From the neighborhood

By: Christina Hernandez Sherwood

Almost 60 years ago, civil rights activist Abigail Pankey, along with several other community and religious leaders, met with Martin Luther King Jr. at her home on 39th and Folsom Streets during the “Freedom Now” tour that brought King to West Philadelphia. Recalling that famed event, Pankey’s granddaughter, Evan Spencer, said her family’s ties in the Mantua and historic Black Bottom neighborhoods stretch back even farther, to the early 1900s. Today, many of Spencer’s family members work for the city, including her teacher mother, Marian Pankey. 

While Spencer relished her West Philadelphia upbringing—missing the city life when her family moved to the suburbs for her middle and high school years—she’s been disheartened by the impacts of the “onslaught of gentrification” and “disinvestment in the Black community” on the neighborhood. The northern part of Philadelphia’s 19104 area code, where Mantua sits, has some of the highest rates of vacant parcels in the city—around 25 percent. It is also a hot spot for gun violence. 

“Philadelphia means everything to me,” Spencer said. “The youth and African Americans of Philadelphia, being one myself, mean everything to me—our safety, our advancement, our communities thriving.” 

That’s what brought Spencer to the Penn Medicine Center for Health Justice, where she has worked as a project manager on the IGNITE research study since early 2023. Hiring passionate people with deep roots in West and Southwest Philadelphia is key to the center’s work of promoting health in Black communities through research-backed environmental and economic interventions, said Eugenia C. South, MD, MSHP, the center’s executive director. 

“People know their neighborhoods,” said South, a Philadelphia transplant and associate vice president of Health Justice for Penn Medicine and the Ralph Muller Presidential Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine. “They know their lives and what they need. Respecting and leveraging that expertise to facilitate the best solutions for health and safety feels like a no-brainer.”  

But that hasn’t always been the case in research, which has a long history of institutions sweeping in to “save” communities without fully understanding or respecting the people who live there, South said. The Center for Health Justice has a different aim. “We’re here to work with people,” she said, “and facilitate their own agency and power.” 

Authentic partners in the community-academic partnership 

Nicole Thomas, MBA, who also serves as director of the Center for Health Justice, said she channels her grandmother, longtime West Philadelphia community activist Frances Walker, as she balances the work of the university with the needs of the neighborhood. By turns a University of Pennsylvania challenger and champion, Walker both spearheaded protests against unfair land use policies and collaborated with the university on local projects. “She, to me, was the greatest model of the importance of community-academic partnerships,” Thomas said. 

South first met Thomas in 2010 when Thomas was leading a class on community engagement for Penn research fellows. “I learned a ton from her early on,” South said. “We kept in touch and now work closely together at the center.” 

Janaiya Reason, who grew up in West Philadelphia, is now a community engagement manager for Deeply Rooted, a project of the Urban Health Lab that is based on South’s research that bringing nature to a neighborhood can improve health outcomes. Through Deeply Rooted, which aims to plant more than 1,000 trees and green hundreds of vacant lots, Reason partners with more than two dozen community organizations across eight West and Southwest Philadelphia neighborhoods to ensure that locals are engaged in the process. “It’s positive when they can see somebody that looks like them,” she said. “That’s what’s most special about having somebody from Philly do the work.” 

Reason tailors Deeply Rooted messages to resonate with the community by using lay terms rather than research jargon and drawing on her insights as a former neighborhood resident. She also ensures the project moves at the speed the community wants it to, without pushing for a faster timeline. These considerations help community members to see the value of Deeply Rooted, Reason said, even if they have some underlying distrust of large institutions like Penn Medicine. “I view myself as an insider,” she said. “It’s important to be relatable to the community that you’re working with.” 

Kingsessing resident Carol Simmons, EdD, first encountered Deeply Rooted when the project facilitated the planting of dozens of trees on the campus of her housing complex. She enlisted the team to help promote the monthly Black Farmers Market in West Philadelphia, which she co-founded to bring fresh, local produce to city residents living in food deserts.  

Simmons said she was comfortable working with Deeply Rooted because the people representing it—namely Thomas and Reason—looked like her.  

“I knew that they were trying to come into the community and really find out how they can help,” she said. “The community pulls on you, in a good way.” Now Simmons and Reason meet monthly, and Reason attends every Black Farmers Market event. “Deeply Rooted has done everything they said they’re going to do and more,” Simmons said. 

Explore related stories about health justice at Penn Medicine 

Health, greenery, and justice for all: Reversing racial inequities is a full-force effort rooted in research that includes gardens and parks, financial support, and lifting up local community members to lead the way. 

A large-scale research study of health, wealth, and greening: Combining economic assistance with greening initiatives in a randomized trial, IGNITE aims to show how to reverse the harms of racial injustice in health. 

‘We are all Deeply Rooted’: Bringing health justice to action, Deeply Rooted is a community partnership that plants trees, greens vacant lots, and funds grassroots programs.