Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: In celebration of Women's History Month, we've prepared a special episode where we touch upon various aspects of women's health and well being across different eras and in today's society. I'm your host, Audrey van Zant, and I'm thrilled to guide you through this insightful conversation with the remarkable Elizabeth Brown starts today's episode by saying, happy Women's History month. March is National Women's History Month and a time to celebrate and educate. Since the birth of this country, the contribution and achievements of women to american history has been largely repressed and censored due to patriarchism and misogyny. This has led women to being overrepresented in low paying jobs, underrepresented in positions of power, and at a general societal disadvantage on nearly every economic measure. In fact, when the US was first established, a woman was considered a man's property. She was silenced, discriminated against, and deprived of her civil rights. It took decades of persistent work and sacrifice by women's right activists to change that. And although we have come so far in the last 250 plus years, we still have a lot of work to do. As a proud woman myself, it is an honor to sit in this room today surrounded by other strong women that I get to work alongside each day. Not only am I joined by my colleagues, but our special guest, Elizabeth Brown, who I would love to have introduce herself.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Audrey. As you said, I'm Elizabeth Brown. I'm president and CEO of YWCA Columbus. We've been in Columbus since 1886. We are a social justice organization. Our mission is eliminating racism and empowering women. And what makes YWCA so unique is that we have an advocacy pillar where we're fighting for justice. We're talking about issues.
We're really pursuing a better world. And then we have a social services delivery pillars as well. And we are better at our frontline service because we also fight for people, and we are better at fighting for people because we also serve them. So it's a real honor to lead this organization.
And I came here to YWCA by way of past work in policy and government. I was a city council member in the city of Columbus for seven years. I helped run a women's policy organization called the Ohio Women's Public Policy Network for five years.
And I am excited for this conversation because I feel like I live and breathe this stuff.
[00:03:04] Speaker C: Yeah, we're excited to have you. Are you from Franklin County?
[00:03:08] Speaker B: I was born in Franklin county, yep. And then when I was pretty small, before kindergarten, my parents moved to both licking county and Lorraine county because they divorced. And so I sort of feel a little bit like a northeastern Ohio gal. A little bit like a central Ohio gal. Yeah. Columbus is very much home.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: Okay. Okay.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:30] Speaker C: I was going to ask if that's where your family roots are now here in.
Good, good.
Well, I'm glad to be here with you today, and I want to thank you for your time. Elizabeth has a very impressive bio that I encourage you to check out in the show notes. And of course, she has already introduced herself very briefly. But I just want to expand a little bit because again, your bio, I had the privilege of reading over it and it was very expansive. Thank you, and we're thrilled to have you today for the many reasons. So I'm just going to again, plug it that it's in the show notes listed below. But as mentioned, Liz is a mother, business person, entrepreneur, wife, daughter, friend, advocate in Ohioan. Liz's work through her amazing career includes broadening access to opportunity and strengthening women's facilities and families. As a former Columbus City council member and education committee chair, Brown sponsors scholarship for kids to enroll in high quality pre kindergarten and career development opportunities for their teacher. Brown led the implication of a paid family lead policy for city employees, the first of its kind in the Midwest and the third nationally. Brown sponsored a program to offer free menstrual products in Columbus Recreation center and spearheaded a partnership to provide free menstrual products for women and homeless shelters, which we'll be talking about today. She funded an initiative with moms to be and the community shelter board to connect at risk pregnant women with stable housing, employment assistance and medical leave. In face of aggression and indiscriminate deportation tactics against Columbus residents, Brown established the Columbus Families Together Fund, which provides legal resources to keep immigrants and refugee parents in Columbus with their children. As the current executive director of YWCA, which Liz had already discussed briefly, she continues to spearhead initiatives for both gender and race equity in Columbus and statewide. And some to say that Liz is a champion for women and families is truly an understatement. I know we talked a little. Know you had mentioned that your parents reside in different parts of the state. You're now living in Franklin county, so let's rewind a little bit and just talk about what inspires you to do the work.
You've had this long, tough political environment that you've been navigating seven years sitting on the council and not even talking about Democrat or Republican, but just the general societal sentiment against our minorized population against women and people face of color. I'm just curious, what inspires you to do this work?
[00:06:00] Speaker B: I mean, I think in brief, because not doing it is too painful. Right? I mean, you talked about the climate right now and setting aside truly the politics of it, just the facts, when the Supreme Court comes out and dismantles affirmative action, when the Supreme Court comes out and dismantles Roe v. Wade, and that list can go on and on.
It is the worst feeling to be powerless in those circumstances. And while one person can't change those facts on the ground that the Supreme Court has created, it is empowering to be in the fight for a better future, a future that pushes back against that, right? I mean, how many folks who carried their petition signature page for issue one last year felt like, okay, I'm doing a little bit, I'm getting 210 twelve signatures, but my little bit is cumulative and allowed for women across the state to stand up and say that we require access to abortion rights in the state of Ohio. I think not doing this work is a much harder feeling than doing the work, even sort of in the face of tough ODs at times. And I also think it's generational work. I think a lot about what.
