Transcript for Episode 1

Ryan McDermott: I'm here right now with Rev. Paul Abernathy, “Father Paul,” who's the Chief Executive of the Neighborhood Resilience Corporation in the Hill District in Pittsburgh.

So Father Paul, tell us a little bit about what you do at the Neighborhood Resilience Corporation and who you are.

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Yeah, thanks Ryan.

The Neighborhood Resilience Project, we grew out of about nine years of ministry here in the inner city of Pittsburgh, which we were doing a lot of things like basic needs, emergency relief for families.

But we learned very quickly that the greatest challenge that we were facing in the community was trauma, the immense amounts of trauma in our community. A lot of times we learned that, when we start giving people a can of food, they'd end up talking about a time where they lost a son to gun violence; or we gave them a sweater, they were talking about at the time they were raped. People would talk about abuse; people would talk about eviction. We began to realize that these challenges, this trauma, was so widespread in our community that, from our perspective, trauma became the foundation for the community's worldview.

And so from that point of view, we began to enter in conversation with researchers and academicians from local universities to help us understand how we might go about addressing community trauma. And from that work and from those partnerships emerged this framework we refer to as, now, Trauma Informed Community Development. For us in the Neighborhood Resilience Project, what the mission is, is the transformation of Trauma Affected Communities to resilient healing and health in communities. And Trauma Informed Community Development is the framework by which we advance that mission.

We have different program areas where we're looking to address community support, health and wellbeing and leadership development in various ways that range from: providing basic needs to families that face food insecurity, to free health center trauma response team for gun violence and various trainings to help prepare community members to address whatever challenges that they face.

So we keep awfully busy. And at this time our work goes not only across our county, but we've entered into partnership with other groups around the nation as well, in helping mentor them and coach them and train them in Trauma Informed Community Development.

Ryan McDermott: All right. So things have really built up since the last time I was there, and I see you're in a new space.

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Indeed, yes. So we have a brand new facility. Actually just only been here since – we purchased it in December and began moving in in January. So we are nearly fully moved in, but we have actually some more settling in to do, and in the midst of the crisis, it's given us a great opportunity to serve as really a base of operations for basic needs, healthcare, and even combating the disease in our community at this time. So it's really good to be in this new facility.

Ryan McDermott: And you're a priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and your wife is actually a clinician who's, I think, running your clinic, right?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Yeah. Well, my wife is a, she's a clinic administrator, so she's not a clinician. But she runs the health center. That's what she's done. And she, of course, her work was to launch and run the free health center, which is a very, very daunting task. But she's done an incredible job in providing access to healthcare for, especially, those who have no health insurance, those who are uninsured and underinsured, who have no other option for medical care. And not only being seen here at the clinic, but also things like the medication that they need or the surgeries and procedures that they need, the lab work that they need, which the health center provides for them at absolutely no cost. Now, more than ever, it's a very critical service.

And in the midst of COVID-19, we've transferred all of our healthcare to telemedicine, so, all of our docs continuing to see patients in a telemedicine platform. And it's not only about addressing, you know, what are the new illnesses that pop up – I know we're all desperately trying to address COVID-19 – but it's also about making sure that those people who were already sick and who continue to need medical care still get the medical care that they need. If people needed insulin two months ago, they will still need it this month. And so it's very important that we don't lose sight of continuing to care for people who are already sick.

Ryan McDermott: Yeah. So that's what I wanted to ask you about. How have you been adapting? How do you keep track, how do you keep up with the people who I assume would, you know, you would've been able to walk down the street and check on how they're doing, they would've been stopping in to your place. Maybe some of the people in your community don't have ready access to the internet. What are you doing to stay in touch?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Well, in our work with the Neighbor Resilience Project, we've learned over the years how important it is to build resilience among community members who can essentially be the eyes and ears of the ministry in the community.

Our work with gun violence, we've been working in the city of Pittsburgh, in the Allegheny County actually, with the Pittsburgh police, the Allegheny County Health Department and various other agencies and entities across the county to address gun violence from a public health perspective over the recent years.

