about saying that folks can donate. We talked about government contracts, typically those take care of and pay for the services that we provide, but here's so much more that happens around it that the contracts don't cover. And so, we need to build our treasure chest to make sure that we're taking care of the folks who work for us to begin with. A number of them are right at that level where they could also fall into poverty, and we want to do a better job of making sure that we take care of them. So give, give, give! There are opportunities to volunteer with us. Our website is www.whedco.org. Folks can log on to the website and see opportunities there to get involved in everything that we're doing in the Bronx.