Production and distribution of City club forums and ideastream Public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, Fond of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

We are going to get started.

Everyone, thank you so much.

So many friends here.

We're so excited.

It is February 28, Friday.

And I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programing here at the City Club and thrilled to introduce today's forum.

It is part of our local hero series, which spotlights champions here in northeast Ohio, whose hard work changes the way we view ourselves and our community.

I cannot think of any three women more deserving of this recognition than our speakers joining us today.

In December 2021, the City Club hosted its first forum on Project Noir.

It was hosted as part of Our Happy Dog Takes on Everything series in Gordon Square, and I had the privilege of moderating that conversation.

At the time.

Project Noir was the first survey and report of its kind to understand better why Cleveland was ranked dead last as a livable city for black women.

I recall the conversation that night being one of the most powerful, raw and significant ones for the City club.

The happy dog was packed, and one of the major takeaways mentioned by then panelist Stephanie Shealey of the YWCA of Greater Cleveland was that you can't make Cleveland better without making it better for black women.

Now it's 2025 and here we are at the City Club and yet another packed room full of sisterhood and allyship to discuss how Northeast Ohio can become a national leader in racial and gender equity, especially for black women.

In Lighting Solutions is a nonprofit social enterprise and social advocacy think tank, and they just released their new follow up report to 2021 is Project Noir.

So has anything changed since then?

Joining us to answer that question and more is Kayla Griffin Green, the Ohio State director for all.

Voting is local and two of the report's authors., Chinenye Nkemere, co-founder and director of Strategy for Enlightened Solutions, and Bethany Studenic, co-founder and managing director for Enlightened Solutions, Moderating the conversation is Indigo Bishop, program officer at the St Luke's Foundation.

If you have a question for our speakers, you can text it to 3305415794.

Again, that's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the Q&A portion of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club please join me in welcoming Kayla Chichi and Bethany Indigo.

All right.

Thank you so much.

All right.

We're going to jump right in because I know this is going to be a really rich conversation and we want to save all the time we have.

So I'd love to start off with each of you sharing just a bit about your background and experiences that shaped your journey to your professional positions.

At this point, I want to start you want to start by.

Sure, I can jump in.

So my background is in social work and law of a master's degree in social work from Case Western Muscle, a practicing attorney.

I do employment litigation for plaintiffs, so I deal with a lot of harassment, discrimination claims with civil Wade and Napili and Chichi and I met doing police reform work, and we saw through that process that it was really difficult to create grassroots change whenever we're dealing with complex systems.

And so we wanted to help translate the community experience to systemic change.

And then in 2020, Cleveland was ranked the worst place in America for black women.

And we knew that that's where we wanted to focus.

And I will say one of the main questions I get about my journey to this work is why are you doing this as a white woman?

And I think there's a couple of really good points.

There's a lot of good reasons, but a couple of the main ones are, you know, first, Project Noire is designed to describe the community's experience.

It is also designed to hold folks accountable to those behaviors.

When I talk to folks who look like me about this study, I often heard, well, I don't know what we're doing wrong.

I don't know why we're at this particular position.

But when I talk with black women, they told me exactly why.

Right.

And so project requires accountability for folks who look like me.

I will also say that I think that when black women thrive, everybody thrives.

My your liberation is my liberation.

But my liberation is not necessarily black women's liberation because it does not include the intersection of race.

So if I'm going to wake up every day and do advocacy work, I want to make sure that we are starting with the most marginalized.

And we know that historically, when we do that, people who look like me benefit disproportionately anyway.

So I really believe in this work and we're so excited to be here today.

Awesome.

All right.

So my background is a little bit different than Bethany's.

I'm a proud first generation American.

I'm a Nigerian-American.

And I think what brings me to this work is the fact that I was raised in a very black centered feminist household.

We were held to high standards and we hold ourselves to high standards, but we also were really encouraged to think critically about the world.

I went to the Ohio State University, where I studied race and electoral politics, and I want to put a finer point on that.

There are a lot of attacks going on around spaces where black students feel comfortable, and I would like to say that I remember very fondly my memories at the Ohio State University, at the Hale Center, at the Black Student Union, and I think that people that are successful from those programs need to be speaking about them fondly and publicly afterwards.

Afterwards, I secretly applied to Teach for America, much to the chagrin of my parents.

I was supposed to the law school and decided to become a middle school teacher in Houston, Texas.

And what was supposed to be a two year commitment turns into seven years down in Houston, which I loved.

I came back up here to continue my career, like Bethany said, where we worked in police reform, specifically around resource sharing and community advocacy around folks rights.

So I think that's the common thread is how exactly can I look at my background as a diasporic African and look at how we are going to empower black Americans, empower women to change the metrics that we're seeing here in across the country, but even in our backyards.

