Across the region, there's a big disparity in how long people live. Nearly 90 years, on average, in Indian Hill and Mason, but barely over 60 in Arlington Heights and Adams County. That's nearly 30 years of life, love, children, grandchildren, and memories that are lost. Why? Community health experts are looking at the larger forces that shape health and wellness. The places where we grow up, live, work, and age shape our lives and our opportunities to thrive. This is the second story in a year-long deep dive into the factors that people and neighborhoods need for long, healthful lives, spotlighting individuals and organizations working toward building healthier, resilient communities.
On a morning when the national headlines blared about war, tariffs, and mass layoffs in Washington, a group of concerned citizens met to talk about what was going on in their neighborhoods in Middletown, Ohio. On their agenda: bad landlords, a revolving door at the city manager’s office, and lead water pipes.
As the White House issued executive orders as if ordering lunch, on the ground in Middletown the issues were closer to home. A dozen people showed up on a cold, rainy Saturday at the Middletown Area Family YMCA to take action on kitchen table topics. The group included a retired business owner, a labor organizer, two pastors, a county health department employee, and a first-term city council member. They were community ambassadors organized by Middletown Connect, a nonprofit that works to strengthen neighborhoods by restoring the community’s power to create change.
“The work we’re doing here is a cultural shift,” said DeAnna Shores, who led the meeting.
Middletown Connect is one of several neighborhood groups working to shift power back to people who have historically been forgotten, marginalized, ignored, or who have simply lost interest over the years. In the Cincinnati neighborhood of Mt. Airy, Pastor Lesley Jones organizes residents around the broad issue of community safety. “What we're talking about is the fact that a truly safe community is not just free of violence, it's safe in every sense,” she says.
In the village of Lincoln Heights, the Heights Movement brought residents of that all-black community together over a longstanding police gun range and now faces its biggest test after a group of armed, masked men displayed swastikas and white supremacist slogans on the village’s front door.
The efforts may ultimately improve the overall health of communities and the people who live in them, as
studies have linked a community’s civic muscle, its ability to influence decisions, with its overall health and wellness. Residents who are invested in and involved in their communities can help make decisions that lead to thriving neighborhoods.
“That means that our children have opportunities for growth and good education; that there’s dignity in aging; there's housing for families, and most of all, there's accessible and affordable health care for all of our neighbors, and that people have jobs so they can thrive in their communities,” says Pastor Lesley.
In Middletown, more than half of the neighborhoods are considered vulnerable to the setbacks that can affect health, cause lifelong problems, or lead to early death, according to
a measure used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In three of those neighborhoods, the average life expectancy is 12 years less than their more upscale neighbors in Butler County. That sparked the leadership at
Middletown Connect to shift its approach to better understand what these neighborhoods wanted and needed, changing from a top-down, paternalistic approach to one that allows the issues to bubble up from the residents and then to connect them with resources to work for that change.
“This was new work for us,” says Kristy Duritsch, executive director. “It was all about empowering and building trust in the community and residents, understanding what they think they need to be healthier, and then engaging partners on what they can bring to these people based on what they're saying they need.”
On the ground in the neighborhoods
Middletown Connect’s leaders held listening sessions in those neighborhoods, asking what residents thought good health looked like and what they needed to get there. “It was very eye opening,” Shores says.
One of the neighborhoods, known as Amanda, is in the shadows of the Cleveland Cliffs (formerly AK Steel) plant and next to the SunCoke plant, which produces half a million tons of a coal-based product used in steelmaking each year. Amanda was annexed to the city of Middletown in the ‘90s and the residents, some of whose small, post-World War II homes are equipped with septic tanks, were promised their homes would be connected to the city sewer system. That never happened.
“We had to start from a place of anger and distrust,” Shores says. Middletown Connect worked on educating the residents, many of whom are renters, on whether they had septic tanks, and on how to get help if their system failed. A quick fix was not possible, but educating and organizing the residents to take action was. “We cannot solve this problem,” Shores says. “What we can do is try to find a place to start to help people move in the direction of being healthier and safer.”
