Rotarians gathered on Wednesday August 21st to hear from Dr. Ben Danielson, pediatrician and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Danielson spoke on his involvement with the Allies in Healthier Systems for Health & Abundance in Youth (AHSHAY). AHSHAY’s mission is to build up the fortifiers of hope and health for youth and unbuild the fortifications of youth incarceration. “I don’t think any of us should be judged for the times where we’re not our best selves, but we could be our better selves. And yet I see around me systems and things that sometimes pick one event in someone’s life and label them forever,” Dr. Danielson said during opening remarks.
Working as a pediatrician at the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, Dr. Danielson saw the negative outcomes that are borne from the inequities facing patients at clinic and incarcerated young people at the King County Youth Detention Center. “And I knew that for every prescription I could write, every time my stethoscope touched a chest, every way in which I could try and bend my skill as a physician to help somebody’s health turn out better, there were these other forces that actually were trying to make their health and their wellness actually worse,” Dr. Danielson said about his time working at the Odessa Brown Clinic and KCYDC.
Dr. Danielson shared how the inequalities we see in the world are prevalent in the systems around us, specifically healthcare, and how these systems work to adversely impact youth in our communities. A June 2024 study from the National Academy of Sciences that was shared by Dr. Danielson, summarized its findings that little to no progress has been made in our healthcare system in regard to inequity. “These inequities persist in the world around us. They’re not just my space and healthcare. They’re not just your space and your businesses and in your spaces. They’re all of our problems, and all of our issues, and we are actually in so many ways, also the architects of the solutions to them. That’s a very powerful thing,” Dr. Danielson said.
Dr. Danielson explained how AHSHAY was started based on the belief that how youth incarceration is handled is wrong and not informed based on the best interests of young people. Community-based programs have been shown to actually decrease recidivism and have longer lasting positive impacts on the general community than just locking away a young person. “It's based on fact, the idea that when you lock a young person away, you don't actually make it less likely that they're going to be arrested again in the future, you make it more likely,” Dr. Danielson said. Dr. Danielson shared that for each day a young person is incarcerated the likelihood of them being rearrested increases by 1%. Additionally, a vast majority of the young people that are incarcerated are either waiting for the judicial process to begin or some other adjudication and have not yet been sentenced.
Further elaborating on the history of AHSHAY, Dr. Danielson explained the inspiration of the organization’s name. “It’s a sound. It’s an expression. It's an expression in black communities and some
African communities, Ashe. When you say Ashe, you're kind of saying Amen, which feels right in a place like this,” Dr. Danielson said. “When you say Ashe, you say, I agree with you, and I really want to see that come into fruition. When you say Ashe, you're saying, I have faith in you, and I know that you and I together can do something amazing,” Dr. Danielson added.
It is important for us all to empathize with one another to better understand the challenges that those around us face and to acknowledge how their experiences may differ as well. Through this understanding of different backgrounds that people have, we can then come together to find collaborative solutions to improve society. “I became super convinced that it is so much easier to lift somebody up than it is to hold them down. That a lot of what happens in our society is the act of holding people down and denying them a future that they deserve and that we would all benefit from,” Dr. Danielson said.
Dr. Danielson’s hope is to see the world differently, with optimism and to see the world through the eyes of the children that he works with. AHSHAY seeks to fulfill this hope of Dr. Danielson by advocating on behalf of young people in Washington state health, incarceration, and social systems. In towns like Aberdeen, WA where prisons have been the largest employer of local citizens, examples show how the prison industry actually incentivizes the incarceration of individuals versus the rehabilitation of them. “The safest job, the best job that might actually give you health insurance and coverage and a little bit of financial security is to work for a prison. We've made it financially more secure to have a prison system in a lot of our small towns and other parts of our communities,” Dr. Danielson added about the Aberdeen community example. Recent data further reiterates this point showing that it costs over $90,000 a year to incarcerate a young person in the state of Washington.
AHSHAY works to identify solutions for targeted issues that young people face, and work backwards to connect the solution to the identified issue. Along the way, the root cause of the issue can be identified and better addressed. This strategy allows for creative collaboration to be made among community members as well as retaining the focus on young people. “I wish you could be in the rooms when these folks are talking to each other and considering what's possible instead of what's terrible about the way the world has been,” Dr. Danielson said. This strategy has helped bring about projects such as Fortifying Futures, which seeks to bring about collaboration with communities for finding solutions for youth incarceration. “What does it look like to start to do that, to bring youth to the center of your work, to bring a cohort of adults and caring people around them, and maybe have a broader host of advisors and supporters around them too. People from all different backgrounds are part of this project now, people like even CCYJ, and other organizations that work with youth,” Dr. Danielson said.
Closing out his presentation, Dr. Danielson added how it is his hope that people don’t look at someone’s past, but to their future. “What does it look like for us to do that work together and invest in each other in such a way that we actually see through the eyes of the young person, their potential, their future. Not what they did in one moment, but what they could do for us for the rest of their lives. And we invested in that,” Dr. Danielson said in closing.
What a great meeting report, Logan!
