…it’s more than a transaction, it’s about the health opportunities of our comunity
On Sunday, July 25, 2021, I joined colleagues in community, political and faith leadership, and the Schenectady Coalition for Healthcare Access, in our asking Schenectady’s local hospital system, Ellis, to include and stand on behalf of the community as a merger process is underway with the multi-state health apparatus of Trinity Health:
News coverage of this rally can be found in the Daily Gazzette and the Times Union
For over 5 decades, the Schenectady Community Ministries (SiCM) has been a collaborative of faith communities serving all of Schenectady County, seeking to bridge the gaps perpetrated by systemic poverty. Our focus has been to provide food and nourishment - to the tune of hundreds of thousands of meals worth of food a year to thousands of households throughout the county. We do this by managing the largest pantry in the county, farming upwards of 1.5 acres of urban land, and facilitating a county-wide summer meals program for children and youth.
Food insecurity is not only an expression of poverty, it is also an expression and an aggravation of the health for the thousands of households we and other sister pantries and youth programs serve. There is no health without food, nor can there an expectation of a healthy outcome without an intentional, present, and engaged health system with, for and among the community.
Ellis, and its predecessor hospitals, have been more than staples in Schenectady. For decades, this community has known in its hospital a member of this community committed to its stability and wellbeing. Community organizations, including SiCM, have known in Ellis - its medical and administrative staff, its foundation, and its volunteer corp - a colleague in understanding the needs of our communities, and an active participant in figuring out what needs to get done to be closer - literally and figuratively - to where the need is, and to where ideas are being voiced. It is this connection to the community that made Ellis for a very long time and trusted space for quality and timely care, especially for the health of women on their terms, care that considers the depth and breadth of the cultural and religious expectations of care, including equitable access and care for the LGBTQIA community, and care that understands the reality of poverty in Schenectady city and county, and that is committed to care over profit, and is willing and wanting to engage with the community in keeping accessible, round the clock, quality care in this county, for the people of Schenectady, and dare I say by the people of Schenectady city and county.
I am joining my colleagues in community, government and religious leadership making a loud, clear, and consistent call to Ellis and to Trinity Health to live up to the expectation they created that this process would intentionally and attentively engaged with community leadership in this process. In some corporate room here in Schenectady or in Chelsea, Michigan, this might seem like a transactional process of moving ownership and administration of a small hospital group to a health system with presence in about half the country. For us, this merger will represent, either the opportunity of our community to access the resources and expertise of a multi-state health system, or the profound concern that our hometown hospital will be turned into a simple satellite. The people of this city and of this county deserve to know what the future of their hometown hospital will be because, literally, our health and their dignity depend on it.