All good.

Good morning.

Good afternoon.

Now, I am I always start by saying I'm from Youngstown, Ohio, and I grew up in the nineties.

So I'm from Youngstown because that shaped so much of who I am.

I grew up during the war on drugs where a lot of black men were being plucked out of our community.

And I thought, Well, I'll go to law school and be a defense attorney because clearly their attorney isn't good enough to get them off.

That's what I thought in my naivete, right?

So I went to Kent, I study political science and Pan-African studies.

Similarly, our our black student union was Oscar Ritchey.

So I spent a lot of time and Oscar Ritchey and was enriched by some of the brilliant minds, Professor Oconto, Professor Dorsey, and graduated and went to law school.

And my first semester of law school I realized that I wasn't going to save every fish, but maybe if I swam upstream and figured out what was happening upstream, then we can solve some of the problems, the political problems, the policy problems.

And so I went on to get a master's of public administration because law, the laws were ever changing.

And I knew I couldn't I couldn't rectify how people on the Supreme Court can just make something up.

I was like, You're making it up.

You're like, You're all making it up.

And then I came and I thought I was going to do criminal legal work.

I thought that was going to be my, my, my work.

And I started to organize thing back in Youngstown around democracy and getting people out to vote.

And then I came here to Cleveland and I got involved within the with the NAACP and started doing door knocking and true organizing life on the ground organizing, started talking to people.

And I realize that for whatever your issue is, whether it's health care, whether it's education, democracy needs to be your second issue because we live in a republic where there are people making decisions for you.

And so I got involved in democracy, and now I'm leading Ohio for an organization called All Voting is Local and trying to help people understand that our elections are one aspect and how we can change a system and how I love it.

So many connections between education, law, advocacy, organizing.

I think it's clear why we're all.

You're all at the table here today.

I'd love to jump over to Enlightened Solutions a little bit to open the forum and talk about Project noir and update on that or give an overview of the your in line solutions and what inspired the creation of the organization in your work.

Sure.

So I'll jump in.

Project Noir was born out of research coming out of the University of Pittsburgh initially, and it was initially supposed to be a study on poverty.

Sociologists was looking at poverty rates in mid to large sized cities and essentially stating that these cities can alleviate poverty.

If you just look at class and resources.

And what that sociologist very quickly learned was the actual issue was race and gender, specifically the intersection between race and gender for black women.

So she changed her research very quietly.

She ended up publishing this research in CityLab.

Bloomberg picked it up and created a list of the top ten best cities in America for black women and the top worst cities in America for black women.

And it was a very comprehensive study.

Again, it's all cities that had a black female population of over 100,000.

And what we learned was obviously Cleveland was at the complete and total bottom.

So when Bethany texted that article to me, I was like, Yeah, girl.

Like, when do you want me to do about it?

This is exactly what I said.

And she was like, you know, somebody should do something about this.

I was like, okay, that's great, but I don't know why you're telling me this.

She said, I'll give you two weeks and in that two weeks I pulled through the actual research and it made me angry.

It made me so angry because the scientists didn't even interview one black woman.

So out of all of that research, you can't take the respect to actually take the microphone and place it in front of a black woman asked for her experiences.

I find that patently offensive that we can study and pathologize blackness.

We can study and pathologize women, yes, but we don't ever ask black people their opinion about their lived condition.

So Bethany knew what she was doing and she said, okay, would you like to talk to black women about their lived experiences and she ended up creating a pilot survey around Project You are?

I did.

I was a bit of a bully about it.

Yes.

But we knew there was something here.

And again, going back to the comment I made about talking about this with local leaders, the conversation was really nebulous, right?

There's always this when we're researching these things, it's almost like we're not talking about the people who are creating the problem, right?

It's like this problem exists, but it's just magically created.

Right?

And that was the frustration I had with this because we know there's another side to this.

And I was also hearing a lot of excuses and a lot of kind of distancing ourselves from this conversation.

And so, you know, I got angry and my response was, you know, we know what's causing it.

I'm going to show it to you mathematically.

Right?

If you need to see it in a percentage, you need to see it in the KPI, fine.

That's how we'll do it.

And so Project Noire was built based on talking to black women and talking about what are some of the main barriers that you have and you deal with whenever you go into systems?

And we're talking about when I talk to folks, a lot of times they say, I don't know what I can do to change what I can do to create change.

These problems are created one choice, a thousand choices, 100,000 choices, a million choices that we are all making every single day to create these outcomes.

And so we wanted to map what are those behaviors?

What are those tactics, what do they look like?

Because exclusion is measurable, it is predictable, it is a script.

And if you can change, if you can measure it, you can change it, right?

