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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and now we continue our 10 part end of year gratitude series with 10 heroes of community wellbeing for 2020. I'll also remind you of the related live Zoom event next Wednesday night, a week from tonight, December 9th, to honor three of those champions of community wellbeing with what the station is generously calling the Lehrer Prize for Community Wellbeing. You can make a free reservation to Zoom attend that event at wnyc.org/lehrerprize. Today we meet one of the three finalists, and that is the leader of the group H.E.A.L.T.H. for Youths an organization which works to "Combat juvenile delinquency through programs and workshops on education, healthcare, and life skills training throughout New York City."

I'm joined by Heather Butts, professor at LIU and a lecturer at Columbia University School of Public Health, and co-founder of H.E.A.L.T.H. for Youths. Heather, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for joining us.

Heather: Hi, how are you? Can you hear me okay?

Brian: I can hear just fine. I know H.E.A.L.T.H. for Youths is an acronym. You want to tell us what it stands for?

Heather: Yes. It's a mouthful but it stands for Health, Education, Academic, Life skill, Training Help for youths like my cousin Vinnie Youths. S on the end. The acronym basically is a way that which we mark how we do the work that we do in a holistic manner.

Brian: We talked yesterday to another guest in this series whose work focuses particularly on six to 13-year-old girls. Your work focuses on an older age group that often falls through the cracks, right?

Heather: You completely got it. Absolutely. I also want to tell you, I love your show. I actually listened to the episode yesterday and listened to the other nominees. I feel like I'm in a very esteemed group and it's such an honor to be nominated. I just wanted to thank you and your show, and WNYC for the nomination. I did listen to the other nominee from yesterday and it was really interesting to hear what she had to say because the reasons why she talked about why she wanted to work with that population, it's the very reasons why I actually started H.E.A.L.T.H. for Youths because we often think about, young people zero through six, six to 13. That group, who they do get a decent amount of attention and a lot of nonprofit work is very much geared towards them.

Once you have young people that hit age 18, they really do fall through the cracks. Whether that's young people who were in foster care or are homeless or have been homeless or somehow otherwise court-involved, they often don't get the level of attention that they need. I said to myself if I ever start a nonprofit, that's the age group that I wanted to work with.

Brian: 18 to 21. Your program seemed to range so widely from virtual soccer during the pandemic to the little libraries program that people may have heard of and didn't realize that you were so involved with that places books, and now food, around the city during the pandemic, to an environmental program that ranges down to Lake Como near the Jersey Shore. How do you decide what to include?

Heather: It's challenging. We're actually a unique nonprofit in that we're a service provider for other nonprofits. Organizations will come to us and say, "We want to do a community garden in Staten Island," and we will help them with that. "We want to build a little free library in Armor Park will help." Like wonderful, fabulous Lake Como New Jersey where we partnered with them and their amazing community and their former environmental commissioner, a man named John Gibbons, on a really wonderful project. That, again, was more this organic program. People come to us, and they have their ideas. Then we say, "Yes, no, maybe so."

More often than not, we'll try to figure out a way either to work with the program and the youths that they are working with or we try to refer them to another organization.

Brian: Can you give us an example? Maybe the Lake Como environmental project and how that both serves our community and the 18 to 21-year-olds who you're particularly trying to help.

Heather: Well, that project is one of the prouder projects that I've been involved with, not only through H.E.A.L.T.H. for Youths but probably just in my life. It's a really unique project that brings together a small town in New Jersey, Jersey Shore Town, Lake Como, which often gets lumped in with Belmar but it has its own town. The entire population of Lake Como during the summer is about 5,000 people, but during non-summertime it's about 1,800 people with 1,000 homes in the community. Essentially, we partnered with them on this project then and the Williamsburg High School for architecture and design in Williamsburg.

That high school, which is led by a principal named Principal Gil Cornell, what they do is they work with students on architecture projects. They're an architecture school. Students also have been doing your garden variety English and history. They partner with their students to do architecture, urban landscaping. In talking with the good people of Lake Como, it struck me that maybe we could put together these young people with the town to help reimagine what the town looks like. Then the town and their environmental commissioner and the mayor and the city council just ran with it.

During COVID, we actually had our final presentation after working with the town and the school for about two years. The students presented their design for reimagining the lakefront of Lake Como from an environmental standpoint, and I couldn't have been prouder. It was amazing. Those plans will go forward with the town. That's the hypothetical pie-in-the-sky thinking that we like to do as an organization. Having young people really work with their community and other communities to make a change and a difference.

