Lead Awareness in New York City

July 18 - August 5

The poster that me and my Sophie Davis colleagues made about lead advocacy strategies.

This summer, I became a second year member of the Sophie Davis Pipeline program. The program, located at The City College of New York, exposes high school students to health care professions, the process of medical school, and public health issues. The focus of last summer's session was community health, which opened my eyes to all the ways that humans mistreat their environments. This topic of this summer was environmental advocacy, particularly raising awareness about lead in New York City and its harmful effects.

The first thing that we did was learn more about advocacy in general. Advocating for a certain cause can be a long and difficult process. Advocacy is not all about protesting; it can involve meeting with lawmakers and officials to make sure that change will happen. Once we learned about advocacy, it was time to find out what the community actually knew about the topic of lead in NYC. We were divided into our mentor groups and sent to different locations around Harlem in order to survey residents about lead. The amount of people that didn't know about lead, its effects, or even the Flint Water Crisis was astonishing. Many people even said that they didn't think a problem like the Flint Water Crisis could happen in New York. It's true that New York City's water is much cleaner than Flint's because we get our water from the Catskills, but that does not mean lead contamination is impossible. New Yorkers can even be exposed to lead if their buildings or houses were made before a certain year. If people remain in ignorance about this problem, then a problem like the one in Flint may be closer than we think.

After we received these scary results from our surveys, we decided to write a petition to NYC Commissioner of Health, Mary Basset, and tell her about why lead awareness needs to be spread around and how we can do it. Once again, we went out into the street to get people to sign our petition. It was very hard to get people to care or pay attention to our movement, but it was a good feeling when we actually got someone to sign. Then, each mentor group was in charge of making a poster about a certain facet of lead awareness. My group was in charge of presenting about different strategies that can be used to spread lead awareness throughout NYC. On the last day, everyone presented their posters while visitors walked around observing our work. Overall, it was a good experience and I learned a lot about population health and advocating for environmental issues.