UB professor takes next steps to close the happiness gap

Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., director of the UB Center for Urban Studies, has cultivated a community development project that he hopes will not only change one neighborhood in Buffalo, but also the whole world.

“It's not complicated,” Taylor said. “We aim to change the world because it can be done.”

Taylor's plan is outlined in How We Change the Black East Side. There are seven focus areas to solve the underdevelopment of East Side and the health inequalities in the community, some of which include fixing existing rental housing, youth development and abolishing neighborhood health inequities. When Taylor previously spoke to The Spectrum, he and his team of UB community members, activists, local organizations, city officials and academics were surveying different neighborhoods on the East Side to determine which would be the best fit for this project.

Now, after 565 door-to-door surveys they’ve locked in their choice: The Upper Broadway Fillmore neighborhood.

They chose this neighborhood for four reasons: The residents in that neighborhood demonstrated a willingness to unite and fight to transform their neighborhood; the neighborhood had a large number of vacant lots coupled with a large number of occupied dwelling units; the proximity to downtown Buffalo and Martin Luther King Park, which makes it a high risk for gentrification zone; and the highly progressive community-based organization, King Urban Life Center.

Currently, Taylor and his team are working to get the money to put this plan into action.

“We've just submitted a grant for $100 million to the MacArthur Foundation. Next stop, we're going to visit the Cabrini Foundation. Then we'll be looking at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Simon Foundation. So there's a whole series of foundations that we're going to go after,” Taylor said.

Taylor explained that the heart of his movement is not just the issue of health inequality among Black Americans, but the issue of happiness, “We are not only being robbed of our lives, we are being robbed of our happiness,” he said.

But Taylor’s desire to help out his community didn’t start recently. For him, it’s been a journey he’s been on his whole life.

For much of his life, Taylor has struggled with what his destiny is. From age five, his father would ask him, “What contribution will you make to humanity?”

“Every person at some point, black person, but people in general, will discover their destiny, and by discovering your destiny I mean, why are you here? And in the moment they have a choice. Do I fulfill my destiny or do I betray it?”

In college, Taylor felt unrest and knew he needed to do something, but he didn't understand what he needed to do. He became a clinical audiologist to help people, but the disparities between his patients bothered him. This is when he knew what he needed to do — stop the disparities and inequalities in his community.

Taylor wants the base level of funding to come from foundations, but the project will tap into government dollars, but they don't want the government to be the prime source.

“If you stand and fight for the freedom of your people and if you utilize the talents and gifts that you have been given to pursue that task, everything else takes care of itself,” Taylor said.

Sarah Owusu is the senior features editor and can be reached at sarah.owusu@ubspectrum.com

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