Black Men in Cleveland Just Built Their Own Health Council. Five Years of Life Are the Stake.

Health / Black Men — REAL POWER.TV

Village of Healing’s new council is going after the five-year gap one man, one screening at a time. Credit to Devon Jones and The Cleveland Observer for the reporting.

Nobody is coming to save the Black man's body. So a group of Black men in Cleveland decided to show up for it themselves.

On August 22, Village of Healing, the health center with locations in Cleveland and Euclid, officially launched the Black Men's Health Council. The Cleveland Observer broke it down, and the credit for this story starts there. Devon Jones reported it, and the Observer's publisher, Ron Calhoun, sits among the founding members. Shout-out to both of them for putting it in front of the community.

Here is why it matters, and why it leads this section.

In 2021, Cleveland State University's Levin School of Urban Affairs put out a report called "Swimming Upstream." It found that Black residents of Cuyahoga County live to 73.6 years on average. White residents live to 78.3. That is close to five years of life gone, and it is not the weather, it is not luck, and it is not fate. That number covers Black residents overall. The researchers were not measuring Black men alone. But anybody who has buried an uncle at 61 or a cousin at 48 already knows which side of that average the men in our families tend to land on.

Five years. Think about what fits inside five years. A grandson's graduation. A daughter's wedding. A pension you paid into for thirty years and never got to collect. Those are the years that leave this county early, and they leave from the same zip codes every time.

So the question is not whether there is a problem. The question is who is going to move on it.

The council answered that question with names. The co-chairs are Dr. Roderick Harris and Devon Jones. The founding members are Ron Calhoun, Dr. Stephen King, Pastor Kyle Earley, Pastor Dwayne Simmons, James Wade III and Timothy Hamilton. Doctors, pastors and men who know the neighborhood. That is the right room. A health plan for Black men that does not have a pulpit and a barbershop in it is a pamphlet, not a plan.

Village of Healing built its name on care that takes a patient's whole life seriously, not just the symptom on the chart. It offers primary care, obstetric and gynecologic care, pediatrics and mental health services, and it says its model is built around the social and cultural needs of the people who walk through the door. Now it is pointing that same model at the men.

The council is standing on three pillars.

The first is holistic care. Equitable access to the full range of services a Black man needs, medical and social. Because the blood pressure reading and the eviction notice usually show up in the same week.

The second is trust and leadership. Community-led engagement to deal head-on with medical mistrust, and a pipeline of leaders who can carry the work. Let us be honest about that mistrust. It was earned. Our grandfathers did not invent it out of nowhere. It was handed to them by a system that treated Black bodies as an experiment and Black pain as an exaggeration. You do not fix that with a billboard. You fix it with men we already know, telling the truth, in rooms we already sit in.

The third is health equity. Teaching families, lifting up local voices and removing the barriers that keep men from managing their own health. The appointment that conflicts with the shift. The clinic that is two bus transfers away. The pride that says a real man walks it off.

Jones said it plainly in the Observer: "Black men are at a high risk of dying from preventable diseases." Read that sentence again. Preventable. Which means somebody, somewhere, could have caught it.

He also said "we have to be intentional about building trust and addressing the barriers of access to care." Intentional is the word that matters. Good intentions do not lower anybody's A1C. Intentional strategy does.

And here is the line I want every man in this city to hold onto. The council plans to do this "one man at a time, one event at a time, one screening at a time."

That is not a slogan. That is an organizing plan. It is the same way we turn out a vote. You do not move a whole city at once. You move the man in front of you, then the next one, then the next one, until the number changes.

Now here is where you come in, because a council is only as strong as the men who answer the call.

The council is looking for local healthcare providers, community leaders and residents to join. If you are a doctor, a nurse, a pastor, a coach, a barber, a brother with a block that listens to you, there is a seat for you. Village of Healing's website has the details on membership and its clinic locations.

And if you are not ready to join anything, do one thing this month. Make the appointment you have been putting off. Get the screening. Take your father or your son with you. Let him see you do it.

We spend a lot of time in this paper talking about power. Who has it, who does not, who is using it on us. But there is no power without the man who is alive to use it. You cannot vote, organize, build wealth or raise a family from a hospital bed or a grave.

Our health is political. It is economic. And this fall, with a ballot in one hand, it should be personal too.

Protect the vote. Protect the block. Protect the man.

Editor’s note: Devon Jones, who reported the original story for The Cleveland Observer, is a co-chair and founding member of the Black Men’s Health Council. Observer publisher Ron Calhoun is also a founding member. The Observer disclosed both in its report.