So Martin Luther King gets a lot of credit for a really important quote he has. But then I love what Coretta Scott King also has said. So Martin Luther King talks about the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
I love that these fights are longer than us. They're bigger than us. They're slow, but they bend towards justice. But Coretta Scott King, and I'm going to have to paraphrase, I don't know the word for word, but she essentially said these fights happen in fits and starts. And every generation has to retread a little bit and fight for what their ancestors did, too, right? It is not a straight line forward. We go back a little bit. And I'm fighting for some of the rights my mother and grandmothers did, right. But because I push the needle a little further, my daughters don't have to fight quite so hard or their fight can go that much farther.
[00:08:30] Speaker C: I think that's a great perspective, and I really appreciate that. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my mom yesterday, and we were just talking about being in the career field as a woman. We were talking about how just my mom working 20 years ago, how different that can be for me and how I have more respect and appreciation to this day than maybe what she was facing in her career. But again, as I had stated in the very beginning, there's still so much work to be done, and you've hit on very important topics. And just hearing you say that you're still fighting for things that your mother and grandmother fought for is disheartening. But you're absolutely right that by fighting for it, you're trying to move the needle for your daughter and your future generation. And I, we have a little better.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Starting line at each generation. Right? That's what it comes down to.
[00:09:20] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a really valid perspective. Thank you. I appreciate that.
I think that's an interesting segue to all the topics we're going to be talking about today are very large, right. Each one could be its own little individual podcast episode.
But something that I think has come up again and again for Sarah and hope and myself as we've gone through this is the gender pay gap.
It continues to be an issue, but it continues to be a silent issue. It feels continuously more and more quiet that we're not bringing awareness that there is a gender pay gap. So I'd be curious to see what is the gender pay gap and why does this remain an issue in 24 and how do we best abridge these issues for someone who may be hearing our podcast or hearing of the gender pay gap or any of these topics for the first time?
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Absolutely. So the gender pay gap is essentially, I mean, right now it's about $0.80 on the dollar. So that means for the same work, a woman gets paid, on average, about $0.80 for a man doing that same work and getting paid a dollar. Now, what's interesting about that statistic is it's like an onion. When you start to peel back the layers, you find all kinds of additional factors. It isn't that a woman and a man walk into a workplace and the employer says, I'm going to pay you $0.80. I'm going to pay you a dollar. There's a confluence of factors that really go back. They're rooted to sort of opportunity at the outset, right? Sometimes factors that have held folks back for generations. And I think that the gender pay gap is a really good example of that. Because while the sort of overall average pay gap is $0.80 right now for black women, it's 63 and a half cents. So for every dollar that their white male counterpart earns for the same work, a black woman earns 63 and a half cents. And that's even worse for latino women as well.
And there are long term generational in part reasons for that.
A lot of the kinds of jobs that are open to women of different levels of privilege contribute to the pay gap persisting in that way. But then the last thing I want to say about it is that we really haven't seen much progress in the last decade on the pay gap. And some studies have said that a couple of years ago it was eighty two cents and now it's 80. And so we're starting to reach a little bit of this ceiling as a culture. I will say when we started talking about the pay gap, there were some employers who wanted to be workplace leaders. I would point to cardinal Health in our community where they said, we're going to put our foot down. We are not going to allow for a gender pay gap. We're going to take a pledge to know our data and eliminate the gap. A lot of employers did that. There was a really, I think, meaningful employer led effort brought together by the city under the Columbus Women's Commission here in Columbus. But we're still not making a lot of progress. And I point that out to say that employers are part of this solution, but it's really public policy that undergirds it that's going to either hold us back or allow us to blow that $0.80 out. Do you know where there isn't a pay gap among union members? The gender pay gap among union members, and I believe the racial pay gap among union members is almost nonexistent, like ninety eight cents to the dollar. And that's because of the way that workers have power in a union employer relationship.
And when that power dynamic is level set, workers voices have results. So I'm glad that some employers are stepping up to the table, but I just emphasize that there have to be more systemic solutions.
And the last thing I'll say, not to belabor this point, but the second data point that's really important to think about when we're talking about the pay gap is the wealth gap, because in this country, what you earn for income is important to being able to raise your family and do all those things, but also what you own is important.
Owning a home is not just important for the stability of a family today, but it's also what you can pass to your children.
And we have in this nation largely left people of color out of the conversation, out of social programs that exist to bolster wealth.
And that is why the racial wealth gap is so abysmal in this country. The gender wealth gap is also bad. It's about $0.32 for women to every dollar a man owns. I don't have the exact number, but it's less than half that for african american women relative to what the $1 that a man owns. So we've got a lot of work to do.
[00:14:33] Speaker C: Yeah. I appreciate you giving that view on the wealth gap as well because I think it certainly adds as you, I mean, clearly because you had mentioned, like, it's certainly a layer in perspective we need to understand when you're talking about peeling back that onion, I know that you're a champion for many parts of your work. Again, I encourage everyone to read Liz's bio. And part of in that bio I had mentioned that you have done some work around period poverty, and I know that's something that is very near and dear to your heart. So not know, again, change subjects too abruptly. But we want to kind of talk over these overarching topics concerning women and the hour that we have.
