Health

On a Sunday in January, Karen Harrison walked across the street from her home in Syracuse’s Valley neighborhood to the area’s first winter market. “I bought greens and onions, potatoes and garlic,” she said. “They’re good and fresh. I just went over there with my bags and filled them up and paid and went back home. It was that easy.”

The winter market, organized by Food Access Healthy Neighborhoods Now (FAHNN), runs the second and fourth Saturday of the month through April at an empty store in the Valley Plaza Shopping Center, 4141 S Salina St.

Rhonda Vesey started the organization in May 2021 to provide food access to a Syracuse neighborhood with no grocery store. Since Tops closed its Valley Plaza store in 2018, neighbors lost easy access to fresh produce, dairy and meat. Transportation barriers make it difficult for many in a neighbor-hood with high levels of poverty and health inequity to travel to buy groceries.

In July 2022, Vesey and other volunteers started a weekly outdoor summer market at Valley Plaza. Operating through October, it featured food grown at nearby Brady Farm and from other local vendors. Vesey also booked musical entertainment and invited representatives from Upstate Community Hospital and Red Cross to do blood pressure checks, help connect people with primary care physicians and educate them about smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

“It takes a lot to get a healthy neighborhood,” Vesey said. “Food is the start of that. You have to have a strong mind and a healthy body to get a job so you can feed your kids.”

The summer market was so successful, FAHNN wanted to operate a market in winter, too.

The winter market is “constantly busy,” Vesey said, with customers buying produce from local vendors and from wholesale sellers, baked goods and eggs. Brady Faith Center, which sponsors FAHNN, often sells out of the fruits and vegetables grown at its Brady Farm.

Harrison, a longtime supporter of Brady Farm, tries to eat locally and eat seasonally. “If most of my greens and salad items are grown locally that’s valuable,” she said.

The winter market shares that vision. “You can walk two or three blocks with your bag and pick up onions and potatoes,” she said. “You aren’t picking up chips and cookies. It helps you be more intentional about being healthy.”

The winter market also provides social benefits. “A bunch of my neighbors were there,” Harrison said. “You’re seeing people from the community and saying ‘hello.’”

Vesey is thrilled that’s happening. “We’re weaving a positive web into the community,” she said. “We want to bring folks out long enough to feel good about their community.”

At 1:00 a.m., Timothy Jennings-Bey drove down the dark, quiet Syracuse streets to a grisly murder scene. There he met with a grieving mother who just witnessed her son being gunned down in front of their home. Standing next to her was the victim’s thirteen year-old brother, with a look of devastation and anger reflected in his features.

Most couldn’t imagine pulling themselves out of bed in the middle of the night to face such a heartbreaking scene. But to Jennings-Bey, it is an all too common horror in his mission to put a stop to street violence and its resulting trauma. He serves as the Trauma Response Team’s Director and founder of the Street Addiction Institute (SAI). 

Jennings-Bey founded SAI two years ago after studying the concept of behavioral addiction to street violence, culminating in the national publication of his 2014 paper, Street Addiction: A Proposed Theoretical Model for Understanding the Draw of Street Life and Gang Activity, in the Journal of Addiction Research and Theory. Now, through SAI, he sets out to break the cycle of neighborhood violence and associated trauma that can lead to retaliation and a life of incarceration and poverty.

The gravity of seeing a friend get shot, losing a loved one, or even just living in and around violent neighborhoods can cause feelings of grief and fear, leading to post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, revenge violence, and detachment from friends, family and school, according to the Syracuse Neighborhood Violence Research Network. This can impede one’s ability to maintain healthy relationships, gain a proper education, or secure a job.

2016 was the deadliest year in Syracuse’s history. There were 31 murders reported in Syracuse that year, making the city’s per-capita homicide rate higher than that of other Upstate New York cities and five times higher than New York City.

“The impact of this violence in such a small geographic area is that most members of the community know multiple people who have been shot, stabbed, and/or killed,” said Jennings-Bey. “Many affected people are experiencing trauma similar to those who live in war zones. We need to tackle this head-on and protect our communities by preventing future trauma from repeating itself in these neighborhoods.”

SAI actively works with the Trauma Response Team as well as other community groups to conduct intervention and prevention services around issues related to trauma, grief, loss, violence, and behavioral addiction. SAI utilizes messengers – such as therapists, pastors, and social workers – within high-violence neighborhoods who can best connect with the challenges that residents are facing. These messengers are on the front lines, responding to neighborhood shootings and providing help to the victims’ families.

SAI is currently working on becoming an independent organization. This includes opening and staffing an office with a dedicated associate that will manage operations, grant requests, service contracts, and programming, putting the organization in a better position to serve more individuals and combat violence more effectively.

Jung Hoon Ryu moved to Syracuse from South Korea in 2005. During his mission work with the Boaz Project at his church, Korean Church of Syracuse, he encountered abandoned, broken and neglected housing on the Northside.

