Partnerships For Antiracist Campus Transformation (PACT) to Remedy Racist Policies & One-Dimensional Community Engagement
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It began with a phone call.
In March 2020, as COVID hit Chicago, it activated racist fault lines, then hidden from broader public view. Huge disparities became almost immediately evident. Citywide, long-standing historical issues created conditions to maximize the impact of the pandemic in the city’s Black communities. Segregation, gentrification, economic disinvestment, limited healthcare access, food insecurity, and resource shortages coalesced. Worse still, inequities were not only exposed by the pandemic but deepened its effect.
Dr. Marc Atkins, a community mental health researcher and Director of the CCTS Community Engagement and Collaboration Program, echoed Mayor Lori Lightfoot, saying the situation as simultaneously “shocking, but not surprising.” As a psychologist by trade and training, Atkins has spent more than three decades working with community partners to leverage natural settings for mental health services for economically disadvantaged children. Chicago is notoriously segregated. A long history of redlining areas to prevent Black families from purchasing homes in more affluent neighborhoods led to a deeply divided city. Disinvestment in those communities followed. Resources from safety-net hospitals to other support services disappeared.
The conditions for COVID were set decades earlier in some neighborhoods.
In those earliest weeks of the pandemic, 61 of the 86 recorded deaths in Chicago— or 70% — were Black residents, in a city that is only 29% Black. Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office wrestled with these staggering disparities between white and Black communities. By November, Black residents came to account for 40% of the more than 3,000 Chicagoans who had died from COVID-19. Six of the city’s 10 ZIP codes with the highest COVID-19 death rates were majority Black.
“The mayor called the Dean of the School of Public Health, Wayne Giles,” Atkins explains. “She knew he had reach in the Black community. She said, ‘I need your help. Could you help me address this?'”
UIC was a natural choice for the Mayor’s office with its history of civic and community engagement—a commitment codified into its mission as the only public, research university in Chicago.
“‘Wayne says, ‘Absolutely, Mayor, I will put together a task force.’ To which the Mayor reportedly replied ‘with all due respect, Dean Giles, I don’t need a task force, I need a strike force.’ So, we became a strike force.”
Revelation & Reckoning
UIC COVID-19 Community Engagement Strike Force was born out of this conversation in April 2021. Dr. Jeni Hebert-Beirne, Interim Associate Dean for Community Engagement at the School of Public Health recruited Atkins. The trio, Giles, Hebert-Beirne, and Atkins initially acted as leadership for the team. An urgent call was put out for help across campus.
“It was really organic,” Gabriela Peña, Associate Director, UIC-Partnerships for Anti-racist Campus Transformation (PACT), explains. “Faculty and staff rose to the call during the height of the pandemic. At that time, we were hyper-focused on COVID-19. We wanted to figure out what can we offer as an institution to help alleviate the burden on our communities of color.”
Their short-term focus at the time was to address the COVID-19 related needs of community partners and align with the Mayor’s COVID-19 Racial Equity Rapid Response Working Group and Recovery Taskforce, but the scope increased as the work deepened.
“We had to be introspective to do this work,” Peña elucidates, “to recognize that how we engage with our community at large is a really big part of that struggle against racism.”
This set the stage for the larger, longer-term strategy of UIC-Partnerships for Anti-racist Campus Transformation (PACT)—the organization that the UIC COVID-19 Community Engagement Strike Force eventually evolved into throughout its first year of work. Namely, to create long-term sustainable structures and norms at UIC to do community-engaged scholarship grounded in community priorities and lived experience while aiming to address systemic racism and its impact on the health and wellbeing of communities of color, especially among Black communities.
Dr. Jennifer Brier, Director of the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies and the faculty coordinator for UIC-PACT, adds: “The impulse is to ‘parachute in’ to the community with solutions. We assume that we are the experts, but we needed to learn to listen. We started a lot of meetings with moments of silence. We started a lot of meetings acknowledging and just making space for one another to feel space even in the tendency to like rush.”
A large part of this introspection meant interrogating systems and methods long accepted as standard operating procedure for the University, looking at human resource policies, funding mechanisms, grant submission processes, or research methods.
“That is what has been so important about bridging the gap between campuses and bringing a humanities lens to this work,” Brier enthuses. Initially trained as a historian and familiar with looking at narratives that drive culture, Brier feels that her discipline and the humanities as a whole have something unique to offer the institution at this moment in time.
Atkins agrees, “What is very, very unique about PACT is that we are probably the only program like this that is bringing together the entire campus in this way. I’ve been at UIC for 28 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
This intra-campus collaboration through PACT challenges how research is done in the community. “It is a really different model than traditionally community-engaged research where the emphasis is on the University and its needs.
“We are looking to engage the community in a way that is not prescriptive, as in we understand what the community needs based on our assumptions, rather than being active partners and participants in their spaces to better understand their community,” Peña elaborates. “We seek to disrupt unidirectional methods of engagement that too often center the University as a sight of knowledge production by introducing models that center reciprocity with a focus on community wealth and assets.”
Amplify Community Knowledge & Expertise
In January 2021, the Partnerships for Antiracist Campus Transformation (PACT) became an official entity under the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Engagement, and the Chancellor’s newly established Office of Community Collaboration.
The CCTS Community Engagement & Collaboration Core team members were instrumental in UIC’s community response to COVID and racial equity concerns. This initiative initially began as a group of community and/or civically engaged faculty, students, and staff committed to providing organized support, resources, and dynamic relationships to our community partners to dismantle health inequities and racial injustices.
It has evolved.
PACT has launched five pilot projects disrupting one-dimensional community engagement methods led by faculty from across campus. They include Grow Your Groceries, a food sustainability and environmental justice initiative; the Chicago 400 Alliance, a multi-disciplinary campaign on behalf of Chicagoans with past convictions to remove public registry requirements that limit their options and opportunities; Portal Project, an initiative working in the informal economic sector to help change economic and social conditions; Melanated Midwives, a new paradigm of maternal health care run for and by Black people; and, Warriors of Winthrop, an oral history on how residents of the 4600 Block of Winthrop have resisted racist tactics in the community since 1900.
“It is about listening actively to the community narratives, understanding what the community priorities are, and then us as an institution, not trying to jump to conclusions on what we think might be good in those spaces, but helping to elevate their work and help them move forward,” Peña notes, speaking to the significance of this community-based work.
CEC members were integral to the launch and support of this program. They provided funding of community centers in two African-American communities—North Lawndale and Auburn Gresham— to promote civic engagement through supporting community-led transformation activities. CEC will continue to promote community-based research related to faculty-led activities.
“CCTS sees this as a major opportunity to enhance community-based research and excellent translational science,” Atkins says. “If we can show how this engaged university approach can advance the health of these communities—that is important! There are lots of universities out there.”
Imagine the impact that is possible.