So from our perspective, it was about telling that story.

When we talk to black women, they say this was the first time that somebody asked me about this.

No.

And this was the first time that I had language for what I went through.

So many women that we talked to, the first thing that they did whenever they went through systemic exclusion was to blame themselves and to internalize it.

And project noir is meant to say, this is not your fault.

Women across this region, black women, are dealing with the same comments over and over and over again.

There's a reason for that.

It is a script, it is predictable, it is changeable, it is measurable.

And so we were incredibly excited with the response we launched in 2020, the day that Ohio shut down for COVID.

And I remember we cried a little.

I cried and then a lot and then we said, okay, we'll retool and will launch at the end of the summer.

So what I thought we would maybe get 25 or 50 responses.

We ended up receiving over 100 responses in our first day, and much of it due to our board member.

Now, Courtney Truex, who placed it on her social media and really galvanized black women to take the survey.

At the end of the survey, we received over 450 responses from black women across Northeast Ohio.

And in fact, we had to shut the survey down early because we started getting responses from black women in Baltimore, Hawaii, and we were like, Oh, no.

So we could go to we broke it.

And again, so in 2023 we decided, let's do this again, and this time let's have a loftier goal.

I said, If I can get 1000 black women from Lorain all the way to Youngstown and down to East Palestine to take this survey, we we would be a success.

And we ended up receiving 1324 responses from black women.

And I'm excited.

In a few minutes, we're going to jump to the 2024 survey and what what differences you saw.

But before we do that, I want to pop over to Kayla to talk about the fact that you just named the Northeast.

Ohio ranks as the least livable region for black women.

Kayla, why has this remained an unchanged fact since 2020?

And what factors contribute to this persistent inequity as it relates to your work with all?

Voting is local.

So I was joking in the back that I'm a start.

Every answer is systemic.

anti-Black racism.

Yeah, and it is.

But there are driving forces behind that because sometimes there's racism.

Folks kind of brush it off, but their driving force is when we talk about racism.

And I want to I know like they're the stats people.

So I was like, let me not do as many stats.

But I wanted to underscore economic disparities are just running our city rampant and our region rampant.

Black women in Ohio make 64 $0.64 to every dollar of every white man, and that is creating a 36 cent racial wealth gap.

That means that black women will need to work until they're 83 to make what a white man makes by 60.

Yeah, 83 years old versus 60 years old.

In Ohio, 39% of women led households live in poverty.

Among black women, 24% live in poverty, 24.8.

So 25% live in poverty.

That's compared to white women at 11.3%.

That's that's economics, right?

That's compound hit by housing and neighborhood inequities.

That's compounded by high eviction rates.

That's compounded by home ownership, low home ownership rates.

That is compounded by health disparities, which I'm sure we'll get into.

But we are the most educated population in this country.

Right.

And we still face these barriers.

And so these conditions are not by happenstance.

These are structural systems that are created for this purpose.

And I want to really connect the dots, because you asked about my work.

I work in democracy, but I want out I think it's really important to stress that politics is not an end.

Politics is a means to an end.

We utilize politics and elections to get our way to create the systems that we want to create.

And so the goal isn't simply to like, increase voter registration or increase voter turnout.

It is to create a society that works for us all.

And unfortunately, our our country and this region has crafted this society and made us feel like we have to live individualistic, that it is on us as opposed to the collective.

But if we take a step back and we say, Wait, there's too many people that have the same systemic issues, then maybe us as a collective will band together and say we need to make some changes and shift and make it a system that works for us all and.

Mm hmm.

Thank you for that.

All right.

We're going to jump back to the project now, our survey.

What are some of the most surprising and overlooked insights that have emerged?

And are there any glaring shifts that you've seen from the first survey to the second?

We did run an analysis to compare Project Nora 2020 to Project Nora 2024 and I will preface this by saying we went into project March 2024, suspecting that there wouldn't be a lot of change, right?

In order to have that type of widespread systemic change, we need to have real investment, real change across multiple systems, including legislative, but also within organization and in organizational reform.

And so when I ran that, there were very few statistics that were statistically significantly different, right?

So we haven't seen much of a shift.

Some have moved up a little bit, some have moved down a little bit.

But overall, we're seeing a lot of the similarities.

What is really nice about Project More 2024 is that every time that we do project more, we enhance our data.

So we ask quantitative questions.

So you'll see that in terms of statistics, we ask qualitative questions and we look for what are the most common things that black women are talking about?

Because these ladies are taking the survey all across the region.

They're not talking to each other.

So if I'm getting 50 stories that have the same pattern, that's something we need to look into.

So in project number 2024, we took those patterns and we asked about them explicitly.

So every time we do this, we get a little bit better at asking these questions and drilling down into the data.