That included a year-long effort of septic system education, creating documentation about individual systems, and – in a city where half of the residents are renters – explaining their rights in demanding help from landlords. “That’s a win,” Shores says.
In some cases, longstanding assumptions were challenged during the neighborhood engagement efforts. When residents of another neighborhood complained about not being able to take walks, the immediate assumption was a fear of crime. “No, it was loose dogs,” Shores says. “They don't want to walk because there's so many loose dogs.” So a connection was made with the county dog warden, who educated and reminded residents about the laws regarding leashing pets.
Central to the work are community ambassadors recruited from the neighborhoods to be trusted leaders and to spread the word about the new effort. The ambassadors hosted a bus tour of the neighborhoods for city council members so the elected leaders could see up close the conditions people lived in. They organized “walk and talks” to get out, walk around, meet the neighbors and see what’s on their minds.
Some of the residents have felony convictions, a blot from the past that can hinder getting employed. Middletown Connect was able to assist with navigating the process to get a felony removed or expunged from the record. The local Elks Club became a community hub, offering its space to host help sessions on expungement, which were then expanded to sessions on health.
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Middletown residents created a community garden on a vacant lot.A big win was getting a community ambassador elected to city council. Jennifer Carter returned to her hometown of Middletown 25 years after she left it to move to California. “When I came back, it seemed like everything was still the same,” she says. “Nothing had shifted; nothing had moved.” She got involved with the local NAACP, became a community health worker focused on pregnant mothers and their babies, and got involved in Middletown Connect. A friend suggested she run for city council. The first time around, she lost, but got elected in 2023 on her second try, at age 70, with her husband as campaign manager and a cousin as treasurer.
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Jennifer Carter“The young people coming up in this community need to see some changes,” she says. “They need to know that it’s OK to be here.”
Civic engagement, through running for office, volunteering, going to school board meetings, or simply staying up on the news, is at the core of flexing community power.
Voting, and the democratic idea of one person, one vote is a bedrock of civic participation. But over the last dozen years, many states, including Ohio, have passed laws narrowing access and making it harder to vote. In 2024, states enacted more restrictive voting laws than in any year in the last decade except for 2021, according to the nonpartisan
Brennan Center for Justice. Many say those efforts are designed to suppress the participation of Black and minority voters.
In 2023 in Ohio, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed,
House Bill 458, which restricts the types of acceptable identification for in-person voting, shortens key voter deadlines, limits the use of drop boxes, and imposes new criminal penalties on absentee ballot regulations. The
American Civil Liberties Union said the law "contains many changes detrimental to election accessibility and thus the power of Ohio voters." The law was passed amidst the constant drumbeat of claims about voter fraud, which is actually extremely rare in Ohio and around the country. “These regressive changes were designed with little to no evidence to support them and to directly hinder turnout,” the ACLU said.
Pastor Jones sees voter suppression leading to voter disengagement. “We have this demon of voter suppression, which has created a demon of apathy and distrust,” she says. “It makes it tremendously difficult to motivate and inspire people to even to go to the polls.”
Protecting access to voting
She leads the
Amos Project, a network of clergy and congregations in Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus that work for social justice, in part through fostering voter registration and turnout. In a time of distrust of elected officials, especially among minorities, the Amos Project relies on trusted messengers to get the word out.
“Most people don’t trust politicians, they don’t trust the elected officials. But they still trust auntie and uncle and grandma,” she says. A running campaign called Our Family Votes calls on families to encourage family members to seize their civic power and responsibility.
“We had actually had a Take Grandma to Vote Day,” she says. “We had to come up with a different way. It can't just be these commercials and knocking on doors. It has to be very personable.”
