- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been provided by Holy Name.

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The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

And by The New Jersey Education Association.

Promotional support provided by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

And by AM970 The Answer.

- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The jobs of tomorrow are not the jobs of yesterday.

- I'’m hopeful that this is the beginning to accountability.

- Life without dance is boring.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I did do the finale, and guess where my trailer was?

A block away from my apartment, it couldn'’t have been better!

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

-_ It'’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it'’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato here.

We kick off the program with Tara Colton.

She's with us again.

Go back on our website and see previous segments she's done on childcare and its impact on the economy.

Tara Colton is Executive Vice President of Economic Security for the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

That's the EDA, and Dr. Leeja Carter, CEO and founder of the Coalition for Food and Health Equity.

Tara and Leeja, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having us.

- Great to be here.

- Let me share that the EDA is an underwriter of the programming that we do, particularly around important economic issues.

Leeja, let me ask you, could you, Dr. Carter, share exactly what the Coalition for Food and Health Equity is?

- Absolutely, the Coalition for Food and Health Equity, we refer to it as either the Coalition or Coalition Equity.

We're here to address both food security and health equity through a racial economic justice lens.

That simply means that in order to create healthy individuals, we need healthy communities, and it takes us all from our local, you know, community groups to our small businesses.

And so by building bridges between all of us in the community, we can really make each and every one of us healthier, whole, and be able to get those meals on the table.

- And we have your website up so people can find out more.

Tara, talk to us about the Sustain and Serve program and why it matters so much.

- Sure, the Sustain and Serve program is something that Governor Murphy launched, really, in the depths of COVID at the end of 2020 as a $2 million pilot.

And it has grown beyond our wildest dreams to a $57 million program where we make grants to about three dozen nonprofits including Leeja and the incredible team at Coalition.

And they use that funding to buy meals from hundreds of small restaurants throughout the state and then feed them to their neighbors in need.

Governor Murphy talks about this as a win win win, and it's really impactful to consider just how far each dollar spent through this program stretches, and how many people's lives are touched with them.

- Well said.

Dr. Carter, let me ask you this.

The importance of delivering food to people, talk about that as opposed to some people's idea of a traditional food pantry, you go there.

The food comes to you in this case.

Delivering food, those options, why are they so important?

- Yeah, I mean, I think that's an area that we take for granted that there's so many individuals that just can't make it to the store, can't make it to the food pantry for a variety of reasons.

The cost of transportation is expensive.

Also, carrying bags of food meals is heavy.

If you are struggling with some form of immobility issue or disability that might impede your ability to carry, then mobilizing food and produce in any form of way becomes invaluable to your daily survival.

And so at Coalition, that's what we do.

That's what I like to say is that we mobilize food.

We make it easy to access in that way, both with nutrition, but just with food, getting it to your doorstep so you don't have to think about how am I gonna access food?

Considering most of our particular clients live in very hard to reach areas where they might have to take two buses or a bus and a train to get to a food pantry or a local grocer that would have more healthy food options.

- Dr. Carter, special meal options, talk about that a little bit.

- Yeah, I mean, I think that's also something that we just don't talk about.

What does it mean to be whole, right?

What does it mean to be healthy and to have the type of food you need to be able to advance your health every day?

I think that part of food security is not only being able to eat and to have food, but also have food that helps you manage your health.

So having those larger conversations around, you know, someone who might be pre-diabetic, or someone with high blood pressure, or someone who just needs to eat a bit healthier in order to just help them be healthy and strong.

For us at Coalition, we like to tailor those meals to our particular population so not only are they fed, but they're fed in a way that can really help them reduce, you know, any type of return visits to the ER or to their primary care physician that could be prevented.

- Tara, let me ask you, we're three years plus into the pandemic, and we've had so many segments dealing with the economic challenges in the state.

There's challenges of small business, the childcare issues that I said you've joined us to talk about.

COVID and the fallout from COVID, the impact of COVID, the long term, short and long term impact of COVID, in many ways, it has changed the role of the Economic Development Authority in this state, has it not?

- Absolutely, I think it is something that was have seeded from the commitment that Governor Murphy made when coming into office for a stronger, fairer New Jersey, but really took root in terms of the breadth of what economic development can mean and should mean when we just saw the fragility of so many New Jerseyans during COVID.

And as our society shut down, and was rocked in every way imaginable, you started to see those cracks, and they got a lot bigger.

And so part of the investment that we're committed to making is really to shore up the economic security of every New Jerseyan, giving them access to safe and affordable and quality childcare, being able to access healthy, affordable, nutritious food, the things that many of us take for granted, but that also have tremendous economic impacts.