Some of the statistics that we looked at this year and this was one in 2020, the committee asked us over and over again to include 67% of our participants were called angry or aggressive at work.

And this comes in two forms.

It usually comes right when someone is targeting a black woman and they suspect that she's going to say something.

And so they preemptively start painting her as aggressive, as threatening, or it happens right as she says something.

And then the response is to say, well, she's scary, right?

She's always overreacting.

This is a very, very common tactic and this is what I'm talking about whenever I say white folks need to hear this because we're the ones perpetuating it.

So what I'm looking at is asking you to make different choices around this 41% of our participants in health care.

We're told to lose weight even when it's unrelated to their complaint.

To give you an illustration, one woman talked to us and she had gone to the doctor because she broke her ankle and her doctor said, If you had just lost weight, like I told you, this would have never happened.

I don't know about you.

I've been thicker, I've been thinner, I've always been uncoordinated.

So I don't know how this goes down.

Oh, Lord.

And see why we've been together for, like, seven years.

Yeah.

So jumping back into some of the qualitative themes that we found really significant in the workplace section, the rise of DIY hire as a slur.

Mm mm mm.

I want to really pause on that, especially for all of the black women inside this room.

DTI hire or a DTI candidate is a slur.

It is a coded slur specifically aimed at black women and especially aimed at black women to target to micro address their expertise, their genius, their understanding of the workplace.

And also, I'd like to really the most important thing that I'll probably say today is that we should stop calling it DTI.

We need to get away from calling it DTI.

You need to say the word or the phrase in full diversity of black women and black womanhood, inclusion of black women and families, equity for black women and families.

If you would like to do away with that, you need to be bold enough to say it.

These are slurs and these are slurs that many black women are experiencing within the workplace.

It was a statistically significant thing because I ran the Google analysis, a trend analysis from 2020 to 2024, and we saw it skyrocket and then we saw it reflected within our qualitative analysis.

Black women receiving that within their within their workplace packets as well.

Yeah, I could go on.

I really can.

That's powerful.

Thank you for sharing.

Project Grant emphasizes the importance of Black women Civic Power.

Kyle I wanted to ask how can advocacy efforts ensure that Black women's voices shape policy at all levels?

Yeah, thank you for that question.

So one of the things that a term that I coined or a slogan that our coined when I started the work at all voting was that voting is just the front door to the mansion of democracy, that there is so much that we can do when we talk about civic engagement.

And oftentimes we get hung up on voter registration and turning out the vote.

Now we know 92% of us, we know we got it.

We we got it right.

But like, we got it.

But there's so much more.

Right.

So it is running for office.

It is attending public comment.

It is attending meetings, understanding what is happening.

It's making sure that the meetings are at times that people can actually get there and not, you know, behind closed doors when people are working.

It is accessibility.

But like I said, politics is not the end.

It's a means to the end.

A means to an end.

So when we elevate women's pay and make sure that black women have equitable pay, then we have more disposable income where we can donate money to candidates who are running, put some money into our C force so that we can, you know, run people and run people out because some people need to be ran out.

No, I mean, you know, and it's understanding what is happening.

So I want to take a a privilege here in Ohio.

One of the things that I've been pushing on for the last four years when it came when it comes to our elections, because I said democracy should go hand in hand with whatever issue you have because there's somebody making a decision.

We have this little thing, little nuanced thing in Ohio called a provisional ballot.

It's the ballot of last resort.

This is the ballot that you are given if you show up to vote and they can't find you on the rolls, you don't have the proper ID because now we have this strict voter ID bill that was passed in Ohio that says you need to have an I.D.. Do you know how many calls I got?

A man the hotline on Election Day and on election season, how many calls we got from adults who take care of their parents, who no longer have IDs.

And they tried to show up to vote and didn't have the proper ID.

So now there are senior citizens being excluded from the election process.

Okay.

To add insult, and we knew this was going to be bad.

We know it's going to be bad because in 2020, we had the largest voter turnout in the state of Ohio.

It was very good.

We had 5.9 million people show up to vote in the 2020 election.

We've not seen those numbers ever before.

In 2021, they introduced this bill to try to roll it back and we were like, no, no, no.

It's going to impact people.

Our numbers skyrocketed from 2020 to even 2023, where there was not nearly as many people voting.

And so we were like, okay, this is a problem.

We know it's going to be a problem, right?

And so the amount of provisional ballots that we had in 2020 was at 24,000.

The amount of provisional votes that we had in 23, 20, 23 on an off year, quote unquote, was 13,000, which is way more than we usually see on an off year.

The amount of provisional votes these are votes that these are people that showed up to the ballot try to vote and their vote was rejected in the 2024 election was 34,000.

