UB featured in new book about equity

UB has long been a leader in promoting equity, including graduating its first female and Black students from the medical school in the late 1800s. Now, a new book calls attention to some of UB’s more recent efforts to improve equity throughout Buffalo — and beyond.

“City Forward: How Innovation Districts Can Embrace Risk and Strengthen Community” explains how the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC) promotes a shared goal of equity among companies and institutions with often opposing motivations and intentions. UB is a founding member of BNMC.

“UB has been a key partner of the medical campus from the very beginning,” notes Matt Enstice, author of “City Forward” and president and CEO of BNMC. “Today, UB continues to advance equity throughout the community in countless ways. I was proud to highlight some of these efforts in ‘City Forward,’ and I look forward to working together with UB to make our community even stronger and more resilient.”

“City Forward” features people and programs from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, the School of Dental Medicine and the School of Architecture and Planning, as well as campuswide efforts toward improving equity.

Enstice writes that he’s inspired by many UB programs, including the mobile dental van, which brings dental care to rural areas, and the UB HEALS street medicine outreach program, which sends medical students and faculty to help the homeless and others in downtown Buffalo. “These types of programs,” Enstice explains, “often provide proven models for outreach, even with hard-to-reach audiences.”

In writing about the UB’s downtown medical school, Enstice recalls that former dean Michael Cain and Laura Hubbard, vice president for finance and administration, “listened carefully” to concerns from people who wanted to keep the medical campus open to the Allentown community, and “asked the architects and designers to find a solution.” As a result, the medical school “features a spacious pedestrian passageway through the heart of the building, connecting Allentown with the medical campus.”

The book also calls attention to the African American Health Equity Task Force, which collaborated with UB and the Buffalo Center for Health Equity to develop a more effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition, Enstice mentions Norma Nowak, executive director of the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences, for her “instrumental” role in securing funding for the medical campus; Robert Shibley, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, for his work with local community advisory groups; and Samina Raja, founder of UB’s Food Systems Planning and Community Lab, who was also a guest on BNMC’s “Talking Cities” podcast, where she talked about how institutions can partner more effectively with the community.

“Too many times people say, ‘let’s create the table and invite them to our table,’” Raja says in the book. Instead, she suggests, “Maybe find out what tables already exist and find out how you can get invited to those existing tables, so you’re starting from the ground up.”

An innovation district is an area that typically includes anchor institutions such as universities and hospitals (“eds and meds”), as well as museums, other cultural institutions, foundations and businesses. These districts are typically designed to drive economic growth and job opportunities, but the benefits often fail to reach the surrounding neighborhoods.

“City Forward” offers a candid look at setbacks and successes at BNMC and at other innovation districts nationwide, specifically related to building equity. The book shares strategies that innovation districts can harness to weave equity into their core work, including the concepts that “ideas must be good for most of the people,” and that institutions must “build a table of trust” and “embrace the activists.” 

“City Forward” notes that the BNMC is “often recognized as a leading model in the United States in terms of both economic development ($1.7 billion in projects announced or under construction at one time) and social change.”

BNMC’s “MutualCity” outcomes include job training initiatives, bikeshare programs, urban farms and more — which is one reason why, as Enstice writes, “elected officials, urban planners and community leaders from across the country seek our help in addressing inequality in their communities.”