So knowing that you're a champion for menstrual hygiene, health and advocating for period poverty, I just wanted to list a couple statistics real quick for our listeners before I dive into the question, because I'm just curious about what your experience has been working in this, but briefly for our listeners, I'd like to just mention here that studies have found that since the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly one in three Americans who menstruate experience some form of period poverty that is lacking access to safe and hygienic menstrual products. Part of this public health crisis stems from the lack of support under current federal policy, where menstrual hygiene necessities are not covered by SNAP, WIC or other government assistant programs and are rarely available at food pantries, coupled with the fact that most states impose a tax on menstrual hygiene supplies, commonly classified as nonessential goods and subject to sales tax, many are forced to choose between buying groceries and prescription medication or period supplies. Some people may think a free tampon or a pad or eliminating the sales tax on them, saving family a few cents here and there is not actually that substantial. We know here at the food banks, however, that for people we serve the most vulnerable among us, that every cents counts. Many of our food banks do their best to provide wraparound services at the food distributions by providing pet foods, diapers, period products as they are able to. But as you know, they're operating on shoestring budgets, especially for non food items. I know that prior to here, I was working at a food bank for three years, and we always did. During March, we did like a big period drive for menstrual hygiene. And then during menstrual Hygiene month, we did pads and tampons. And there was always so much gratitude for it by offering those wraparound services because they were already coming to the food banks to receive the food. And then this additional cost that, again, they're not able to purchase, of course, with SNAP, because we know it's a nutrition assistance program, but we try to utilize those wraparound services at the food bank level. So I'm curious, at your level, what work you have done around period poverty.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for this conversation and this question, because it is a passion of mine.
I would call her, like, my period mentor, like, this woman who's done a lot of period advocacy, menstrual product advocacy.
She's a successful business person in Columbus, Nancy Kramer. And I was meeting with her, oh, gosh, ten or twelve years ago, a long time ago, and as like a professional development meeting, trying to get her advice. And the conversation turned to her passion project, and she said, I believe it was for her 50th birthday, her husband had gifted her a website called Free the tampons, because I'm now telling her story, because she had been talking for so long about how unjust it is that we treat, frankly, tampons and pads differently from how we treat toilet paper. And he sort of got this URL for her to say, go follow your passion on this. Give yourself permission to just untangle this. And she's done a lot of amazing advocacy work. But I described that conversation with her as my aha moment.
I think that even as a woman who has for years used period products, it still took me a conversation, an interaction to have that aha moment.
And many of us can probably relate if we've never thought about this issue. The first time we think about it, we're like, why is this a problem?
I'm sorry, but this world is so screwed up that this is a problem we have to even talk about, right? I have bodily functions that come with having a uterus and the body that I live in. Men have bodily functions that come with their bodies that they live in. All of their bodily functions are publicly accommodated for in every setting they go to.
Heck, they could even get a toilet cover if they want, right? Like, there are toilet covers, there's hand soap, there's toilet paper, publicly accommodated for anything a guy needs. But for potentially one quarter of the time, my bodily functions are not accommodated for in a setting where I'm using the bathroom, it is absurd that we put these products in a different category than toilet paper. I mean, just, there's no way to justify it, there's no way to explain it, and it's just been perpetuated because men are in charge. There's like no other reasons reason men are in charge. Men have always been in charge. And they decide what makes sense in a budget. Because then you go to an organization such as a school and you say you need to provide tampons and pads, and the answer is, well, we don't have the money for it. When you're looking to save money, have you ever said, let's cut the toilet paper budget? Right.
Has that ever been when you're trying to tighten the purse strings, what, you come for the toilet paper? No. So why are we coming for tampons and pads and to stay on schools for a minute? I think that the disparity between in access overall is really bad. And like myself as a person with economic security, I don't worry about whether I can afford tampons and pads. Not that they're easy to buy all the time, but I don't worry about that in my budget. And what you're speaking to are ways in which families who are living on the economic margins are always worried about it. But to peel back another onion, I think where we have to start is with our young people, people who are towards the beginning of their menstruation lifetimes. And that's in our schools. Because I don't care who you are. I don't care if your mom has a room full of tampons for you. Everyone forgets to bring their tampons or pads to school sometimes. But then if your family can't even afford them, it's not about forgetfulness. You just don't have them. Nancy Kramer actually helped do some national surveys on this and found that one in four teens in the US have missed class due to lack of access to period supplies. So this is deep.
If you are in class and you realize you start your period even if you're not missing class, how distracted are you in the classroom, unable to learn? This is a classroom instruction issue. This is an equity issue in terms of supporting what our young girls need in the same way that we support what young boys need. Every restroom in our schools should have tampons and pads readily available. Not in the nurse's office, because I am not sick when I'm on my period. I am normal and healthy. I'm actually healthy when I'm on my period. And they should be alongside the toilet paper in every bathroom in America.
[00:22:23] Speaker C: I wish I could mic drop.
No, that was wonderful.
I don't even know how to respond to that more than thank you. You truly had everything dead on the nail, and as a woman, I sympathize with it. And I appreciate your advocacy and your voice. I really do.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Well, thank you.
[00:22:41] Speaker D: Hey, guys. Hopeland Gavin, director of nutrition policy and programs. I wanted to jump in here because Liz is just doing so great, and I wanted to stay on this topic for just one more second. But, Liz, I was just wondering if you could just share a little bit more about how do we better uplift and educate on this. Like, I've worked with you for several years, long before this, on eliminating the pink tax, and we successfully did that with now auditor Bridget Kelly. But just, like, how do we better educate on this issue? I guess that's fundamentally the question, because it feels like this is very obvious, but when you talk about it for the first time or when you talk about it with someone new, they're just perplexed by this concept of free products. And I think Audrey said this. Is this really an issue? Is saving a few cents on a box of tampons really that substantial? It is. We know it is. But how do we communicate that better to legislators, to policymakers, to advocates? How do we do that?