Leeja talked about the savings in healthcare.

Think of how many ER visits are prevented by providing people with healthy food.

Think of how many workers are able to go back to work or stay employed because they're able to reliably send their child to a childcare center.

So I think we're truly transforming what economic development can mean.

It's long overdue, and it's something that we really believe the Economic Development Authority is a national leader on this front.

- Before we get out of this segment, I want to get both of you to respond to this.

So a fair number of people watching, those who don't watch, people who just have views and opinions on things, "Yeah, this COVID thing, it's over.

Come on, aren't gonna be done with this?

It's been three years plus."

It is not over, Dr. Carter, for the people who suffered disproportionately who are trying to find a way to get back on their feet, it is not over.

Please talk to us, Dr. Carter.

- Yeah, I mean, where do you start?

Because, you know, when we look at COVID, just like many other one natural disasters and other forms of challenges that happen in our lives, what COVID did was present another challenge or another stressor, right?

Another traumatic event that individuals experienced that they then had to navigate without the necessary safety nets and supports in order for them to be able to thrive, right?

And so if we just look at it just from a just a general personal health context, you have individuals whom are already suffering from preexisting health issues, and then you put COVID on top of it, right?

- Made it worse.

- Make it worse.

We have here at Coalition about 78% of those that we serve are our aging population.

So after COVID, what COVID did both physically and psychologically was cause individuals to say, number one, "I'm not sure if outside is really safe for me."

Number two, it made very clear, "Hey, I need to find additional resources and supports to help me help myself, particularly from a health perspective, and a preventable health perspective."

- I'm sorry, I don't wanna cut you off, but I'm running out of time.

Tara, I wanna give you a few seconds on this.

- Yeah, I think the impact and the residual kind of effects of COVID continue to shake through different parts of our economy, and one of the areas that we're really committed to supporting are the small businesses that are still getting back on their feet, especially in the cities that have not yet rebounded.

You see the office workforce that's not fully back, that's where we also need to make sure we're dedicating some resources.

- Yeah, COVID's not something we check off the box and say done, and that's why we continue these conversations.

Dr. Carter, Tara Colton, we wanna thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- Yeah, stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

- We're now joined by Dr. David Jones, Chief Diversity Officer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJIT, one of our higher ed partners.

Dr. Jones, great to have you with us.

- It's a pleasure to be with you.

Thank you for having me.

- You got it.

How would you describe your role at NJIT?

- Certainly, you know, my role, I serve as diversity lead for the institution in providing initiatives, programs, and developing policy that works to create an inclusive campus environment for our faculty, our staff, and most importantly, our students.

- You know, Dr. Jones, I'm curious about this.

We talk about DE & I, DEI, and where it's rhetoric and where it's real, where it's window dressing and when it's real.

What about if someone says, you know what?

This should just be natural, it should be organic.

Organizations should do it without having a chief diversity officer, without having to name a program.

But it doesn't.

- Right.

- Does it?

(David laughs) Talk to us.

- Certainly, no, absolutely.

You need the leadership in place.

You need the infrastructure in place to be able to build out sustainable, right, culturally sustainable initiatives and programs that allow people, particularly people from underrepresented backgrounds, to feel a sense of belonging, to feel a place that is affirming in their identities and their cultural beliefs and values within the organization.

And so chief diversity officers or diversity leads for organizations are critical to building out that type of infrastructure if we wanna be able to sustain these efforts.

And, and let's face it, right, we're looking at a society in which our cultural climate is faced with realities that disenfranchised people from underrepresented backgrounds.

And so to build in this infrastructure, not only is it culturally responsive to what we're seeing in a society at large, but it builds in a culture that allows employees in organizations and students within higher education to thrive, particularly those that come from disenfranchised backgrounds.

- There are some folks who I've heard be critical of what they perceive diversity, equity, and inclusion, what it really means, what it should mean, what you do when your colleagues do every day.

And the response sounds like this.

"You know, I understand that we need to diversify, but you know, sometimes we quote, we go too far."

When I hear that, I often ask myself, "Well, aren't we playing catch up?"

Talk to us.

- Right.

Certainly.

We are playing catch up.

I mean, we're dealing with a society in which there's longstanding systemic and structural inequities and barriers that have placed people of color, members of the LGBT community, women, persons with disabilities, right?

And thinking about religious diversity, you know, and ways in which they have been disenfranchised and marginalized for far too long.

And so- - Including in the media.