In this election, and there is a provision currently in Congress called the SAFE Act that will drastically reshape how we do elections, because when you go to register to vote, they need they are trying to see proof of citizenship.

Now, this was tracked.

This was floated at the state level as well.

But proof of citizenship means I need to bring in a passport or a birth certificate.

Well, half of Americans don't have passports.

And many in our our African-American culture don't have birth certificates.

Don't let you be a senior citizen and migrated from the South.

OC Don't let you have just endured a natural disaster and lost everything you have.

You know, like, these are the nuances that we are talking about.

Don't let you change your name as a woman got married and change your name.

And they say, Well, I need your birth certificate.

With your birth certificate, your ID don't have the same name.

So now you're Disenfranchized and you cannot vote.

That's half of our country.

This is these are decisions that are being made.

These are choices that are being made.

And so if your issue is not democracy, it needs to be quickly.

Because if your issue education, if your issue is health care, somebody is making those decisions, but you can't vote on who who that is.

Come on.

Yeah.

And sticking with the theme of policies and and turning it back to to prioritizing the the economic and educational health care outcomes of black women.

Bethany and Chichi, are there specific policies right now or coming up that that you think would particularly impact that.

This is our hardest question.

We have too many ideas.

We are a think tank.

So think a lot.

We talk to text messages from cheesy.

What about this?

Yeah, I texter.

The thing is, is there's no one silver bullet policy that's going to fix this, right?

This has to be a long term concerted effort across multiple systems, local systems, state systems, federal systems, national systems.

I will say, you know, locally, we have worked really hard to support the creation of the Black Women and Girls Commission at the city of Cleveland.

We're really proud of that work.

And we made that recommendation because we know that we need long term focus on this.

It's not going to be one specific policy in terms of, you know, organizations We'd really like to see more commitment to data informed decision making.

People talk about using data to make decisions, but when it comes down to measuring micro-aggressions, suddenly they're not so interested in the conversation.

Yeah, this is the type of change we need because we have to chip away at these scripts that we're following.

We're really interested in public data disclosures for workplaces, health care and education.

If you're choosing where you're going to go and get healthcare, you deserve to know what the health care outcomes are for.

People who look like you.

Mm hmm.

If you're looking to take a new job, you deserve to know what the turnover rate is for people who look like you and the average tenure, Right?

You deserve to be able to make informed decisions.

And those are easily measurable and reportable.

This is the hardest question for me, because I have too many things.

I'll do a broader point.

It's not necessarily attached to a specific policy, but it's a it is a socioeconomic call.

We are currently and have been currently experiencing a brain drain in the state of Ohio.

If black women are the most educated, getting the most certifications, even in the midst of all of these different obstacles that systems and individuals are placing in front of them.

I want you all to understand that black women of means, education and resources will leave this region.

They will leave.

Not only will they leave, they will be taking their education with them.

They are taking their families with them.

And cynically they're taking their tax money with them.

Cuyahoga County is losing population.

The city of Cleveland is losing population.

The city of Cleveland is 48% black.

We are a black majority city.

If we cannot foster an environment that allows black women not only just to survive, but to thrive.

We are artificially creating a brain drain, and that is perilous for our economic stability in the state of Ohio.

We are already losing representation, as Carla states.

The reason why we were like, we have to have her up here is because this is a democracy question.

If we are losing population, we are losing representation.

We are losing our voice not only on the national level, but here locally as well.

If we are not investing in making sure that the black women and girls, the girls at the table, the girls in the back that are gaining an education, if we are not invested in their livelihood, in their career paths, we are actually doing ourselves a disservice within the state.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

All right.

And I know it's almost time for Q&A, so we're going to do one last question.

And this is for for all panelists, because I know it's a question that might come up in Q&A, but something that everyone's going to be thinking about is what individuals can do, what can community organizations do?

How can we take action based on all voting is local and project What is findings to create lasting change and sustainable.

We have to push back against the system like we have to push back against the system that tells us is them or us versus us.

We have to push back against the system that profits, that drives profits for a very, very, very small minority and keeps us out.

That is what this is all about.

It is all about economics.

It really is.

It is not about they don't like my hair, how I show up.

It is they want to control people in order to make more profit.

And if we can coalesce together and I say this all the time and don't shut up, because now Dr. King was assassinated, because he started talking about bringing poor white people and poor black people and middle class black people together.

And they say, oh, absolutely not.

Absolutely not on our watch.

Because when we wake up and we understand that my enemy does not look or lived out across the road or across the railroad tracks, it is the people in the glass and ivory towers that we need to rage against the system and say, do you know how much money $1,000,000,000 is?

Do you need a do you need multiple billions of dollars when we are suffering, when there are people that are suffering and we are not disposable people?