[00:23:41] Speaker B: Thank you for that question. It does take a few champions to get it done right. And I think that what Bridget Kelly did when she was a state representative and you and I worked together, Hope was really important because she also was able to forge a partnership with someone on the other side of the aisle who had very different motivations for eliminating the pink tax. Right. He was just a little bit basically anti tax. Right. And so that was his motivation to sign on to something that Representative Kelly was doing for equity reasons.
But she got loud about it. She stayed on the issue, and she got it done.
When I was on council, I worked to make sure that we have pads and tampons provided alongside toilet paper in every city restroom.
And I was a little annoying to people because I didn't shut up about it. So it does take a few, I think, people just staying on the issue and pointing out for some people, these products are unaffordable for everybody.
The status quo is inequitable. Right. And just like, really hammering that is important and supporting voices that are out there. So there are several groups nationally that are talking about this.
Aunt Flow is one where she actually sells tampons and pads. But then it's part of her business model to talk about the equity issues around this. So if this is something that you care about, I would very much encourage you to check out ant flow and ways to get involved. And I would also encourage you when you're in a place where you see tampons and pads provided next to the toilet paper because they're there now, find somebody in charge and thank them. Say, like, I see what you're doing. I think it's important. It's not small where you're comfortable. Raise it also, when you see it not provided. Right. If you are a parent, go to your school board and say, tampons and pads need to be provided. There were some parents in Dublin who did that who really kind of changed what the Dublin schools are doing around the provision of tampons and pads. And I think if we're going to start anywhere, the best place to start is with our young people, because then they will expect the world to look different.
[00:26:07] Speaker C: Yeah, that was great. Thanks, hope. I appreciate you chiming in with that question. I appreciate your response, Liz. We'll make sure that we put Antflow in the show notes and bring access to that. We talked a lot about people who identify as women, and those who menstruate typically earn less and have less money to buy items, including tampons, pads, diapers, panty liners, certain creams, just to be able to function and participate in society. I mean, as you had mentioned, it's a fourth of every month for us, and we continue to live normally and healthy with our life. So this can certainly add an additional layer of financial burden and ultimately a mental strain on the individual and possibly the entire household. You've already mentioned students are having this experience in classrooms, which is certainly valid. We know that the majority of family caregivers remain women, and they provide more hours of care than their male counterparts. Recent studies have found that since the start of the pandemic, 3 million american women have left the workforce. Other women are resorting to fewer hours worked and lost wages due to caregiving earlier in life, making women caregivers two and a half times more likely than non caregivers to experience poverty later in life. We know that caregiving, whether it's for a child or an aging parent, is often unpaid and even more overlooked as real work, despite its necessity. More than that, though, it disproportionately takes women away from the workforce, which, as you mentioned earlier, contributes to the wage gap. What policy solutions do you propose, or have you proposed to eliminate the inequity? And do you ever see a world where women are not primary caretakers.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Thank you for that question. So I'm going to also add, if you think about the pay equity conversation, the pay gap conversation we had at the beginning, caregiving contributes to pay equity, too. So some studies have shown that mothers of dependent children also have a larger. They're another group that is affected differently. Right. If the average is $0.80 on the dollar for the pay gap, mothers have more like 70, $0.74 on the dollar. Right. And then if you peel that back, more black mothers, Latina mothers. Right. The numbers change. So it's really important to recognize that caregiving absolutely penalizes our incomes at a time when income is needed more than ever to raise a healthy family.
And so it's pretty perverse, actually, when you think about it that way, and drives me crazy that those two realities exist at the same time.
So I want to take the second half of your question first about do I see a world where women are not primary caretakers? I don't know if I see that world, and I guess I don't care to see that world or not, right. I'm a little agnostic on that world. What I do care about is to support caregiving choices structurally. If we support all caregiving choices structurally, women have the freedom to be or not be caregivers. Men have the freedom to be or not be caregivers. And it will take many years, I think, to grow into that. But it's about, again, structural policy issues that support caregiving choices and caregiving needs. Chief among those is paid family leave.
I've been a huge paid family leave advocate for close to a decade, helping to introduce through the women's think tank that I was part of some state legislation with several lawmakers, including Representative Kelly and others, that has not made it through the General Assembly. I don't know that it has any shot, frankly, because of the makeup of the legislature right now. But a good, strong paid family leave policy is essentially taking what FMLA affords to workers. FMLA is guaranteed job protection for needing to take time off for caregiving reasons. And they define caregiving comprehensively. And I think equitably this federal law does. Right. It's not just about moms with newborns. It's about parents with newborns, people caring for an immediate family member. Women are caregivers across their lifespan. This is not about having kids. Zero to 18. Women are caregivers in many ways across their lifespan. And there are studies that show that women, on average, I think ARp did this study for caregiving duties. Women lose about $350,000 in lifetime income. So a strong paid family leave policy will take those FMLA allowances for caregiving and provide a social insurance for people to be paid during that time so they can take that time off. Because the way that FMLA works now, it's job protection for your leave from work, but the program is not available to you if you don't make enough money to take time off. Right.
And if you work at a small employer, they're exempted. So the national Partnership for Women and Families did a study in Ohio where they showed that in reality, FMLA is supposed to apply to the whole workforce. It really only helps about 40% of working people in our state because it's essentially unavailable to that other 60% because it's unattainable. Right.
And paid family leave would protect people's jobs, protect people's incomes at really important, critical times in their lives where a family member needs them. And if you have to choose between your job and your paycheck, your job and your family, it's an impossible choice because without your job, you also can't provide for your family. But if you choose your job, then your family languishes, doesn't get what they need. A quarter of women go back to work two weeks after giving birth.
It's sobering. It's unacceptable. And we have the policy vehicle identified to change this.
What I did on city council is introduced a paid family leave policy for our employees where there hadn't been one. We have about 9000 employees in the city of Columbus. It's interesting that when I used to be a city employee and I thought I had paid family leave because I was a union member and I worked for the public sector, and I was like, oh, I'm sure this will be fine. Until I was pregnant and was like, it is not fine. This is not fine.
And so when I got on city council, I worked to change that. But I think it's important to recognize that even ostensibly progressive employers for a long time didn't think about paid family leave, because when you need it the most, when you personally need that leave the most, you also have no time, no bandwidth, no capacity for advocacy. So you kind of silently suffer. Not to overstate it, but that's what happens. And then you get back to work and you're focused on something else. And so it's hard to build coalitions of advocates around this issue. I think we've made a lot of progress in the last decade. A lot.
But we still haven't actually passed the policy, and it should happen federally. In the absence of that, states should pass policies, which many have.
In the absence of that, employers should provide for this. In the absence of that, I think individuals within their domestic partnerships, like whatever their partnership looks like at home, should talk about this issue and talk about how to equitably share caregiving and time taken away from income because it can hold back progress when men don't think they have anything to gain from paid family leave. And believe me, they do, we all have a lot to gain from paid family leave.
[00:34:42] Speaker C: Thank you. I'm sure there's some listeners on this call, maybe, hopefully some employers who can hear that and certainly emphasize that into their workforce, or maybe just that last part. If it's just having the conversation just internally with your partner, whatever that looks like, you have to start somewhere and continue to build. So thank you for not only the perspective, but the call to actions that we can do.
I want to acknowledge that we've only broken the ICE on topics we could cover concerning Women's History month, health and rights.
But the one topic I want to ensure that we get into, no matter how brief, is maternal health.
Ohio and much of the rest of the country is facing a tremendous infant and maternal health crisis that is elevated for women of color. We at the food banks deeply understand that poverty is intersectional, and the people coming to our lines struggling with food are also likely having challenges with other social determinants of health. For this reason, we pride ourselves in partnerships with other social services to try and address the root causes and not just today's needs. We have dove into this topic deeply in a previous episode, which will be linked in the show notes. But we know that you offer a really interesting perspective and a fresh perspective, Liz, both with your direct service with the Community Shelter board and the YWCA's women's residency program.
So in your experience, what is the key to adequately addressing our state's maternal health crisis? Or in other words, what has worked? And what work do we need to continue to invest in concerning partnerships and policies around maternal health in Ohio?
[00:36:24] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, this issue is deep, and it really goes back to the pretty racist health care system that we have and a health care system that doesn't listen to women. Right?
So when you look at the very worst happening in the maternal health circumstances, which is that a woman dies, right? A mother dies. Black women were two and a half times just in Ohio. These are Ohio stats. These aren't nationally Ohio stats. Black women were two and a half times more likely to die from pregnancy related causes.
The Ohio Department of Health has, I forget the technical term for it, but like a group that reviews these kinds of deaths, lots of kinds of deaths, and tries to figure out what maybe went wrong in the system. Right? And when they look at pregnancy related deaths, they found that of all of the pregnancy related deaths that occurred, 72% were, quote, unquote, preventable.
And so it's not that something catastrophic happened. There was no way for anyone to sort of save her, but the events that led up, we could have actually prevented her death. And again, two and a half times more likely to happen for black women in Ohio.
And this goes back to the lack of health care that women have across their lifetimes, and particularly women of color. In our shelter, YWCA Family center, we have close to 200 people nightly, sometimes 250, depending on family size. We have 50 rooms and some overflow.
And we have a lot of babies right now. Right? I mean, women who are in our shelter are pregnant and having their babies in our shelter in the middle of homelessness.
The reason that a woman who is pregnant is in a homeless shelter has to do with eviction laws in our country, which disproportionately impact black women, has to do with wages that women make going back to pay equity, which disproportionately harm black women, and has to do with food access, which I know you all think about every day, and has to do with caregiving policies and affordability of daycare. All of those things harm women first and worst.
And first and worst among those harms are black women. So disproportionately, the families in our shelter are single headed households, single black women headed households. And what we're also seeing is that the experience of housing insecurity is actually more correlated to infant mortality than even smoking is.
And we can't know exactly all the whys in that fact, but what we know to be true is that housing insecurity is one of the worst symptoms of, as I just named, all of those other things going wrong for someone. And so the toxic stress that occurs on a person who is carrying a pregnancy is kind of unfathomable, fathomable. And that's why these health factors show up in pregnancy and why for so many women, for too many women, the morbidity rate and mortality rate just skyrocket. The US has one of the worst maternal morbidity rates of any sort of developed country in the world, and morbidity and mortality are different. I'm not a doctor, but as it's been explained to me, mortality rate is actually dying. Morbidity is having serious, serious health problems. So a friend of mine just had a baby, and she experienced postpartum preclampsia, which she, looking back, believes she had in her pregnancy, and it went unidentified because her concerns were ignored. She almost died in childbirth. She is fine and has a healthy baby, fortunately. But she has a lot of issues now that need to be attended to, serious issues now that because she wasn't able to get the care she needed during her pregnancy, she's now having to deal with. So those kinds of serious issues are maternal morbidity, and it's a key factor as well, because this is about healthy moms and healthy kids, which really sets us up for a better future. So in our shelter, we see this all the time.
And again, I think it goes back to wages that women earn, housing laws in our nation and evictions, and we have the power to do better.
[00:41:28] Speaker C: Thank you. I'm curious to hear for our listeners who are listening in, you talk about how these issues stem from our backyard all the way to our state house and beyond. And so when I think about a listener listening to this, sometimes it can get overwhelming, even when we're talking about calls to action to our legislators. I'm curious just what your call to action with the YWCA would be, whether that is. Maybe you're in the Columbus area and you want to support the many infants and women that you're currently housing. Maybe it's the Dayton YWCA. I think that a lot of people, there's a lot that we can do at the state and federal level, but a lot of people just want to kind of help their backyard.
And it was just a question that kind of came to my mind. What would your call to action to our listeners be for the work that you're doing for the YWCA with these women and infants? Is there anything you would like to say to maybe people in the Columbus area that can support the YWCA, or what would your call to action be starting at kind of like the ground level for anyone listening? Yeah.
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Well, I'll sort of do a callback to how I described YWCA at the beginning of the podcast, that we are an organization that fights for people and serves people.
And because of that, when I'm asking for someone's support of what we do, I will emphasize that we serve people better when the community is behind us. Right. So we welcome all of your listeners support. Ydfsaccollumbus.org they can donate, they can volunteer depending on what the time you have is. We have volunteer opportunities all the time. If you follow us on social media, our team is really awesome about expressing when we have an urgent need, right? They'll lift up. We actually got an influx very, I mean, heartbreaking to say. We added an influx of babies, of infants recently, and we were really low on a lot of supplies. And because we're a nonprofit, we put that call out there and we got incredible support. So follow us. Look at our website. Please donate or volunteer. But we are an organization who serves folks and fights for folks. And so I want to say that when people volunteer with us, they are still treating the symptoms right as we are. We're treating the symptoms of a system that has failed women.
And if we're going to hand a better world over, to make it personal, my three children, all of our children, if we're going to hand a better world over, we have to do more than treat the symptoms. And that's why I would ask people to join us in our fight for people, too, in our fight for changing the policy that undergirds this broken system that allows for these disparities and inequities to persist year over year.
[00:44:24] Speaker C: Thank you. We'll make sure to link all that in the show notes. I think it's just really interesting. Sometimes it can get overwhelming for people to hear like call your senator, call your congressman. But there's little things you can do just in your own backdoor, helping your community and starting there.
[00:44:40] Speaker D: Liz, I'm just curious more about what are know we at the food banks, we know that we are continuously serving and breaking records every quarter of the number of people that we are serving. We have long surpassed the amount of folks that we were serving during peak COVID and again, we are continuing to break records every quarter with the number of people served, the number of first time people served. We do a lot of interviewing in the field around what is your biggest challenge today. And folks keep saying food inflation in rent and that's what's bringing them to the food banks. And of course, loss of a lot of pandemic supports is not helpful, especially right now when food inflation is so high and just so many other things, energy costs are high. But I'm just wondering if you could share a little bit. I know you've talked a little bit about just what you're seeing day to day with your shelter. But just curious, what is different today in February, in March of 2024, spring of 2024, what's different today than spring of 2023?
[00:45:42] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I can dive in a little bit to what things look like for us. So our housing programs are. We have two housing programs. One is permanent supportive housing, which is long term dedicated housing stability for formerly homeless women, single women. That's our downtown building. We have 92 women there.
And the other is our family shelter, which I've talked about. And that's emergency homelessness. So designed to be a very short term stay to stabilize families and get them back into housing. That's our housing work. We have 22 childcare sites as well. One of them is inside the family shelter. So our homeless children are served in that childcare center and the rest are scattered across the county. And then we have all of our social justice work, which I could talk about for a whole other podcast. But in those service programs looking particularly, I think some of the alignment with the food banks is particularly what happens in our shelter. So to your question, hope our numbers are a little different from how you guys track your numbers, because as the problem gets worse in Columbus, we are able to serve fewer people. So let me unpack that. We have 50 rooms and then some capacity for overflow as housing gets more scarce and harder to afford. What happens is people in our shelter can't find housing, so their stays are longer, so we can't admit new families. Right. So we don't measure sort of the service pressure in number of families served. We have been at capacity in our shelter for years.
There is never an open room, and there's an additional shelter in our community. The whole family system has been at and over capacity for years.
The stays are getting longer and longer.