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Pastor Lesley JonesJones is the pastor of
Truth and Destiny United Church of Christ in Mt. Airy. She grew up in rural North Carolina in a politically and civically active family, absorbing lessons from her family at an early age. At her elementary school, girls were not permitted to play kickball during recess, only boys. That didn’t make sense to young Lesley, who, like her friends, wanted to play. “So I took the ball and we staged a sit-in on the playground until they let us play,” she says. Even the girls who weren’t interested in playing joined the protest because their peers did.
There’s power in being right. That’s another lesson from her grandmother. “I remember her saying to me that you always have to stand up for what you believe is right,” she says. “I've lived that, and it’s been my mantra. It may not be popular, but it may be the right choice and the right decision, and sometimes that means you're going to have to rock the boat.”
As a student at Miami University in the ‘80s, she led a campus protest against a professor who told racially offensive jokes in class. She sees her role as a minister extending beyond the church and into the broader community. “The prophets in the Old Testament preached justice,” she says. “God's justice is that we are all a part of a beloved community. Regardless of whether I agree with your ideology, or whether I like what you do, you're a part of God's beloved community, and therefore I have a responsibility to act.”
That includes pushing for Medicaid to cover doula services for pregnant women, for relief from high medical debt, and, like her peers in Middletown, for fresh starts for felony offenders. “If you can pardon 1,500 people, including several hundred who pleaded guilty to violent crimes, then we can pardon people who have lower-level offenses, have done their time, and have been out of prison for years and never re-offended.”
Amos Project and its umbrella organization, the
Ohio Organizing Collaborative, see their issues as promoting community safety and health. “A truly safe community is not just free of violence, but it's safe in every sense,” Jones says. They’ve launched a campaign called Healthy, Safe, and Free in four cities. “We're not just going to talk about just health, we're going to talk about it from the perspective of, what does it take for people to be safe in their communities?” she says. “What we have heard is, ‘I'm safe when I thrive.’”
Lifting up Lincoln Heights
Safety is on the line in Lincoln Heights, where residents felt threatened by an incident on Feb. 7, when about a dozen men, some carrying rifles and all wearing masks, displayed Nazi symbols and white supremacy slogans on a bridge over Interstate 75 that connects Lincoln Heights to the 80% white community of Evendale. Lincoln Heights is a connected community and within minutes, dozens of residents were on the bridge, confronting the white supremacists. A town hall a few days later was overflowing with more than 200 people demanding to know why police did not arrest or cite any of the pro-Nazi demonstrators.
Much of this organizing is due to
The Heights Movement, a community group started a few years ago to work to restore Lincoln Heights as a hub for the Black community and entrepreneurship. It achieved a longstanding community goal in 2023 when an agreement was reached to move the Cincinnati Police gun range, which for more than 70 years was located next to the community. Most Lincoln Heights residents live within a two-mile radius of the range, and some homes are only a few hundred feet away. The noise from high-powered weaponry has been a constant backdrop in a community that has a historic distrust of police. Plans call for the gun range to be moved to a new county safety complex to be built in Colerain Township.
The Heights Movement has also worked to create a learning and innovation center to teach and train budding entrepreneurs and it has joined the My Brothers Keeper Alliance, which focuses on improving education for young men of color.
But it's the appearance of the white supremacists that has embroiled the community and led to some residents patrolling the streets with weapons. Daronce Daniels, a village council member and a leader of The Heights Movement, has publicly urged a more peaceful response, calling for a boycott of businesses in neighboring Evendale, whose police did not cite or arrest any of the pro-Nazi demonstrators even though the incident took place in Evendale.
"We’re not just talking about boycotting Evendale," he wrote in an
op-ed. "That’s not enough. We bring our businesses, our power, and our money back to Lincoln Heights. We fight to reclaim our land ... We demand answers and accountability from the Evendale Police. We make sure this never happens again."
This series, Health Justice in Action, is made possible with support from Interact for Health. To learn more about Interact for Health's commitment to working with communities to advance health justice, please visit here.