And what that's really done has exposed us to an epidemiological framework. That's what a public health approach to gun violence is. It really takes an epidemiological framework looking at gun violence as a disease, and for that reason it's given some, not expertise, but some familiarity with what stopping fighting, preventing disease actually does look like. And so for that reason, we've taken what little knowledge we've received in our work to address gun violence and we've really adapted it to the current conditions.

And we've actually launched an initiative to create a core of what we call Community Health Deputies. And these Community Health Deputies are community members who we're training in an epidemiological framework to combat the spread of COVID-19; to check and assess the needs of people, especially food and medicine; and finally to assess and support the mental health needs of the community. As we all know, people are facing a great deal of anxiety. We're trying to train them, as many as we can, via webinar and some who are close to us we're able to train in person, keeping up with social distancing.

But this has really provided a way to really advance a pretty significant network through the community, where we're able to stay in touch with the community. We're conducting telephonic wellness checks in the community, especially those community members that are aged 60 and over, have preexisting health conditions that are very vulnerable to this, and using it as an opportunity to continue those relationships and find what these community members need so that we can actually get these community members that which they need in the midst of the crisis.

In addition to that, we really are doing as much as we can to help with food insecurity. I mean, as I know you know, Ryan, we've had rounds of layoffs, like everywhere else. And so the need is increased. And so here we're able to distribute food. And not only people are coming here, but we're trying to get food to the people who are unable to come and pick the food up.

But what we're really committed to doing is addressing food insecurity and providing food for the community. And so we've begun to do that both with canned goods and shelf-stable foods, as well as with hot meals that we've just started to serve the community a few times every week as well.

And this provides an also other opportunity – while maintaining social distancing – an opportunity to teach what this disease is really all about and maintain relationships with the community and try to understand what people need and, this particular time, what the community needs. So, it's a change for sure, but we're adapting to it as best we can.

Ryan McDermott: So one of the things I love about the epidemiological approach that you all are taking to gun violence and to neighborhood community building in particular is that when you say community, you're talking at a very small scale, actually. I mean, I know that your original interventions were basically based around recognizing which block in this neighborhood is the strongest and which can we build out from. And I understand now that you're trying to train more and more leaders. What is the scale of that? Like, are we still talking the “block” level?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Yeah, that's a great question. Well, you know, up to this point, in the Hill district, we've had full-scale interventions, right now, with – we call them “blocks” or “microcommunities” – right now with about five microcommunities. And we've begun to really bring them together to begin to build strength and communication among a broader community. These five microcommunities in this particular time have served as an incredible foundation as we work to now increase our resilience in this community in the wake of this crisis.

In addition to the group in the Hill District, we've trained cohorts from three different areas in the local region. We've trained a cohort from the North Side here in the city of Pittsburgh. We've trained a cohort from Braddock-Rankin area, and we've trained some folks from the city of Clairton. And so along with that work, we're really trying to do whatever we can, also, to help people in other underserved communities, or what we prefer to call Trauma Affected Communities, to help really continue this work, help people understand that if we find the right area to begin, just starting with one little block can be the foundation for really beautiful community transformation that results in resilient healing and healthy community.

Ryan McDermott: Yeah, it's interesting. It makes me think of, you know, all of… I'm a college professor and all of my students have been sent back from campus, most of them, who have families that they can go to. And so when I connect with them now, it's very much like a centralized connecting with each of these individual nodes. But at the same time, I also teach in our family's homeschool co-op and so, when I taught my high school literature class this morning by Zoom and connected with the co-op, I was connecting with multiple nodes that had in themselves little communities. So there are three siblings in one, two siblings in another.

And it seems to me that one approach to neighborhood development would be this very centralized approach where you are the source of everything good and you need to individually reach all these individuals, but what you're doing instead is you've already created these little pods of community that you can actually kind of count on to help each other at this moment. Is that kind of the idea of how it's supposed to work?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Ryan, that's exactly the idea, and what I'm really most thankful for in all of it is that this crisis has really brought that to light. It's really incredible to see that doing the work of helping connect neighbors to one another, doing the work of helping build community on that extremely local level, being neighborly to the people who live really close to you and drawing near to them, not only in physical proximity, but really near and heart. Now we see that that provides the real foundation so that it's not these agencies and institutions, you know?

