Victor Garcia is a pediatric surgeon searching for big change in Cincinnati. He's looking for an integrated approach to creating community wealth so he can save lives.
As a surgeon, he's been saving lives on the operating table for decades, but his heroism as a surgeon comes at the cost of a tragic gunshot wound, and there are too many gunshot wounds in Cincinnati to leave Vic feeling remotely like a hero.
When we think about building wealth in communities, we have to realize that there are stronger forces in place than just the structures that drive behaviors in poverty systems. Culture can freeze change in its tracks. When thinking about leverage points, Vic asks, "How do we go beyond systems thinking and take the other disciplines that help transform culture, so that we can realize community wealth?"
Because if culture is a force in driving poverty, and if there are more gunshot wounds than Vic can sew up, then there must be a bigger leverage point in play. Vic realized that his work at CoreChange could save more lives building wealth in a community than healing wounds on the operating table – a sort of "cost / benefits" analysis to understand the impact of his work. It's a little different than what Phillip Morris thinks of when evaluating the costs and savings of people smoking (ok, a lot different), but a comparison between two outcomes makes a decision point sharper. We understand the difference in two paths we have to make when we as leaders decide which leverage point to work on.
The answers aren't obvious. "Let's not do what I did as a poor kid in Harlem, and get the hell out of there, because that perpetuated the problem." Let's work on building wealth in communities like Cincinnati with great businesses, shared ownership and anchor institutions.
We can't do it alone, and we won't see the results tomorrow. But if we can realize this dream and stop the gunshot wounds, then we could all be healers.
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Pediatric Surgeon Victor Garcia, MD, is the founding director of Trauma Services at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and a professor for the Division of Pediatric Surgery. He is the co-chair for the Cincinnati CoreChange Initiative.