Brian: How do you measure success with respect to the young people who you work with and know if you've really made a difference in the direction that their lives take?

Heather: Well, my point is, perspective, the way you really measure yourself is you ask people. A lot of times I think that [unintelligible 00:07:32] were really good at doing surveys, which are helpful. I'm a researcher. I like surveys, and doing evaluation, and so forth. One of the best ways that I've found is to ask the students themselves. Young people are usually not super jaded and they will give you the real deal. The young people that we work with have told us what works, what could be improved, what's made a difference for them. Having a real conversation with them where we can understand what makes a difference to them is honestly how we're able to move forward and do a better job for them.

Brian: Now you have a day job, I gather? Teaching.

Heather: I do. Yes.

Brian: This is not your full-time work. What is your day job exactly and how does it connect with this, if it does?

Heather: It does, actually. In my real life, I'm a public health person. I'm an assistant professor at Long Island University, and I am in their public administration department. I also am on faculty at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, which I think you might know something about. I also am a lecturer at St. John's law school. My day job is actually, what I did before COVID and coronavirus was study epidemics, pandemics. I actually listened your show yesterday regarding a new law that just came down from the Supreme Court. My Thanksgiving was spent poring over reading the decision in that case, the Cuomo case that looks at our religion and the diocese.

That's what I do. I look at laws and the intersection of law and public health, and how ethics and laws can shape the way that we go forward as individuals to make our public health lives better. That's my day job from a teaching and a research perspective.

Brian: That's pretty relevant. Certainly, I guess you must be having the experience this year of what is maybe a somewhat obscure intersection of the law and public health now being so front and center in people's lives?

Heather: It's really incredible that you said that because when I first started this year, I was teaching public health law class. One of my students reminded me that the very first thing I said in class, back on January 21st, I mentioned coronavirus. I said, "Are you sure?" And he said, "Yes, look at your notes." I said, "I sure did." At the time I mentioned it and I talked about it again in more, "This is something to watch, and now let's go back and talk about Jacobson Massachusetts and Ebola and the 1918 flu." To go from a class like that where I had 20 students in it to my public health law class now, but had a wait list of 41, it is very different change for me.

I have to say though, as tragic as coronavirus and COVID-19, I think one hopeful positive thing to come out of it is people are paying more attention to what public health means and why should we care about it, and what does it mean to care about your fellow human beings' health as well as your own health? If that could come out of this tragedy, then I think that can be something that we can move forward with as a society.

Brian: We don't have much time left. I wonder if you could touch briefly on the little libraries program, which brings at a time when most or all of the New York City public library branches are closed, little outdoor libraries to parks, public squares, a subway station, low-income apartment buildings, community centers. I'm seeing seven police precincts as well. What is this?

Heather: Right? The Little Library organization has been around almost as long and H.E.A.L.T.H. We're both about 11 years old. They started under the auspices of an amazing man who passed away not too long ago named Todd Bol. The concept of that was pretty simple. His mother had been a teacher and he wanted to do something to honor her. He built a little box and put some books in it for his neighborhood. That transformed into more little boxes and more people putting books in them. The concept of Little Free Libraries is give a book, take a book. You leave a book and then you take a book or you take a book and then at some point you can give one back.

We at HE.A.L.T.H for Youth decided to take that model and run with it. We have approximately 60 Little Free Libraries throughout New York City and New Jersey that we built. We've done it through a lot of help from volunteers and other amazing supporters that have really been there on the journey with us. They are in parks, and they're in front of people's homes and they are in public spaces. We help to get Little Libraries-

Brian: Let me jump in just because we have only 30 seconds left, and I want to give you a chance to tell people if they want to volunteer or donate or want your services, how do they get in touch?

Heather: Yes, www.health4youths.org. You can check us out there and, you can learn more about the Little Free Libraries, and we would love anybody to volunteer with us and help out.

Brian: Health4youths.org?

Heather: Yes.

Brian: Heather Butts. Thank you, and I'll see you at the event. That's Wednesday night.

Heather: I can't wait to meet you in virtual person. [laughs] Thank you.

Brian: Listeners, again, you're all invited to Zoom in with us at that event next Wednesday night. You can get a free reservation at wnyc.org/lehrerprize.

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