ST LOUIS — Ten years ago, Jason Q. Purnell was the canary in the coal mine.
He was a researcher at Washington University in the summer of 2014, months before Ferguson became a hashtag. Purnell released a ground-breaking report called “For the Sake of All,” which tracked health outcomes by race and Zip code in the St. Louis region. The report highlighted local racial disparities in a way never quite seen before.
Black people were dying earlier because they didn’t have easy access to good jobs, health care and education, the things that just one or two Zip codes away were readily available for white populations living longer, healthier lives.
“Where we live can either support a healthy life, or it can make health more difficult to maintain,” the report found. “A child born in 63106 near the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood can expect to live 18 fewer years than a child born in 63105 (Clayton), 15 fewer years than a child born in 63017 (Chesterfield), 14 fewer years than children born in 63122 (Kirkwood) and 63109 (St. Louis Hills), and 3 years fewer than a child born in 63133 (Pagedale/Wellston).”
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“For the Sake of All” put a cost on poor health outcomes: Premature deaths of Black people in the region were costing St. Louis more than $4 billion a year in lost revenue.
The report was a big deal. The death of Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014, pushed it into a different stratosphere. Audiences around the world who were being introduced to racial disparities in the St. Louis area wanted answers. Purnell’s report provided many of them.
“The report took on international implications,” Purnell told me in a recent interview. “It helped to underline the desperation.”
Jason Q. Purnell
“For the Sake of All” became an important guide for the Ferguson Commission as it produced the “Forward Through Ferguson” report, which made dozens of suggestions for the region to reduce racial disparities and improve equity.
Ten years later, Purnell finds himself in a role where he can try to address some of the underlying causes of those health outcomes — specifically, the wealth gap that exists between Black people and white people in St. Louis. Purnell is president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, one of largest charitable nonprofits in the region.
As Purnell looks at the history of the city, he sees a tendency to invest more in “things” — like sports stadiums, for instance — than people.
“There’s a kind of magical thinking in St. Louis that if we build the shiny objects that other major cities have, we will be a major city,” Purnell says. “It’s a backwards logical fallacy. We’ve got to at least match, if not outpace, the level of investment in our human and social capital.”
Purnell is interested, for instance, in seeing how the city’s project tp give some parents of public-school children $500 a month will play out. (A judge is expected to decide Monday whether that program is put on hold pending a legal challenge).
Purnell also would like to see St. Louis think big on how to invest the windfall from the Rams lawsuit, considering a program like “The Kalamazoo Promise” or similar projects that provide college tuition for students in cities.
To that end, the McDonnell Foundation will announce in August an open call for about $2 million in grants. Recipients will collaborate with organizations in the region and try to increase wealth among residents living in high poverty areas. Some of the grants will be small — in the $20,000 to $40,000 range. But the goal is to get groups that wouldn’t normally work together to come up with unique solutions and improve economic mobility — that process of climbing from one economic rung to another.
“We’ve got to create a value proposition for being in St. Louis,” Purnell says.
What he means is that the city could spend billions on fancy improvements to downtown, but if people don’t want to send their kids to the local public schools, or don’t see opportunity to find a job or start a business, where’s the long-term gain for the region?
It’s time to invest in people, Purnell says. Ten years after Ferguson, that’s a lesson St. Louis has been slow to learn.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones delivers the State of the City address on Tuesday, May 14, 2024. Video courtesy City of St. Louis
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