And I think that in this particular time, it becomes so important, because the agencies and institutions, to be quite honest with you, they're seemingly overwhelmed. And so the question becomes, well, how are people really ready to step up and build community and be community to one another now that these institutions that we all depended on are no longer available?

I think one of the great challenges that happens in our communities is when there's this overemphasis on the need for these institutions, these central institutions that will care for the needs of individuals. And I think what that can do, although we need strong institutions that help support people and community, what that can do if executed the wrong way is it can really reduce community resilience. It can really try to undermine the necessity for neighborly relations. It can try and replace what is the good old-fashioned relational community.

And so what our work really is dedicated to is to help really building people up; to help really build up community at that very, very local level; to help really reconnect people so that the community members themselves can be the resilience that our community needs, not only in times of crisis, but truly always.

Ryan McDermott: That really reveals a great range in our imagination of what constitutes social distancing. You know, when we think about going back to normal, I think for many of us, going back to normal will actually not change that much because we were already fairly socially distanced from our neighbors.

And what you're describing is you're describing that contrast that in normal times, how socially distanced is a particular neighborhood? How socially distanced is a particular community? And only if in normal times you actually have those bonds of community are you going to be able to maintain any kind of social cohesion, even under conditions of social distancing.

So what are the practical ways that these communities are able to remain in touch with each other and able to help each other under the conditions of social distancing?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: You know, that's a great question. Probably one of the best examples I've seen is one of these microcommunities, one of these blocks that we've worked with, where they actually are doing a daily roll call and check in with every member in that block, and they themselves are doing it. And so they're checking to see if anybody has signs and symptoms. They're checking to see if anybody was even potentially exposed. They're certainly looking at what do, really, people need? And then even if there are neighbors that need groceries – I just received a text message from one of the folks on one of these blocks who's overseeing this, saying that we have people who just can't get groceries right now. We’ve got to work to address that.

Also, trying to not only check in with people, but to make sure on a daily basis that everybody connects with somebody so that they can have some kind of support. I really appreciate that.

I know there are some who, they talk about “social distancing.” But there's some who really prefer the term “physical distancing,” meaning that although we can't be physically close to one another, that still we have to maintain that social connectivity. And so it's really inspiring to see how committed they are. That they are really making it a point to say, every single day, “We will make sure that every neighbor of ours is checked on, not by an institution or by a government agency even, but really by us as neighbors and that we are really maintaining our commitment to one another.”

I'll tell you one of the other things, a really, really great example of this is: after we finished with intervention with one of these blocks, they understood that they had an opportunity to perhaps support one another. And so they started what they called a “good neighbor fund” where everybody in the block pitches in money every year. And that that particular fund is to be used in the case of any sort of tragedy in the year, so that they can help address it as a community, so they can help address it as a block, the best way that they can.

And seeing them do these kinds of things like that, so that they can really tap into their own strength, so that they can really develop themselves, not only personally, but understanding the wellbeing of the person is very much in the context of community wellbeing. It's just very, very inspiring to see. And I think that if we continue to foster those connections and people are able to see how maintaining those connections and being that community to each other in a time of crisis in which the institutions and government and even healthcare system to some degree were overwhelmed, I think that will really strongly encourage this idea going forward.

One of the things that we're really trying to teach now is that the world will undoubtedly be changed by this crisis. What we have to understand is that change does not have to be bad. And from this, the changed future that no doubt will emerge from this crisis, there are certain ways that we can make sure that that change is actually for the betterment of our community. And I think this is one of those ways that it very clearly could be.

Ryan McDermott: And so you're an Eastern Orthodox priest. Can you talk a little bit about the religious and spiritual dimensions of your work and how this expands your notion of health?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Yeah. For me, as an Orthodox priest, this work is formed first and foremost by my own theological experience, and by that I don't so much mean what I've studied as much as much as what I've learned just in praying and being in the presence of the living God and being around godly people.

