'We can stop our children being poisoned': the fight for a lead-free Cleveland
The city of Flint, Michigan, made headlines around the world in 2014 when improperly treated water from the Flint River began corroding lead pipes and releasing harmful chemicals into the city’s tap water.
But many other cities across the US have faced – and continue to face – serious health risks because of new contaminations of lead, or the legacy of failures to get it out of the environment, with children most affected by exposure.
In Cleveland, Ohio, the risk has been to children who have ingested lead from old paint either peeling or flaking or turning to dust, and those living in older homes in the most deprived neighborhoods are most at risk.
Research has at times in recent years shown children in Cleveland as actually having higher levels of lead in their blood than in Flint. Last year, more than 1,200 children in Cleveland were poisoned by the toxin – but the true figure is almost certainly much higher, due to low screening rates.
Over the years, many in Cleveland have been fighting to improve its record on lead, exposure to which has been linked to everything from a significant loss of IQ points to a rise in violent crime.
And this year, Cleveland’s city council passed legislation designed to protect children before they fall victim to the lead-laced paint in many Cleveland homes, rather than treating them afterward. Among other provisions, it will require landlords to pay for private inspections and secure lead-safe certificates, and create new official bodies to track the progress of the law.
One public health campaigner who has been in the vanguard of these efforts for years is Kim Foreman, executive director of Cleveland nonprofit Environmental Health Watch (EHW), one of the 25 people and groups the Guardian and The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s biggest-selling newspaper, are recognizing in the City Champions series. Foreman says she is not done yet. The lead legislation still needs to be implemented, and many other environmental problems still affect the city’s most destitute neighborhoods.
Look at any map, she said: “I don’t care what you’re talking about, from lead to asthma, environmental health issues to crime to food deserts, it’s all the same outline.”
For years, those communities heard big ideas from people who came and went, or had non-solutions foisted upon them. Foreman is aware of that history. One key to helping people, she said, is to respect them. “I don’t care what issue you’re working on,” she said. “It’s about the intention and it’s about how we grow relationships with impacted individuals and communities.”
Respect and consistency have figured hugely in her long-running efforts to solve the city’s lead problem.
Foreman was a mother of two before she was 21, struggling to raise her kids and pay her bills while pursuing an education. Eventually, through a program that helps prepare underrepresented students for careers in the sciences, she gained admittance to Case Western Reserve University. There she studied sociology and interned at EHW as a health educator.
As she worked in Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods, she realized that many children there suffered from lead poisoning. In young children, lead can cause a range of symptoms, from learning difficulties to sluggishness, fatigue to seizures and death. Symptoms generally appear only after dangerous amounts of lead have accumulated in the child’s body.
Foreman eventually joined EHW full-time.
Cleveland had one of the nation’s worst lead-poisoning rates. There was, perhaps, plenty of blame to go around. But Foreman didn’t work that way: “If I’m stuck at blame, I’m not doing anything. I’m not working, I’m not moving anything.”
There were ample reasons to quit. Foreman never did that, either.
“She never quits,” said Cleveland city council member Blaine Griffin. “I mean, here is a person who has dealt with this issue for a long time and a lot of times people, they get bored or they get frustrated because they see people are not as committed as they are … She stayed engaged and had the spirit that there is a solution to this, and she basically didn’t take no for an answer.”
Foreman also knew that if she were to beat lead, she’d need to help build a winning coalition around that cause.
“‘Fearless’ is the word I’d use,” said Sandra Chappelle, who worked with Foreman when Chappelle was a program officer for the St Luke’s Foundation. “She was completely determined to make that process work. Kim’s style has always been, ‘Let’s try to be collaborative.’”
Foreman worked her way up at EHW and became executive director in 2016, at a low point for the organization. There wasn’t much money. Staff had been laid off. Her problem-solving talents kicked in: she secured two national grants, started attracting more local funding and put the organization back on solid footing.
She didn’t concern herself only with lead. She helped local resident Walter Patton fund his One Garden Valley initiative, which encourages kids to tell stories about their lives through hip-hop music and film.
“No one really gave me a chance,” said Patton. “They didn’t hear my story about the different things we were going through, the crime, the food deserts, no jobs. Nobody wanted to hear my cries. But Kim heard me.
“And she doesn’t try to take the credit for the work. She just helps people do it because she has passion for the community.”
In the last few years the logjam on lead seemed to break. Foreman credits two things for that: the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, and years of coverage by reporters Rachel Dissell and Brie Zeltner for the Plain Dealer, starting with the Toxic Neglect series in late 2015.
For decades, the city had focused primarily on treating children after they were poisoned by lead. Yet some of the damage lead causes to developing young brains can never be repaired. Also, the city’s de facto strategy meant that many lead-contaminated houses, built long before the substance was banned in paint in 1978, were left to poison generations of children.
Foreman became a driving force in the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition, which hammered out new policies aimed at preventing lead poisoning.
She connected policymakers with the people living in homes where children were exposed to lead. She also connected them with leaders in other cities, such as Rochester, New York, that had already enacted prevention-focused policies.
“She was the translator of the group, taking it from an academic exercise to a practical approach,” Griffin said.
She’ll stay involved, working to implement Cleveland’s new lead policies and helping to solve lead problems throughout the state as an appointee on governor Mike DeWine’s lead advisory committee.
“We can literally prevent poisoning in our community. I wholeheartedly believe that, and I’ve always said we have the people here and the skills, the talent here to stop our children from being poisoned,” she said.
“But it’s bigger than just lead. It’s about people and their communities. You start to get to the root causes and the core, and then you can solve things.”