Description
Contributors
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Andrea Manzo - Regional Equity Director, East Salinas Building Healthy Communities
MODERATOR
Andrea Manzo is the Regional Equity Director for the East Salinas Building Healthy Communities (BHC), a 10-year initiative funded by The California Endowment. In her role she supports Toward a Racially Equitable Monterey County, an ecosystem approach that centers resident voice and power while building capacity across multiple sectors to understand and advance racial equity through an inside-outside strategy.
She also supports the BHC initiative including its grantees by forging relationships with community and government ensuring meaningful collaboration. Ms. Manzo convenes residents and community organizations via the Community Alliance for Racial Equity which focuses on implementing racial equity policies and practices within local government to increase the level of resident voice and power in decision-making processes. She is an advocate for authentic community engagement and is passionate about supporting youth to be agents of change in their community to reframe the narrative of young people.
As the daughter of immigrant parents, she is deeply rooted in her culture and dances with the mexican folklorico group, Tonatiuh Danzantes del Quinto Sol. Ms. Manzo received her undergraduate degree in Chicano/a Studies and French Studies at UC Santa Barbara.
In 2015 she was honored as one of the Women of the Year by the Monterey County Commission on the Status of Women commending her work with youth on the only nationally youth-led open streets event, Ciclovía Salinas.
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Francisco Lara-Valencia - Associate Professor, Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University
Francisco Lara-Valencia is an associate professor of border studies and senior sustainability scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Francisco obtained his PhD in urban and environmental planning from the University of Michigan. His current work focuses on the transformation of cities by immigrants and access of immigrant communities to healthy neighborhood environments. He also studies governance and policy issues in border regions, with an emphasis on the U.S.-Mexico border. He is the executive director of the Association for Borderland Studies (ABS) and director of the Transborder Policy Lab.
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Charles Branas, PhD - Chair, Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Dr. Charles Branas has conducted research that extends from urban and rural areas in the US to communities across the globe, incorporating place-based interventions and human geography. He has led win-win science that generates new knowledge while simultaneously creating positive, real-world changes and providing health-enhancing resources for local communities. His pioneering work on geographic access to medical care has changed the healthcare landscape, leading to the designation of new hospitals and a series of national scientific replications in the US and other countries for many conditions: trauma, cancer, stroke, etc. His research on the geography and factors underpinning gun violence has been cited by landmark Supreme Court decisions, Congress, and the NIH Director. Dr. Branas has also led large-scale scientific work to transform thousands of vacant lots, abandoned buildings and other blighted spaces in improving the health and safety of entire communities. These are the first citywide randomized controlled trials of urban blight remediation and have shown this intervention to be a cost-effective solution to persistent urban health problems like gun violence. He has worked internationally on four continents and led multi-national efforts, producing extensive cohorts of developing nation scientists, national health metrics, and worldwide press coverage.
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Eugenia South, MD, MS - Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, Penn's Perelman School of Medicine
Eugenia (Gina) South is Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, as well as the Faculty Director for the Penn Urban Health Lab. As a physician-scientist, her broad vision is to improve health and quality of life for residents in low-resource and Black communities through both research and clinical work. Dr. South’s research agenda is focused on developing and testing individual and neighborhood level interventions to better understand the ways in which the physical and social attributes of where people live, work, and play influence physical and mental health, and community safety. Her work on vacant lot greening has been published in JAMA Network Open, PNAS, and AJPH, as well as been covered by national and international media outlets such as the Washington Post, NPR, and Time Magazine. Her current work includes an RWJ funded community-led micro-greening efforts, developing a peer-navigator intervention with a behavioral economics framework to increase the amount of time people spend in urban nature, evaluating the impact of structural housing repairs on crime, a CDC funded study to evaluate the impact of blight remediation and an alternative response unit on opioid overdose in Philadelphia, and a series of studies evaluating the impact of violent crime on acute care utilization. Dr. South is also passionate about diversity, inclusion, and antiracism and currently serves as co-chair of the PennEM Diversity Committee and is a member of the Penn-CHOP Alliance of Minority Physicians Faculty Steering Committee. Dr. South received her BA from Harvard University, her MD from Washington University School of Medicine in 2008 and her MSHP from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, during which time she was also a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar.