Collaboration changes the future of Frayser

High Ground News

June 18, 2014

The community of Frayser, just north of Memphis proper and across a wide alluvial plain from the Mississippi River, began as a suburban town built around a railroad depot. It was annexed by Memphis in 1958, and industry, in the form of International Harvester and Firestone, moved in to churn out giant red cotton pickers and automobile tires.

Those companies would eventually move out, taking jobs–more than 2,000 in the case of Harvester–and people with them, and leaving gaping holes in the landscape. Over the years, those who stayed or have moved in since have weathered loss of jobs along with a recession and real estate woes. It is one of the most economically disadvantaged areas of Memphis, with some of the highest crime rates. The butt of jokes for years, it’s a community made up of still-proud people, many looking to rewrite its narrative from the ground up, from among its boarded-up homes, crumbling infrastructure and struggling educational institutions.

According to the 2010 census report, the 20 square miles that make up Frayser are home to just over 40,000, with a makeup of 84 percent African American. Nearly 20 percent of residents–the largest group–made $15,000 to $25,000 per year, and almost half of the population rent their homes. Forty percent live below the poverty level.

In answer to such problems, the Frayser Community Development Corporation (CDC) was founded in 2000 to act as a nonprofit revitalization engine for the area. In 2013, through a community-wide election, the Frayser Neighborhood Council was created.

The Frayser CDC has been buying up houses for renovation and resale or lease, and currently owns close to 75.

“We sell everything we can, but we rent and lease what we can’t sell,” says Steve Lockwood, Executive Director. “We work with families to try to get them in a place where they can get a mortgage to where we can sell them the house they’re already living in.”

The CDC recently received $495,000 from the Tennessee Housing Development Agency, which will help buy and renovate 11 houses designated to be rented or sold to very low income families.

“We’ve tried to learn to be as strategic as we can about how to invest in housing,” Lockwood says. “My board, after years of discussion, we’ve been investing in the middle-ground neighborhoods, the tipping point neighborhoods in Frayser.”

In such areas, the CDC will typically buy the worst house on the block, putting resources and about $45,000 into renovations.

“It becomes the best house on the street, and then we put a strong working family in there, and we think it changes the whole street,” Lockwood says. “We can prove that it changes the tax base for the whole area because an abandoned, blighted house hurts the value.”

Even in this deflated market, Lockwood says they’re able to sell houses for $60,000 in a neighborhood where the average sale price is around $27,000 . . . (read more)

Bridge Builders teaches kids unity, teamwork

‘Because I Said So’ column for The Commercial Appeal

June 19, 2014

Bridge Builders Madison, Somerset and Simone

Bridge Builders teaches kids unity, teamwork

As our children grow older, they grow closer to each other. They’re more willing to get along and coexist harmoniously in the limited space of our home. It’s a wonderful feeling; it’s all that we’ve hoped for as parents from the very first days.

Still, though, they backslide. They bicker and argue over things as inconsequential as a spot on the sofa or a difference in perspective.

Memphis, too, grows and ages and, hopefully, matures. Yet even as it moves forward, becoming more progressive on issues of growth and development, we backslide. In past weeks, interest groups and Memphis Zoo leaders have been bickering over land the way my kids argue over that spot on the couch.

Other groups have become embroiled in the most inane argument of all: Who is the most minority? It’s like my children discussing which of them is my favorite (I’ll never tell). This public discussion has devolved into public name-calling, water-throwing and an arrest.

It was against this civic backdrop that we sent two of our kids, Somerset and Joshua, rising seventh- and eighth-graders respectively, to Bridges last week for the summer Bridge Builders COLLABORATE program. In a building that acts as a bridge itself — on the edge of Downtown, Uptown, the Medical District and North Memphis — 114 young people from 32 ZIP codes came together to learn how to work as one.

The issues of the day weren’t the focus, not in so many words. No one read them headlines from the newspaper or a long list of acerbic statuses and comments from Facebook. Instead, the college-age facilitators led groups of kids through exercises meant to instill confidence, leadership qualities, unity and teamwork.

My kids didn’t want to go, be sure of that. They’re preteens and only recently finished with school, so they were looking forward to long summer days spent lounging on the couch, arguing over who sits where. “Why do we have to go?” they asked up until that very morning.

“Because you’ll like it,” I said, again and again. “You’ll meet new people, it’ll build character and it will give you something to do all day.”