[00:47:43] Speaker D: Could I ask, Liz, are you seeing more people today? And again, I know you don't have data right in front of you, but just anecdotally, are more people working in staying in your shelter? Is that an issue that you think that you're seeing more and more?
[00:47:57] Speaker B: No, not necessarily.
We do have residents, many residents who work. We also find it's often an income interruption that leads someone to us, and we can't speak to what our experience, our clients experience, is all the other months of the year other than the time they're at our front door. Right. So what we know is when they're at our front door, it is fairly typical that there's been some kind of major income interruption. Either one head of household lost a job.
I mean, there are plenty of women are evicted because they just had a baby. I mean, literally, if you don't have paid family leave and you can't show up for work and you stay home to take care of your baby for more than two weeks, or even just two weeks, and you're not showing up for work, you get fired, you can't pay your rent. Right.
So that is different. Again, the numbers are a little different for us in terms of your indicators at the food banks, I think.
Yeah.
[00:48:52] Speaker D: Liz, do you see a lot of people struggling with to access or just loss of public benefits and that impacting their just stability? So maybe they had a know, stayed home for two weeks and they lost their food stamps a month ago, so now they lost that income. Plus they've missed two weeks of work.
Has that been an issue that you've seen at all?
[00:49:17] Speaker B: Yeah, there are a confluence of factors, and each story is very different.
And in general, though, the trend line is that there is some kind of interruption in income. And sometimes that income is assistance that went away. What we know is that money coming in has dropped off for a family, and that's why they're at our front door. And so one of our imperatives when families are with us is to increase money coming in so that they can afford that home that we hopefully find them and we entertain all options for increasing income. Right. Matching them with the proper assistance, matching them to an employer, whatever it takes to ensure that families then have an income to sustain a housing option that we find them.
But our stays are getting, it's getting harder and harder to get to that point of housing stability. When our doors opened in 2005, it was like two or three weeks that residents were with us. That's what emergency shelter should be, two or three weeks. Absolutely, that's what it should be. You fast forwarded to 2018 and it's really more than double that. Right. It's taking folks 30, 40 days to find housing. You fast forward to today and it's double again. So in the last five years, it has doubled again. We are seeing folks 90 days or more, which is really more than doubling, actually.
We see the instability in the housing market simply through that length of stay number in so many ways. And of course, it's not that simple. There are other things involved, but chiefly that's what our families are facing now. When a family is with us, we try to give them everything they need to get economically stable. So we have our childcare center on site. If you have kids that are not school aged, they can go there. Right. And we enroll you right away. And we work very hard to have a zero waiting list. We have zero waiting list. And that is very hard to do, let me tell you.
But we are Johnny on the spot there.
And then we also, obviously, provide free home cooked meals as to and a family advocate for everybody to help champion their needs.
[00:51:34] Speaker C: Do you guys ever have anyone come in to help with things like applying for snap application assistance or WIC or Medicaid or anything like that, coming into the shelter? Do you do any partnerships?
[00:51:43] Speaker B: We have partnerships with other organizations to help. So our advocates, they have a caseload. They're like service coordinators, advocates for our families. They have a caseload. And depending on the menu of needs that a family has, we get them in front of the right people.
So we really rely on that community of helpers, if you will, in our city to make sure that our families.
[00:52:08] Speaker C: Are getting everything they need.
[00:52:09] Speaker D: So you went from being a Columbus city council member for a long time, a long tenure, to know being the CEO of a homeless shelter in the city. I guess my question is very different positions, and I'm wondering, what was the most shocking thing to you making that transition?
Were you surprised by the number of individuals that are unhoused in our city? Did that shock you, or were you just shocked by poverty? Was there anything making that transition from being, like, serving the community in one way to this other?
What, anything that surprised you about Columbus? What did you learn about Columbus that was new in this new position?
[00:52:54] Speaker B: Well, I think one thing I learned about Columbus is just how fragile the homeless system is, is that as a policymaker, as a council member, I understood the numbers. It's up to us to understand the numbers. But also, when you're in elected work, you have to be a. You know, I could focus on poverty and homelessness a certain portion of the time, and I probably spent a disproportionate amount on that. But I also had to focus in on other issues, and there were zoning and there was curb replacements and new parks, and I was on the committee that oversaw rec centers. And so you think about a lot of things at once. And I think when I got into this role, and I'm able to just really dig deeply and think constantly about social justice, racial justice, gender equity, and poverty and homelessness, I feel it more. And what has shocked me is how precarious and underresourced the shelter system is.
Fun fact. That is not fun at all.
So the federal government, which is one of the most important funders in our. I mean, it's just the most important. It's everything, right? And other layers of government are important, but so many things start at the federal level, they don't see emergency shelter as a, quote, solution to homelessness. So they do not fund emergency shelter at all. They fund something called permanent supportive housing. We have a program like that, but the obstacles to building permanent supportive housing and qualifying for it are very different from emergency shelter where you're suddenly evicted and you need a quick answer. And they view it as not a solution, so it shouldn't get money.
And that mindset can be rationalized when you think about the public dollar and where it goes. But that mindset is very pervasive across a lot of public bodies that make it very hard to actually get a system that solves for the problems. Right.
And that has been surprising to me.
[00:55:04] Speaker D: Very much so, being on the other side now. So you were elected official and now you're an advocate full time.
