Through Dollars for Doses, we managed to vaccinate 1% of Cleveland. That statistic told a powerful story about the work GCC does. The person behind that analysis was epidemiologist, Dr. Ndidi Edeh, who recently completed a second evaluation for GCC, this time on Healthy Blocks. Here’s her story, in her own words:
How did you meet us?
I met you through Dollars for Doses, through a collaboration with the Better Health Partnership, and designed and completed the analyses of the vaccine data.
How did that turn into you working with them directly?
After Dollars for Doses, Keisha and I stayed in touch, and I remained close to the work as an unofficial thought partner. When I mentioned I was planning to leave nonprofit work to start my own epidemiology consultancy, she told me GCC was looking for an evaluator for Healthy Blocks.
What made you decide to work with us?
I was thrilled at the opportunity, because GCC represented what community work is actually supposed to look like, and I’d spent years frustrated by the alternative. In most of my prior work, community members were brought in at the end of the process, after all the details were solidified. GCC flips that on its head, centering community members as the subject matter experts. This affords them trust, and the ability to employ the same community to be advocates for themselves. One example I loved from the Dollars for Doses work was the thoughtfulness around payment: when other groups were handing out $100 gift cards through FQHCs, GCC was giving cash incentives because they knew the community preferred cash, and then they added a $25 referral bonus on top for each new person they brought in.
GCC also focuses on winnable issues at the local level, where they have real pull as a direct representative of the community. This may be a smaller lever than the big institutions pull, but it’s one you can actually move.
And my own story is woven into Healthy Blocks work in a deeply personal way. I grew up on Medicaid and SNAP right here in Cleveland. They say it’s expensive to be poor, and it is — in time as much as money. Who has the hours to spare sitting on hold for four or five hours just to reach a representative, just to schedule an interview, just to secure Medicaid for herself and her children? It would be so helpful to have people to help you navigate the system.
Now that you’ve completed the analysis of Healthy Blocks, what has inspired you?
We are birthing five primary care practices out of this, in places where they’re actually needed. That will provide access on a level that we typically don’t see. You’re showing community that what they say they need is actionable.
What’s convinced you this work will scale?
I love the sustainability built into your work. You don’t just listen and act, but instead equip people to advocate for their own health and put tools directly in their hands. The clearest example I can think of is Lee Road Baptist Church couldn’t access facade funding because the City’s improvement program was business-only. GCC worked with Lee Baptist to think creatively and decided to approach the city anyway, who agreed to give GCC the $90k anyway. That’s the whole model in miniature: listen, synthesize, get creative about the solution and work past the barrier.
That same commitment to community shows up in how they handle setbacks and I think the health center project shows it best. It started as a single primary care practice tied to Metro Health, and when that partnership hit a barrier, GCC pivoted and ultimately found a private donor through community connections. Now they’re working toward five primary care practices, with behavioral health and environmental safety built in and have brought Metro Health back into the picture in a different way. That’s community-driven collaboration in real time: it takes all of us, egos left at the door, recognizing that people most affected by these systems have expertise too. That adaptability, grounded in what community actually said it needed, is why I see GCC as a north star for community-centered health work done right. Most public health work claims to lead with community voice; GCC actually does, and builds people’s capacity to advocate for themselves so the work outlasts any grant cycle.
I also love how flexible GCC is, how they react to real world implications of federal policy: As an epidemiologist, I’m trained to look at trends and project out what I see coming down the pipeline. So when Trump got elected, I came to the conclusion that the government doesn’t want citizens to rely on it or essentially anything. And so to navigate in those spaces, we need to pivot and be flexible and creative. It’s like we have to run parallel to the structures that be. It would have been awesome to have Metro Health be the first step, but given the policy changes and having to pivot it also shows. That’s what GCC does better than most public health entities: they factor in real-world policy consequences and pivot anyway.
What are you doing now?
I recently defended my dissertation examining the role of racism in birth outcome disparities and launched my epidemiology consultancy, the Community Institute for Health. I worked for years in the nonprofit sector and got exhausted seeing one consistent trend that to me is almost a diagnosis of why the needle isn’t moving that much when it comes to reducing disparities. We don’t center people enough. The issue is how it is set up from the get go and it ties into why I admire GCC so much.