We are not disposable.

Black women are not disposable.

Our Latino community is not disposable.

So we to rage against the system and we need to look for policies and politics to do so.

So I say this at probably every single speech that I give, it's and it's a proverb from my people.

It's an Igbo proverb that says those who live in the attic know where the roof leaks.

Oh, yeah, Black women know exactly what is wrong with these systems.

The problem is, are we actually listening to black women or are we doing that?

We've listening and we're learning.

I'm done with it.

I've been done with it.

Anybody that knows me knows I'm done with it.

What we actually need is unencumbered financial resources to actually build the systems that we deserve.

If we invest in black women, we are investing in our own future.

It is very revolutionary, just like Kayla says, to be bringing together a multiracial coalition of individuals that may not look like you.

So it is so important for us to be listening.

Individuals that may have different experiences but are valid all the same.

Hmm.

I'll just add the.

The future is diverse.

We've been saying this for quite some time, but it's here.

There's a reason that the conversation is so difficult right now.

48% of Gen-z is racially and ethnically diverse.

By 2045, there won't be a racial majority in this country anymore.

Women have more education than we've ever had.

We are outpacing men for the first time, a third of gen-z is LGBTQ.

Change is here.

That's why we're dealing with these difficult conversations now.

And I will say, as advocates, the thing that I often say is that if I'm not making somebody mad, I'm not pushing hard enough.

So I understand that we see resistance.

Without resistance.

There is no advocacy work.

That is part of the definition of what we do.

I'm not afraid that the pendulum has swung.

We're not going to keep we're not going to stop doing what we're doing.

But I will say our work is more important than ever.

We're watching data being deleted.

We're watching our conversations being put on hold or banned entirely.

We need funders to really be focusing on the organizations that are most at risk right now.

And it's the work like Teague and I are doing.

We need your support to be able to continue to do this because we're not going to stop using these words to be able to apply for federal grant.

Mm hmm.

Maybe I heard a lot of things in there.

I heard Push back, make people mad, resist.

And for allies to listen and to fund the major things.

Yeah.

Fun, fun, fun, fun.

Yeah.

That's powerful.

So I think that was our last question.

We're going to move to Q&A.

So we're about to begin the audience Q&A for our livestream and radio audience.

I'm Indigo Bishop, program officer, the St Luke's Foundation, and moderator for today's conversation.

Today, we're talking about the newly released project noir report, a follow up to their 2021 report, which sought to understand better why Cleveland was ranked last as a livable city for black women.

Joining me on stage is Kayla Griffin Green, the Ohio state director of all voting is local and two of the report's authors, Chichi and sorry in camera co-founder and director of strategy of in line Solutions and Bethany Student Tech co-founder and managing director for In Solutions.

Also, we welcome questions from everyone City club members, guests, students as well as those joining via our live stream at City Club dot org or live radio broadcast at 89.8 9.7 Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speakers, please text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

We have our first question.

Please.

Okay.

Good afternoon.

My name is Carmen Gray and I'm representing National Congress of Black Women and I've been asked by the youth that I work with to ask you all, when are you coming to them?

Mm.

I'm new to this format about questions, but I so it's going to come off as a statement and a question at the same time.

It's my youth how I was able to get involved.

I've been asking them for years to do things, but I had to learn how to communicate with them.

So I had to get a book or Ebonics book, and I had to watch a show called Betty's.

Okay.

It was stupid.

But finally they listened to me.

Oh.

So they told me I had to do that same way and I had to come to them because they weren't coming to me.

And I remember growing up as a missionary child, we said, if the people don't come to church, you bring the church to the people.

So with all that being said, I'd just like to know is when are we coming to them?

Because they have way much energy, way more talents and know how to do the social media and all that Twitters, they can type with two fingers.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So when are we coming in?

Now.

So I'll I'll jump in because I'm serving as the I am the immediate past president of the Cleveland NAACP.

But our new president, Will Tarter, is here.

One of the things that I want to plug is that NASA has a youth council that we certainly can and would love to bring to schools and communities.

And so if there are educators and folks who have dynamic young people or young people, it's just trying to figure it out.

Invite us in.

Like we just we need an invitation.

You know, we knock on the door.

We're like, Jesus, I'm I'm not I must know.

That's not at all.

So invite us and invite us in for an AC.

The Youth Council.

Awesome.

Hi, my name is Dr. Wendy Ellis Jones.

I just want to compliment everyone.

I mean, thank you for sharing your transparency and your truth.

I have to admit, at 48 years old, I have never in my life met a white woman who speaks with so much conviction about the purpose of doing the work that you do and speaks with it with authenticity and know no reservations about it.

So I just want to say thank you to you.