This was one of the few instances of my being right; they loved it from the first day. They loved the people in charge, the kids in their groups, the games and workshops, and the lunches.

I picked them up that first day and, as they described the activities, the themes of the week shined through — they worked together to complete tasks, they had to choose leaders, they had to select a workshop of their own interests to focus on throughout the week.

There was a day of community service when the kids went into the surrounding neighborhood to pick up trash. The trash wasn’t theirs, but they cleaned anyway. These future leaders will one day be cleaning our messes. Because of Bridge Builders, they’ll be better equipped and more eager to do so. They’ve learned the skills at a time when current leaders have trouble putting petty differences aside to work toward a common solution.

As Cynthia Ham, president and CEO of Bridges, said to the crowd of kids and their parents at the induction ceremony on the last day, “No matter what you end up doing, I hope you will hold sacred what you learned this week at Bridge Builders and know that you can make a difference, especially in Memphis.”

Permanent link to The Commercial Appeal

Tour Le Bonheur to see the heart of the city

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

June 5, 2014

Tour Le Bonheur to see the heart of the city

I spent a recent morning taking the Le Bonheur 101 Tour. My group of eight was given breakfast, lunch and guided access to the children’s hospital.

In the 40-bed emergency room, relatively quiet at 9 a.m., Dr. Barry Gilmore, medical director of emergency services, assured us that it would fill up multiple times over the course of the day. Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital is the only nationally certified Level 1 Trauma Center in the state.

We were shown operating rooms with equipment costing millions. Dr. James Eubanks, medical director of trauma services, demonstrated computers so technologically advanced that I was sure we could launch a moon mission from the corner of Dunlap and Poplar.

In the cath lab, a days-old baby underwent a procedure as we looked on from a control booth where nurses monitored every action, giving feedback to the physician and his team while tapping a keyboard the way my teen does his phone.

And mixed in and among the gadgetry, the LED lights and a seemingly endless nervous system of fiber optic wire, was another complex, yet simple, piece of equipment. So important is it to the patients and their families, the doctors and nurses, that, when the new building was completed in 2010, they capped it off with its image.

It is the heart.

A big part of Le Bonheur’s philosophy on treatment of the body is the support that is offered to patients and their families; there is talking, physical and emotional interaction, and bonding.

The doctors and nurses, department heads and marketing team each took time from their day to explain to us every floor, ward and piece of equipment. They answered our questions unhurried and at length. They even took time to point out the art on the walls and explain its significance and what it means to them. There is beautiful art everywhere, made by and for children, and it appears as integral to the day-to-day functioning of the institution as an MRI or EKG.

I toured the hallways, operating rooms and waiting rooms of Le Bonheur the other day and, as thankful as I am that it’s there, I hope I never have to see it again.

At the beginning of the tour, we were asked to share our own Le Bonheur stories. A few of us had them. For me, it happened about 14 years ago when my son, then only 2 years old, stood up in his high chair at Pete & Sam’s restaurant and went over backward, landing on his head. As a parent and Memphian, when something like that happens, the first thing that comes to mind is “Le Bonheur.” He was examined and released soon after we arrived.

Other stories aren’t so simple and don’t end as quickly. We heard some of those stories during our tour, saw others being played out in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and operating rooms. It’s for those children and those parents that I’m grateful for the institution.

June 15 marks the 62nd anniversary of Le Bonheur opening its doors, and the 4th anniversary for the new facility. You’ve toured Graceland and Sun Studio, the Stax Museum and Brooks Art Gallery, and they all make Memphis the unique city it is. If you want to see what makes us great, what makes our heart beat, be sure and take the Le Bonheur 101 Tour.

Permanent link to The Commercial Appeal

$250 million infrastructure makeover keeps UTHSC competitive

High Ground News

May 21, 2014

The Johnson Building
Photo by Richard J. Alley

In 2007, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) completed construction on the 90,000-square-foot, $25.2 million Cancer Research Building at the corner of Madison Avenue and Manassas Street. To say that the facility, or any improvement to the campus at all, was long overdue would be an understatement–it was the first new building for UTHSC in 17 years.

It was also the impetus for a formalized, five-year, $250 million master plan by the century-old institution.