[00:55:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:55:11] Speaker D: And so you talked a little bit about just having as an elected official so many just things to pay attention to. Honestly, what could we do as advocates now that you have, again, insight into the mind of an elected official? How can we better elevate our issues so that not you, but elected officials can focus on our issue? So, like you said, I talked about curbs and recreation centers and education, and you had all these other things to pay attention to and just so much time in a day, but everyone feels like their issue is the most important. So how can we better convey our issue to get elected officials to pay more attention to our issues?
What could we do better to elevate our issue?
[00:55:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I think as often as possible, presenting the solution is just really important when advocating with elected officials because there are a lot of problems to focus on in any given day. So the ones that have a solution, great, we can win on this, right? Because a lot of times you're going to confront an elected official who agrees with you about the problem and believes it should have a solution. But they're not necessarily the expert to craft that solution. And so for advocates to have a solution and actually present that and be open to the feedback of like that doesn't quite work. But maybe this version of it would work. That's always a part of things, but I think that's a really important way to be effective.
[00:56:37] Speaker C: Thank you for the question, hope. I think that was a great place to leave it for our audience, and that kind of rounds up everything. So we are only breaking the surface on many topics that could be covered around women's history and women's right to equitable access.
I think for an hour's worth of discussion, we've hit on some really major talking points. And, Liz, you have done more mic drops today than I was prepared for. And I'm so thankful for your perspective on everything. It's been wonderful just to hear everything. And so I want to close with a final question, a fun question. It is a two part question. And so it is, who is a woman personally in your life that you admire, and why, and what year do you predict the first female president?
[00:57:24] Speaker B: Oh, jeez.
Well, a woman that I personally admire very much is one of my older sister, Emily. I've always looked up to my older sister. I mean, I think there's something about that sibling relationship, and she's really lived her career, has been so focused on making a difference in people's lives.
And I also get to see up close how she does motherhood, which I admire.
I have three kids and she has two, and they're close in age.
And I'm often floored by all that she's able to get done. I know what a hustle it is, and she's an immigration attorney and helps fight for folks who are undocumented to have their right to stay in our country. And she was a labor organizer before that and really saw the limitations of labor unions for people who couldn't even claim citizenship and were just constantly being left out of the picture. So I admire so much about her. I've kind of just been, like, always thought I want to grow up to be my sister. Right? Like at 40 years old, I still feel like I'm going to grow up to be Emily.
[00:58:44] Speaker C: Is it just the two of you? No.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: We have a big, modern family because of divorce and remarriages and all that. So Emily and I are my dad and mom's kids.
My mom remarried, and I have a stepsister, stepbrother, and half sister there, and she remarried when I was little, so I grew up with them. My dad remarried when I was much older, 19 or 20. And I have a step brother and a stepsister there, so Christmas is crazy in our world.
There's a lot of family to see and love on.
[00:59:23] Speaker C: That's awesome. I always look up to my big sister, too. I think it's just when you have that female role model, sometimes you don't want to listen to your mom. Yes, but if your sister says it, you're like, maybe she's right.
[00:59:36] Speaker B: Totally. But it's so funny now, having, I have an eight year old daughter, a five year old son, and a three year old daughter, and there is no one that my three year old loves giving attitude more than her older sister. She is just always like, no, Carolyn. Like, always disagreeing with her. I'm like, wait, what happened here? I thought Carolyn was supposed to be the boss, but Maribel's the boss of all of us.
[00:59:56] Speaker C: I love the.
[01:00:00] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you.
[01:00:01] Speaker C: My boy is so. Oh, yeah. Wonderful. Well, do you expect in Russell's lifetime or Maribel's lifetime or any of their lifetime to see a first female president?
[01:00:11] Speaker B: I do expect in their lifetime to see a first female president, but I don't know what year that would be.
[01:00:16] Speaker C: But hopefully in your children's lifetime.
[01:00:18] Speaker B: For sure. For sure. All right.
[01:00:21] Speaker C: I love that enthusiasm for they are.
[01:00:24] Speaker B: Of age to run themselves. Excellent. Right. So in the next 30 years. All right.
[01:00:31] Speaker C: I will certainly take that answer.
[01:00:34] Speaker B: I just want to thank you again.
[01:00:35] Speaker C: For your time today. It's been so wonderful listening to you. I personally have learned a lot, and I think our listeners are going to learn a lot. I'm excited for all the things that are going to be in the show notes. I think there's going to be incredible resources. So I just want to, again, thank you for the work that you're doing here in Ohio to improve the life of many families, women, mothers, children, humans. Thank you, Liz.
[01:00:57] Speaker B: Thank you, Audrey.
[01:00:59] Speaker C: Yay.
[01:01:01] Speaker B: Awesome.
[01:01:07] Speaker A: Again, thank you for listening. I hope whether this episode finds you in the last few days of March, the next few blossoming weeks of spring, or even stumbling upon it in December 2024, know that the discussions we've had today are crucial ones. Advocating for women's health and well being isn't limited to a single month. It's an ongoing journey that demands our attention every day of the year. Be sure to check out the show notes to learn how you can take action.
[01:01:34] Speaker B: Now.
[01:01:35] Speaker A: We want to wish those who identify a happy Women's History Month and leave you with a special reminder that our efforts today are paving the way for future generations.
[01:01:45] Speaker C: Be well.