You you give me encouragement that there's other women out there, particularly who don't look like me, who care enough about us.

So thank you to you.

My question is, hearing you share these statistics.

I'm sorry.

She's going to cry.

Thank you.

My question is, hearing you share the statistics about black women is certainly alarming, particularly what you spoke on on stage.

But as it pertains to health care, as an executive in it, what advice would you give to women who don't look like me, who are in the corporate environment, who exhibit the behavior, microaggressions and don't know they are and how they can change their language, behavior, attitude?

You know, everything change.

That's an amazing question.

And thank you.

And it is saying, I don't think my mascara is waterproof, so I'm going to try and hold that back.

You know, when I talk, I do a lot of talking with white women about this.

I get a lot of questions.

And one of the main things that I talk about is that need to process our trauma.

So much of what we do is repress and protect white supremacy and patriarchy, and we play an incredible role in that.

And because we never reckon with the pain that comes along with that, it's not part of our culture is not part of what we talk about in general.

And if you do talk about it, you're punished because we don't process that.

We take it out on other people.

Trauma comes out one way or another.

You can't repress it.

So you're either going to take it out on someone or you're going to continue to live through those cycles.

So I often talk with white women about processing our role in the system, processing the ways in which it has injured us, and starting to understand and empathize with folks who look different because our liberation is tied together.

If we leave oppression alive in any way, any form, it grows back so we can eradicate it for white women.

And ten years later, it'll be right back.

We have to eradicate it completely.

So thank you for your question.

Hi, my name is Jada.

I'm a student at M.S.

Scores Film.

And my question is, well, first, it's a quick little statement and there's a question.

As of 20.2, 29% of black women have died during childbirth in Ohio.

Black women have I'm sorry, milliners.

Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate compared to any other race.

I was wondering, what are your views on how black women are treated in health care?

Also, why isn't this being talked about more?

Mm hmm.

Okay.

So, yeah, that statistic is appalling.

And more than appalling.

I want to remind us that we live at the nexus of four globally ranked health care institutions, four of them for and to their neighbors.

The black women that you are are speaking about.

It's not just one loss of life.

That's an entire generation.

Mm hmm.

That's a whole generation.

So obviously, we take this extremely personal.

And throughout our research and project noir, we actually talk specifically about those themes that you're talking about, bedside manner, callousness, the indifference to pain that black women are experiencing within the health care system.

So to your question about are people speaking about it?

Yes, we obviously are.

Many of our health care partners are definitely talking about it.

We have partners that are in the room village of Healing that just opened their new facility in Shaker.

We also have Jasmine was birthing beautiful communities here.

There are black women that are taking their knowledge and expertise and removing it from the systems that had absolutely constricted them.

We are attempting to to work with our health care systems, to work within the systems to to eradicate these health care disparity disparities.

But we need individuals to keep talking about it so that we can keep pushing as well.

And before we move on that, that is why it's important for people to lead hospitals.

Yep.

Hmm.

That is why it is important for black women and black people to be teachers.

Well, and med school so that the narrative isn't pervasive that black people don't experience pain.

But that's why we go ha!

When folks are fired from institutions.

So as a segue way.

Thank you, Kayla and Dr. Adrian Hatton and Lifetime Northeast Ohio resident.

I was going to ask just about that.

My question is really related to the narrative and controlling the pain.

My question is, how do we as black women get because I can't say regain because we never really had it control of the pain.

So we can tell our own story.

Mm hmm.

I'm going to kick it because I think that Project Noire is an example of that.

Right.

We might not be in the newsrooms and we've got some amazing black women news journalists here.

Yeah, we have some amazing folks who are writing and leading and telling the stories.

Leading organization is at the helm of organizations, but sometimes we just don't need to ask for permission.

We.

Bethany asks for permission.

Didn't like presented it, but like the report that they did was like, Oh, we're going to tell the story and put the spotlight on black women.

So I just want to kick it.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, it's just the fearlessness.

what I'm seeing is when black women step into the first role of a historically white organization, they are under and the attack impacts the mentally, physically, emotionally, their household.

I know this from firsthand experience, and I'm witnessing that happen to other black women right now.

What can we do as a community in northeast Ohio to better support black women when they step into this role?

And what's the responsibility of holding these boards accountable to doing such natural infection when something isn't?

It's a great question, and it's something we've observed many, many times in our work we have talked to sometimes when we talk about this.

One of the kind of rebuttals or dismissive statements we get is, isn't this an inner city problem?

And we've always pushed back on that.

There's a reason we call it a Northeast Ohio survey, because this is across the region.

And it's also not about poverty.

Poverty is an additional barrier that so many of our women are high achieving black women who are making money and doing amazing things in this region.