And the whole concept of community that we're really working to promote, this reflection in my experience is a reflection of the Gospel of our Lord. The Gospel of our Lord, it does provide the way that we ought to love one another as God loved us, that we ought to be one with each other as Christ and the Father are one. And so this idea about unity, this bond of love that must unite humanity, the bond of love that was healed. In the Book of Genesis, in the Tower of Babel, we are separated by sin. And yet that separation is healed in the moment of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends and everybody hears them speaking in their own tongue. This is the healing of our division as a result of sin.

And so when we see the division in our community, we see that people, they don't look at another human being sometimes as someone that they want to know or that they want to love, but they sometimes people see another human being as somebody as they fear. I think even that's a temptation that might especially be prevalent now, where people look at other human beings and they say, “Could they potentially be carriers of this virus?”

And there's an aspect of reality there. And yet we know that Lord says in the Holy Scriptures that we must not be afraid in these particular times. And that the division that's caused by our own sin has been healed by the Lord himself. And this is good news and this is the Good News that has to inform our work. For us, we begin our work with prayer, and we do the best that we can in remaining prayerful throughout our work. Here at our physical location, we make sure that we have prayer services every single day. And in addition to that, we are praying for the people that we serve and that the groups that emerge from our work, they also become these microcommunities that in many ways define themselves by prayer. I'm thinking of one group that in order to build relations with one another, they decided to meet at a different house every week for no other reason than just to pray with one another. And this becomes a way in which they can foster their bond, understanding that the best way that we can increase our relations with one another is to do so with the Lord present in our midst. And so for us, it's been very important.

The final thing really that I'll say about it, that I think is incredibly crucial, is that this kind of work is so incredibly difficult. If we're really talking about community transformation from Trauma Affected Community to resilient healing and healthy community; if we're really talking about gun violence and trying to stop gun violence; if we're really talking about how we're going to battle COVID-19 and we have people that are putting themselves at risk just so they could feed somebody who's hungry or somebody who's homeless; if they're talking about people who would make their own sacrifices to check on their neighbors and be with their neighbors in a time of crisis, I think it's very important to understand that it is really by faith that we have to walk this walk because it's too much, it's too difficult to do without the grace of God. The temptation to quit is too great. The temptation to seek personal benefit is too great.

We understand that we are citizens not of this world, and we do not seek prize in this world. We know that very often to do this kind of work, it is thankless work, if we are to think about what kind of rewards do people get in this life. And yet we trust in the words of our Lord who teaches us that, yes, we must – that teaches us that we must be citizens of the kingdom, not of this world; that it's not about what happens here, but it is the kingdom of God and the world to come. And not to be dependent upon humans who so often fail us and cause us to stumble, but really to be solely dependent upon God and be strengthened by his grace.

This is the foundation of our work here, and were it not, there's no doubt in my mind that we'd be unable to do this, especially with a sense of peace, joy, and love that we are called to do this work with.

Ryan McDermott: The work you're engaged in is very personal. It's very personal work. So I'm wondering, are there any particular exemplars of this kind of personal work that you look to and that you try to commend to others and model your own work on?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: For me, what's really interesting, is over the years I've had the benefit, the privilege of being exposed to people who were very radical in their faith.

I mean, certainly history is filled with examples of people who have done this work from very, very radical perspectives from the early Church. Certainly, I think you can look in the Acts of the Apostles and you could see plenty examples of radical witness among the people, administering to the people. And that's an influence I carry in my heart. You can go a few centuries later and look at saints like St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great, even St. Nicholas of Myra Licea, these mighty men and women of God who had done this holy work and the saints, the righteous ones of God, who do this holy work in all the ages.

