(calm acoustic music)
- It is just such an honor
that you all would trust us with this time.
My goal for the Sacramento
health and history tour and bringing the
health system leaders there just to get them
off the health campus.
There's so much that we can learn from community
and actually from seeing the community,
not just driving to a place,
but to kind of take it all in miles and miles at a time.
We drove through Oak Park,
which is a historic neighborhood in Sacramento.
- I don't think I really fully appreciated that
history at all until we started to ride around
the communities and see these false dividing lines,
lines that divide not only properties,
but us.
- These are the systems in the neighborhood,
education, health, housing, employment.
- One of the folks who came with us was
Jesus Hernandez, a PhD in Urban Sociology.
His unit of measurement, consideration, intervention
is really the neighborhood.
You can actually map the geography of health disparities
in Sacramento by the neighborhoods,
not so much by the zip codes.
- When we saw a gate that was locked,
still locked to my chagrin between neighborhoods,
and one side people had been allowed to own houses
and the other side of people who were of a certain
race were not allowed to own houses.
- So can you believe that?
That's what people lived like.
- The van trip began to show me just how diverse
the city is.
How communities were split by free workers and
how road infrastructure and how the need for
mass transit has impacted the city.
- We all have to have incredible common ground,
we want our families to be safe and secure,
we want access to the support services that
every city should provide,
police, fire, healthcare.
Taking a moment to slow down and just see that
maybe we're not getting all the people all the
help that they need is important.
- How long have you the store?
- Well we opened in 2013.
- I wanted to point out to our health system leadership
how these are strong community entities that we
depend on,
not just to provide healthcare services,
but to bring us young people who will then
accomplish our mission of providing the best,
most culturally-humble, culturally-competent
care to the region.
- As a tourist, as a voyeur, you are sort of
apart from a community,
you don't have a relationship other than one
of being an outsider looking in.
- You look at your map,
here's the Med Center,
we've come down Broadway.
- By going out, by initiating relationships
with people in the community,
you get a sense of being part of the community,
about having real conversations,
honest conversations.
- We are the oldest and largest school in the district.
We're about...
- It was just so wonderful to see the attention of
these health system leaders really soaking
up the expertise.
- That is key to understanding how we got to this place,
and then beginning to engage to how to move beyond.
- Mainly because we focus a lot on hospital care,
which is very important.
The real world, the future is going to be
how we work with our communities,
how we partner with communities.
And understanding their needs and wants
and how we can help them improve.
- It's when you understand their experience
that you can then be relevant for whatever
the next steps are in your relationship.
- This is real and there's real beauty here,
and there's real potential here,
and to have that learning and problem solving go both ways,
it's been life changing and transformational.