- Including in the media.

And so we need to be able to factor in particular initiatives and leadership in place that is responsive to what we're seeing every day in our society.

And so, you know, these type of roles, the role that I'm serving in, is a very critical role.

It supports the president and his mission.

It upholds the values and cultural beliefs and core values of the institution.

And it places us on a path toward success and employee engagement and student engagement that I think is really critical for higher education.

- Let's talk more specifically... By the way, talking to Dr. David Jones, Chief Diversity Officer at NJIT.

Name a specific initiative that you and your colleagues are involved in, that in fact, work toward diversifying the culture in the workforce and the environment at NJIT, which can be replicated, and is being replicated I'm sure in other places, other institutions of higher learning, please.

- Certainly.

And so we have just put in place a university-wide committee on inclusive excellence, and this committee is going to be a body of faculty, staff, students, and alumni to serve in partnership with me to address key priorities that are happening at the university level to ensure that our students and our faculty and staff, particularly those from diverse backgrounds, are feeling supported and affirmed within their identities and cultural beliefs here while they're at NJIT.

And so this committee is going to be a representation of the university across all disciplines and aspects of cultural life here at the university, to ensure we are making, to ensure we are being responsive to all of our constituent groups.

- Quick question, when it comes to faculty, right?

Recruiting faculty members, hiring faculty members, and making the faculty, frankly, more diverse, historically disproportionately represented by white males, okay?

How challenging is it, Dr. Jones, to actually recruit a diverse faculty workforce that A, wants to be in higher education in these challenging times, right?

Not getting super rich doing that.

But also qualified to do it.

Talk about that.

Not easy.

- It's not easy.

But I think, you know, one of the things I think makes it achievable is if you build in the infrastructure, right?

If you build in- - What does that mean?

What does that mean, building in infrastructure?

- For example, So for example, you know, we're looking at building out training, and learning, and development opportunities so that our faculty and staff can have the diverse equity inclusion capacity, right, to be able to engage with people across difference.

Where we can build in a collection of understanding and awareness around our differences and allow our differences to bring us together, not necessarily divide us, right?

And so one of the things that I'm working on currently is a partnership with our office of our provost, is that we're going to have a two-day professional learning experience for our faculty and staff in where they're going to engage in understanding how to identify, confront unconscious bias in the classroom and out of the classroom.

So building out that capacity among our faculty and staff is critical to ensuring we're creating the type of workplace environment that is inclusive for those that we recruit.

- Last question.

Where'd you grow up?

- I'm originally from Brooklyn, New York.

So that's where my roots begin.

And then I, later in life, during my adolescent years moved to Hartford, Connecticut, the Greater Hartford Connecticut area, and lived in Windsor, Connecticut.

- So you lived in Hartford.

Unique experience- - No, I lived in I lived in Windsor, Connecticut, the Greater Hartford.

- Quick question.

Where and how you were raised?

Significant impact on the work you do?

- Absolutely.

I would say, you know, coming from Brooklyn, New York, and then moving to a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, my experiences, particularly around my racial identity, hugely impacted my life growing up.

- How so?

You were one of only a few African American families?

- Sure.

Yeah.

We were only one of a few African American families in the neighborhood that we lived in.

I attended schools where I was one of few black males in my class.

And so the sense of only-ness, right, in the educational space, impacted my racial identity development and in ways in which that I think have propelled me to this career where I can now be in the position to help individuals, faculty, staff, or students that might be navigating their own identity, right, in these workplace environments in higher education to help them overcome those challenges and not necessarily have to navigate some of the hurdles and adversity that I had to overcome.

- Not just professional, but highly personal for you.

- Absolutely.

This is my personal work.

This is something that I carry out each and every single day and I'm committed to this work, not just in my role at NJIT, but in the various other ways in which I show up in my community and various other spaces across the country.

- Your passion's clear.

Dr. David Jones, Chief Diversity Officer, NJIT.

Dr. Jones, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you for having me.

It's been a pleasure.

- You got it.

Same for us.

Be right back.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

- All right, folks.

My colleague, Jacqui Tricarico, joined me down in Atlantic City for the New Jersey Education Association Convention.

And Jackie sat down with Eva Elliot, who is the president of New Jersey Association of School Librarians, to talk about a whole range of important issues affecting school librarians and students in our public schools who rely on those libraries.

Here's Jacqui.

- Joining me now is Ewa Dziedeic-Elliot who is the President of the New Jersey Association of School Librarians, has over 10 years experience as a school librarian and is here today at the NJEA Convention.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

- Thank you for having me here today.