And we know that the glass cliff is a real thing.

It's a documented phenomenon that when an organization is in a difficult situation, they think maybe it's time to bring a woman on.

Yeah.

And then the woman kind of fixes everything, and then they fire her for no reason.

Yeah.

And we see that over and over and over again.

And then someone who, like a white man, comes in and takes credit for it and moves forward.

That's a documented statistical phenomenon.

And so when we think about change, part of it is having conversations like this where we can raise awareness, where it looks, it starts to look really blatant whenever we we know that that's something that they do and they continue to repeat that pattern.

my question is, first, I want to say thank you so much for doing this research.

Now it's in the face of everybody.

So I hope that you are listening.

But what efforts can we in this room do to help push organizations to fund this work in research here?

So many young people here who in ten years this can really influence how we love on our young black girls.

So what dollar amount are we talking about?

Because sometimes to get to people, you got to just get to the bottom line.

So like what?

How much money are we talking?

Mm hmm.

I mean, she's my translator.

Reading your mind?

Yeah.

It has to be sustained.

Yeah.

And so our work we did, we had four years between the project because we had to fundraise around it.

We had to have conversations.

When we talk with funders, we're often still seen as the new kids on the block when we first pitch project new are before we actually did the survey.

Most funders told us just flat out no, we don't fund research.

We don't fund research, we don't fund policy work.

We're not interested in this.

One particular person told us, Don't black women already know this?

Is this even really helpful?

Yeah.

And so we had to break through a lot of barriers and we're still breaking through those barriers.

I will say I won't put a dollar amount on it because I don't want to limit it.

Right.

Never put out the first number in a negotiation.

But what we do need a sustained funding over time.

Teaching.

I worked really hard.

We work with systems to earn income.

We put our own dollars into this every single day.

But we need systems here locally to see the value of that, especially when we're at a time where data is being deleted.

And she she and I are always right.

And I mean, it's factual.

We were like, it's not going to change.

And then like, Oh yeah, well, it doesn't change.

But we we genuinely are.

And on top of it, it is just a two person team.

All of that research, all of those interviews, all of the surveying, all of the community investment is just me and Bethany.

We need the help.

We need the assistance, whether it's a program office or whether it's data analysis.

Bethany runs all of the data analysis and I go through and I clean it up.

These are investments that we actually need to change these metrics because it's only going to grow larger.

A thousand black women took this survey.

Next time, it could be 5000.

It's going to be unavoidable when we're not able to actually explain why the needle has not moved.

I think this is.

Hello, everyone.

Peter Wood from the St Luke's Foundation.

Great job, great panel.

Wonderful, wonderful responses.

My quick question is, you know, when we think about the city of Cleveland, how do you increase fellowship or camaraderie or support amongst black women?

I think often times we fall victim to the environment and sometimes there's a conquer and divide attitude when you're trying to rise to the top.

So how do you promote that fellowship and increased camaraderie to support one another in the black community?

For black women, I'd actually kind of push back on that.

I would actually say that black women have the highest amount of camaraderie and the highest amount of support of each other.

The best thing about working.

No, no, no, no.

I know.

Yeah, I'm just Bolt.

Sorry, But to increase it, I think what what would be necessary is just understanding that we are all on that We all are.

Our destinies are completely tied together.

So bringing down another individual isn't actually going to make you taller.

It makes you a small human being and makes you small.

So again, just making sure that we are protecting one another because our destinies are interconnected is probably the most important thing.

But again, there's nothing better in this world.

There is nothing that I would ever ask God of more than, you know, to be reborn as a black woman.

It is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Friend, please.

A round of applause for Indigo Bishop, Kayla Griffin, Green, Chinenye Nkemere Bethany Studenic.

Forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club dot org.

Today's forum is part of the City Club's Local Heroes series presented in partnership with Citizens and Enbridge.

Thank you to each of them for their support.

The City Club would like to welcome students joining us from Beaumont School, Saint Martin DePauw High School and Empty Squared STEM High School.

And we would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by Birding Beautiful Communities, Citizens collaborate.

Cleveland College Now Enlightened Solutions First year Cleveland at Case Western Reserve University, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

The St Luke's Foundation.

The Center for Community Solutions and the MetroHealth System.

Thank you all for being here today.

Coming up next week at the City Club on Friday, March 7th, we'll be joined by the president of Strongsville City Council and the chairman of the Republican Party of Cuyahoga County, who will provide their insight and analysis on President Trump's performance as he makes his way through his first 100 days.

You can get tickets and learn more about this and other forums at City Club dot org.

That brings us to the end of today's forum for forum.

Thank you once again to Indigo, Kayla Chin, Tanya and Bethany said the economy and this forum is now adjourned.

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