“I could see the broken hearts of the residents living in those conditions,” said Jung. “I realized then that God led me to Syracuse to help make change for them.”

Using his construction and architecture background, Jung established Building the Bridge USA to rebuild broken homes and communities and provide construction job opportunities for other New Americans. Through his involvement with Hopeprint, he was hired as the general contractor for one of its first lead-safe renovation projects.

On a warm August Day, Nicole Watts, CEO and founder of Hopeprint Inc., toured us around the Northside neighborhood. She loves the community of neighbors, the sound of the Assumption Church bells that play every hour and the kids playing in their yards. And she’s not the only one. The New Americans that settle in this neighborhood and find community through Hopeprint’s programs do, too.

“Folks come to us, and we build together,” Watts said. “We help them on their trajectory to thriving, and after a few years, many are ready to be homeowners, but they aren’t staying here.”

For more than a decade, Hopeprint has served the local resettled New American community through family empowerment programs, community navigation supports, and neighborhood development.

After a series of community dialogues, Hopeprint recently launched its micro-neighborhood reinvestment strategy, which seeks to address the area’s lack of quality, affordable housing. The strategy is multi-stepped with a focus on advocating for equitable transit options, right-sized housing, and business development. The chosen micro-neighborhood is a stretch of 30 blocks inside a boundary of four Northside streets (Park St., E. Division St., North Salina, and Kirkpatrick).

“We want to invest in these 30 blocks, so that residents can prosper in place,” Watts said. “So they don’t have to move away, and leave the community they’ve built here.”

Hopeprint approached Greater Syracuse Land Bank to purchase vacant homes and properties in the area, and hopes to start renovations on properties this fall. With support from the Community Foundation’s LeadSafeCNY initiative, Hopeprint will remodel the houses to be lead-safe.

According to the Onondaga County Health Department, more than 10 percent of Syracuse children tested in 2019 were shown to have elevated lead levels. On the Northside, such as in census tract 23, that number jumps to 16 percent – or one in every six kids. Our LeadSafeCNY initiative is committed to data-driven investments to eradicate childhood lead poisoning that disproportionately affects communities of color in the county.

“Our focus is on the people that call this place home,” Watts said. “This initiative is an investment in housing, but ultimately it’s an investment in people.”

As we walked the streets on the Northside, Watts pointed out the vacant houses and empty lots that she’s hoping to one day move families into. Some are full tear-downs, and others will take a lot of love and care, but it’s easy to see her vision as she talks.

She sees the problems – the broken windows, the faltering foundations – but just as easily sees the businesses that might one day root the corner of DeMong Park, or the new parents moving into their first home on North Alvord.

“We want to make sure that there are viable options for our families who want to stay on the Northside, and that there’s a quality home available to them,” Watts said.

As a Northside property owner and budding developer himself, Jung shares Hopeprint’s desire to see the Northside be a place where people can prosper in place.

“This is the first big step to reaching the light at the end of the tunnel and opening the door to the future for residents on the Northside,” he said.

Jolie Moran doesn’t see herself ever working for anyone other than Vera House. She started her career there 10 years ago and hasn’t looked back. It has not only been a safe haven for countless survivors, but a place of refuge for her as well. 

“It was about five years after the incident before I even said the words, ‘I was raped’,” Moran said. “After working here for some time, I was more easily able to work through my own trauma.”

Moran doesn’t shy away from her story. In a way, she relates to the survivors on a personal level as Vera House’s Outreach and Advocacy Program Coordinator. She currently supervises nine advocates who provide services to individuals in Onondaga County affected by domestic and sexual violence, elder abuse, and other crimes.

“We are, what I would like to consider, the emergency room of Vera House,” Moran said. “If there is someone in need, someone in crisis, our advocates are the ones responding to them.”

Vera House offers a 24-hour support line, often staffed by volunteers, that provides referrals and support to anyone affected by domestic violence.

“We could not do the work that we do without the help of our volunteers,” Moran said. “There is so much need in our community. We have a team of volunteers that helps us respond to the hospitals, we have a group that will help answer the crisis support line, and volunteers down in our family court helping to fill out orders of protection for people that need them.”

Moran explains that Vera House is where survivors can attend to the process of healing at their own pace and take advantage of the resources on hand.

“We provide a safe space for people to be able to share with us what they need to share,” said Moran. “We never want to pry information out of them.”

Aside from supplying pertinent information and education, Vera House also has close-knit working relationships with the local hospitals as well as police departments. All  collaborate and work toward the same goal: to eradicate domestic and sexual abuse.

As Moran puts it, working at Vera House has allowed her to engage in her own healing process while carrying out the mission of an organization that is helping others, like her, who are setting out to live in a world “free of violence and abuse.”