Courtesy of Ijeoma Opara

The water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi is considered a case study in environmental racism — a public health issue decades in the making. Yet almost half of the audience at the Yale School of Public Health’s first Change Talk walked in clueless about it.

Angelo Pinto, the inaugural activist-in-residence at YSPH, flew in community activists from Jackson last Friday for his first Change Talk in a series of conversations around pressing public health issues. When he asked the audience who knew about the crisis, only around fifty percent raised their hands. 

“I’m trying to bring these issues closer to home so that students can kind of touch it, feel it, understand it in a way where it’s not just on TV, it’s not just talked about by a teacher,” Pinto said. “[They should] really have a real relationship with these challenges.”

The activist-in-residence program was launched in February 2022. Pinto is an activist, attorney and political strategist. He co-founded “Until Freedom,” a social justice group dedicated to criminal justice reform.

Ijeoma Opara, assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at YSPH, took the lead on introducing this program. Her vision is for researchers and public health practitioners to listen to activists’ lived experiences and collaborate with them. She seeks to bridge the gap between research practice and policy by offering activists a chance to utilize the resources and platform of “a high level institution.”

By bringing people “who are on the ground, doing real work” to the University, she wants to show students and faculty that the affected communities should not be looked at as data points or as a grant. Research should be conducted in pursuit of creating policy that changes real lives.

“You have to be able to hear from everyone on the ground, all their different experiences, to be able to develop a sustainable solution,” Opara said. 

Opara emphasized the importance of connecting academics to activists on public health-related issues, such as criminal justice reform and environmental injustice.

Over 150,000 Jackson residents have been under a boil advisory for weeks, with water line breaks, contamination hazards — including lead — and low water pressure threatening access to clean water in an 82 percent predominantly Black city.

Pinto brought in several activists from Jackson, including Lauren Lewis, who works with the Immigration Alliance for Justice and Equity. From her experience volunteering at water distribution sites in Jackson, Lewis noticed an issue with language barriers to key public health advisories for Hispanic communities. 

Lewis further discussed how recent increased presence of Capitol police at distribution sites had started scaring away undocumented community members — raising concern over their access to safe drinking water. 

According to Lewis, many residents have up to 18 people in their home and cannot even flush their toilets.

“We don’t have access to these Ivy League facilities,” Lewis said.

Towards the end of the talk, audience member Ambria McDonald GRD ’27 spoke up about her plan to address the crisis. This issue was personal for McDonald, who was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is currently working with her lab — the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Sustainability Initiative led by Professor of environmental justice Dorceta Taylor ENV ’85 GRD ’91 — to figure out how their research can best support the Jackson community. 

“This generation of students looks different,” Opara said. “They actually want to see solutions. They actually want to use their voices to make a difference.”

Activist Danyelle Holmes of the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign emphasized the importance of sending experts to Jackson. An environmentalist had reached out to Holmes to express concern over the residents’ tap water, which contained lead and other contaminants. 

Holmes wants scientists to conduct water testing and to work on understanding the long term health effects of regularly consuming small levels of lead — regardless of the EPA’s accepted maximum lead concentration in drinking water.

In law school, Pinto concentrated in health law. His first job focused on studying health disparities faced by formerly incarcerated individuals. In addition to his work around mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, Pinto was on the ground in Flint, Michigan during the height of their water crisis, and likewise in Jackson.

In Flint, he learned that lead levels in water were impacting people’s mental health, brain development and propensity for violence. Use of contaminated water was linked to a rise in crime, creating a dangerous cycle for already historically disadvantaged communities.

“These are also the communities that don’t have the resources to pay attention to public health issues — to recognize that someone may have been impacted by coming into contact with lead,” Pinto said.

Even if students and faculty do not necessarily go “on the ground,” Pinto hopes these Change Talks will shift people’s research strategies and goals. He wants students to understand current issues more intricately through these firsthand accounts.

Anagha Babu SPH ’24, a first year MPH student in the Social and Behavioral Sciences program, attended the talk to learn more about the effect of the environment on marginalized groups. She said Jackson’s water crisis exemplified a common theme currently taught in her classes — intersectionality. This perspective looks at marginalized groups holistically, showing how people are impacted on multiple fronts, rather than strictly classifying them by race, gender or socioeconomic status. 

Outside of these events, Pinto will guest lecture in YSPH classes.

The next Change Talk on Nov. 4 will bring in prominent civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump to speak about police brutality happening in the local community. The Change Talk on Nov. 18 will focus on women’s health, specifically surrounding the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the high maternal mortality rate experienced by women of color. 

“I think we’re dealing with issue fatigue: there are so many issues, it slows down people’s desire to respond,” Pinto said. “I hope that these conversations change that by showing people the specific ways they can get involved.”

Pinto’s term as activist-in-residence will end in February 2023.