In my own lifetime, I've been very, very blessed to be exposed to incredible Christians who were, again, radically committed to doing this work in the United States and beyond. I had a wonderful mentor. I had some wonderful mentors, especially, when I was at college, at Wheeling Jesuit University. I had some wonderful mentors there who really challenged me to think about my Christian faith and what it meant for the life that I led, and really the way in which we engage the world as the Lord commends us to go forth. And seeing people who not only encourage me, but they themselves have been living that radical witness, was very inspiring to me. And so I've been very, very blessed with certainly the saints from the ancient days of the Church to modern, wonderful examples of this in my own life.

And the last thing I just would say is, I think, my own immediate family. I was very, very blessed to live in a Christian home where my mother, single mother, has really, she always was an extraordinary witness of the Christian faith. And she's even still now a social worker. And she’s told me very recently that she’s going out, she's doing wellness checks on senior citizens that are very vulnerable to this. And she of course is vulnerable in her own way. There are some who won't go right now, but she's going because she really believes that this is a ministry, that this is a work, that this is what God has commanded her to do, even if it puts her at risk for contracting the illness. And to be raised in a home like that is just, it's just incredibly powerful. So I've been very blessed with many wonderful examples of my life.

Ryan McDermott: What can people in the Pittsburgh community, people watching this, if they want to support the work that you're doing there, how can they do that?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Yeah. Thank you. So there are a couple of different ways. Number one, we certainly need food. We are preparing to be in this situation for a little while. We pray that it ends sooner rather than later. But we are preparing to be in this situation for a little while. And so we are in need of food as the rounds of layoffs have continued. So donating food is a very, very important way to help.

Another thing is we're recruiting volunteers who are willing to be trained as Community Health Deputies because this is not work only that we're doing in the Hill District, but we're doing it across the county, in particular, in medically underserved communities. So the more Community Health Deputies we’re able to train, the more we can, hopefully, save some lives in our most at-risk communities.

Thirdly, we're recruiting people to help us conduct these telephonic wellness checks. People who would be willing to make phone calls and check on people in the area who might be very vulnerable to this illness and to see how they're doing to provide the – just let them know that they're not in this alone, to see if there's any particular needs that they have.

So those are ways that people really could help. And last but certainly not least, if somebody really felt comfortable being physically present, there is also the opportunity to serve hot meals, especially, those days where we're serving hot meals to the community and we make sure that we have the protocols that help us be as safe as we can with all of this, for sure. But just the need to staff those positions as well.

Certainly people can go to our website, neighborhoodresilience.org, and we'll try to keep the latest information there as well as on our Facebook page, Neighborhood Resilience Project, and another social media. So be sure to stay tuned.

Ryan McDermott: Great. We'll put links to those in our show notes.

I've been asking everybody I've been talking to: What are the best things you've been reading or watching or listening to during this time that you'd recommend to others?

Rev. Paul Abernathy: You know, it's interesting because for us, this is also the season of Great Lent. So, the spiritual readings, we're trying to keep in line with the season of Great Lent.

But one thing that I might recommend, that's a really wonderful, book to read, that's not a very difficult read, but it's a book called Way of the Pilgrim. And Way of the Pilgrim is a book about a simple Russian man who's traveling across Russia has only two things: the Bible and the Philokalia, which is a collection of spiritual writings. And it's a very wonderful introduction to what it means to lead a very, very simple life in which we're dedicated to praying without ceasing.

And I think that's especially relevant now, because we find ourselves, many of us, having almost too much time at home. And so, this idea about prayer and solitude and the role that it can play in giving us grace and strength at this time is very, very beautiful. I've very recently heard a nun say, “I've been social distancing for 20 years.” And so there's a lot to be, I think, learned from those men and women of prayer who have really been dedicated to this inner spiritual life. And so that's one thing I might recommend. And, for me, certainly, the Scriptures and spiritual writings from the Philokalia have been especially meaningful to me in this particular time of crisis.

Ryan McDermott: Great. Thank you. Well, Father Paul Abernathy, thank you for taking the time. I know you've got a lot going on there and really send you prayers and blessings on the good work that you're doing.

Rev. Paul Abernathy: Thank you, Ryan, and thank you so much for taking the time and may God bless and strengthen you and keep you and your family safe and healthy.

Ryan McDermott: Thank you.