Now at the midway mark, the plan includes numerous completed, underway or planned projects. The $49 million, 135,000-square-foot Translational Science Research Building is under construction at the corner of Manassas Street and Union Avenue and will be a mirror image to the Cancer Research Building that sits immediately to the north. The buildings of the Historic Quadrangle, a tree-canopied oasis that insulates students from the heavy traffic noise just to the south on Union Avenue, are due for a $68 million upgrade, with the Mooney Memorial Library being converted to administrative offices, reception area and meeting spaces, and the Nash Research Building and its annex renovated into research space. The Crowe Building there will become the College of Nursing.

The Shelton Feurt Pharmacy Research Building is across Dunlap Street from Health Sciences Park and will come down to make way for a $24.1 million Multi-Disciplinary Simulation and Health Education Building.

Upgrades and overhauls planned include the fourth floor of the Cancer Research Building for $4.8 million, $9.5 million on expanded research enterprises and office space in the Pharmacy Building, and retrofitting and renovating the medical library in the Lamar Alexander Building for $6.1 million.

Growth and upgrading are necessary to any institution of science and learning as technology is in constant flux, and as the recruitment of students and world-class researchers becomes increasingly more competitive.

“The infrastructure was very, very challenged,” says Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Operations Officer Kennard Brown of his first exposure to the university campus.

Such infrastructure could be seen as a liability, unimpressive as it is to potential medical students. With 165 new enrollees per year, UTHSC is competing against several programs nationwide, including Duke, Wake Forest, Vanderbilt and Washington University among others, many of which can offer scholarships that a state school without a comparable endowment just can’t afford. In such an atmosphere, the facilities, the campus, whether or not the environment is conducive to learning and living, become all that more important to a student and his or her family.

“All of them are medical schools, we all graduate kids at the 98th, 99th percentile, we all have our standards, they all have to pass national boards to be physicians,” Brown says. “So academically we’re probably comparable, but what appeals to the kid, what appeals to mom?”

If the technology and infrastructure aren’t keeping pace, there is a greater chance UTHSC–and Memphis–won’t make the cut . . . (read more)

Respecting our elders: the Plough Foundation’s aging initiative

High Ground News

May 14, 2014

Katie Midgley, Program Associate for the Plough Foundation, was hired in 2011 to help figure out how the foundation might be more proactive in the funding area of aging.

“I think there were several reasons why aging was selected as our area, to really get our feet wet in being more proactive instead of reactive,” she says. “Number one is because of the numbers. People are hearing a lot about baby boomers and the ‘silver tsunami’ and Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and what are we going to do about it?”

Midgley looked at past grants that Plough had awarded and saw an increase in funding related to aging.

“The numbers reiterated what our board already suspected. Memphis is no different than the rest of the country in that we are getting older and we will stay older, people are having fewer children and they’re living longer, so that’s really a population paradigm shift. I think that’s why we selected this issue as a foundation.”

As a result, the Plough Foundation Aging Initiative was created, and a request was put out for proposals among the area’s non-profit organizations and public and private sectors. It is the foundation’s first RFP in its 50-year history.

Plough completed more than 70 interviews of individuals and organizations with expertise in all aspects of aging, and commissioned a survey of more than 500 seniors aged 65 years old and up within Memphis and Shelby County. Based on the survey and in-house research on the topics of aging, two task groups were convened, one Aging in Place and Mobility and the other Elder Abuse and Maltreatment.

Finally, a speaker series was convened to educate the public. “We wanted to really sound an alarm bell,” says Mike Carpenter, Executive Director of the Plough Foundation. “We wanted to end that (speaker series) with this call for proposals to say, ‘We’ve rung the alarm bell, now we want to be partners with you in doing something about it.’ This is a way for us to engage the not-for-profit community, because with the RFP we’re able to be very specific about the kinds of things we’re looking for, the kinds of things we’re willing to fund. It has also allowed us to bring these interested groups to the table and have some pre-discussions about their ideas and to help direct them in ways that we’ve determined would be best for the community all around this issue.”

The total grant amounts are being left open-ended, which is also a first for Plough. Not wanting to limit the focus on this complex issue is one reason. Another, Carpenter says, is that “We don’t want to be put in a position where we get proposals that are maybe subpar and feel that we need to fund those to meet some arbitrary amount that we had set out. We feel like our commitment to this is going to be larger than any single grant that we’ve made in our history.”

While the amount may not be written in stone, it is expected to be larger than the typical $12 to $13 million that Plough awards each year, an amount which won’t be affected by these grants . . . (read more)