- So let's describe the Association of School Librarians.

What is that in here at New Jersey?

- We are NGA members and what we do is we provide professional development and support for school librarians across the state of New Jersey.

What that means is that if the school district, let's say is writing new curriculum or if they are hiring a new librarian and that librarian needs additional training, we're able to provide that training.

We're able to provide that professional development.

We're able to provide mentorship but also in the light of the latest book challenges, we have created a task force and the task force is able to provide resources to support school districts, school administrators, school board members and the school librarians across the state of New Jersey.

- Well, let's talk a little bit about that.

We're hearing that word book banning, that term, a lot now in the media.

What does it mean for a school librarian the role that they play in terms of book banning or specific issues that community members, parents, caregivers, bring up about the books that are being presented on the shelves in the libraries of our schools.

- This is actually very complex problem and I think that at the core of it is something that shows very negative impact on our librarianship as a profession because we as school librarians, we have teaching certifications and on top of that we have library certifications.

So we are dually certified and here we have community members coming to our libraries and saying that we don't know what we're doing.

And we are specialists in the field.

We are trained to provide expertise and proper materials for our school libraries.

And this is something that we have to remember.

School librarians materials are supplementary materials and they support state standards.

So anything and everything that we provide in our libraries is to support already existing policies and curricula and state standards.

We don't come up with these recommendations and with these books out of thin air.

If there is a certain book in the library, that book was purchased keeping in mind that we have to provide some level of support for classroom or for some kind of lesson plan.

So it's a well thought out process.

When it comes to book banning, it's again, very very complex issue, but it's greatly under reported and our biggest problem here right now is that a lot of school districts are not following their school policies and are not following the state standards and laws.

So the issue is very under reported.

We as an association receive information from our members that school administrators or school board members come into the library space and make requests to remove something out of fear of potential book challenge.

That's sweeping the problem under the rug.

- Well, yeah, and playing devil's advocate a little bit, what do you say in terms of parents who say let's leave it up to the parents to decide if these books that are causing these issues or that are coming up in a lot of these school board meetings as books that should be taken off the shelves, leave it up to the parents to make that decision if the kids can have access to them.

- I would say to those parents if you are not comfortable for your child to read that, you have the right to do it but you cannot make this decision for all of the children because there are children out there who look forward to have these resources in their hands.

They really need it.

In some cases, seeing a protagonist struggling with the same problem that the child or the student is struggling, it might be life saving.

So I would say to those parents, if you are not comfortable having these conversations with your child, if you are not comfortable with your child to be exposed to certain subjects, you have right to do it.

But take care of it with your child.

Don't put this on everybody else because remember if you are putting that pressure on yours or my child, another parent may do the same to your child.

They may put something that is not compliant with your belief system.

So it works both ways.

- It's a challenging conversation and something that we're consistently hearing.

Lastly, how important is the role of the school librarian?

How important is it for us as a community, for parents, to support the librarians that are in our children's lives as part of their education?

- So there is a lot of studies.

Librarians love data.

We love studies and data.

There is a lot of studies that are showing that having a school librarian actually increases all kinds of scores in all state standards if they're properly aligned.

And what happens is having a school librarian actually helps with literacy more than having early interventions which basically means that if you're talking about money if you're talking about hiring someone as a school administrator, you are better off hiring skilled librarian with proper certifications who can provide support for your child, for your student, rather than even having certain programs.

Then, on top of that we are providing all kinds of research assistance.

Our job changes from grade level to the grade level.

Elementary school librarian has completely different job description than middle or high school.

Elementary school librarian is more like an intervention teacher for library literacy, skill reading literacies, and then middle and high school is more college prep oriented.

We are the only people in school buildings who actually work with everyone who knows the curricula and lesson plans across the board.

We are prepared and ready and trained to work with absolutely any department in a building.

I can provide assistance to art teacher I can provide assistance to science teachers, to math, english, social studies because I'm trained to do it.

We are the only people in a building who can also provide IT help.

So we are very diverse in that.

- Ewa, thank you so much for giving us some more insight into the challenges right now facing school librarians and just how important that role is in our children's lives.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Holy Name.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The Russell Berrie Foundation.

Valley Bank.

PSE&G, The Fidelco Group.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

And by The New Jersey Education Association.

Promotional support provided by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

And by AM970 The Answer.

- Hello, I'’m Dr. Luke Eyerman, a family medicine specialist at Holy Name.

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Be proactive and talk to your primary care doctor today about scheduling your annual physical.