Building Generational Health in Trenton

A little after 9 o’clock in the morning in the West Ward of Trenton, the capital of New Jersey, the Trenton Restorative Street Team (TRST, or Street Team) puts up a black, red, and green tent.

Across its canopy reads, “Restoring Justice. Promoting Peace.” TRST is part of the oldest Black faith and advocacy institution in the city, Salvation and Social Justice, leading the way across the state on racial justice issues.

“It’s critical if we are to [address] structural racism that those with resources and power collaborate to help build up directly impacted organizations,” shares Reverend Dr. Charles Boyer, a pastor and founder of Salvation and Social Justice.

On the table, visitors find flyers about legal aid; sign-up lists for the weekly mobile food pantry in partnership with Arm in Arm and the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen; a rolodex of jobs; and a list of Black therapists–resources for economic advancement and healing.

Shaffona “Shay” Morgan and her TRST colleagues, Keyion Jones, Pete Lewis, and Dontae Thomas, stand around the table, sometimes calling to passersby leaving the corner store. Shay spots a woman she knows leaving the deli next to the tent, “Food pantry! Come sign up, it’s free!”

“Where do I sign up at? I need the food.” The woman writes down her name. “Yeah, even I signed up,” Morgan tells her. It’s been hard to get many who sign up for mental health and job resources to follow through, but with their tent and tables, interventionists and volunteers are consistently showing up for their neighbors so that when they are ready, they’re there. Hearing  that the team members are recipients of the services themselves, people are more willing to share their struggles and desire to find a pathway toward a future they want to build. “I feel like people who [are] closer to the problem have better solutions,” Morgan shares. “When people see me, they know my story. They know what happened. They realize like, ‘Dang, she on this side.’ So it intrigues them, too.”

Morgan grew up in the same neighborhood where she now hands out resources. It’s been a long road for Morgan, navigating personal trauma on top of the generational trauma stewing in the community. Morgan was just 10 years old when a vehicle she and her family were in malfunctioned and crashed on the highway, killing her mother and uncle. It took Morgan two years to speak again after the car crash, but she held on to the fact that despite the trauma, she and her siblings all survived. “And so I know there’s a greater purpose,” Morgan shares. Channelling her pain into music, Morgan was a finalist on The Voice, and made it to American Idol, but at 17 years old, she got caught up in a violent dispute that landed her in prison for six years. 

Now, carrying on the legacy of her grandmother’s gospel group, “The Heavenly Dee Etts,” Morgan has made a life singing, coupled with activism and mentorship work in the community. “I wanted to be part of the solution,” Morgan says. She is committed to doing social justice work and to creating and reshaping opportunities for her neighbors and their kids and grandkids. She now also sings at funeral services, or families with no resources to pay for those services, to honor those whose lives have been lost from community violence. 

Healing a community by creating pathways to opportunity.

Having those from the community lead the design of the program has been key to the success of TRST’s and their partners’ work throughout Trenton. 

Keyion Jones, a High Risk Interventionist with the TRST, grew up in the neighborhood and has served as a firefighter until he experienced an injury. “Working in a firefighter’s unit, you get to go inside of everybody’s house. You get to see the real truth,” he notes, also sharing that he grew up with a “family in crime.” Despite the trauma, addiction, and barriers his family experienced, he has been committed to working toward creating a different kind of community–one that is abundant with opportunity, rather than being a place people try to survive. “I’ve seen a lot of people get killed,” he says. “If you’re not strong, if you’re not level-headed, it will swallow you alive.”

Jones has dedicated himself to a life of activism to help bring about a different kind of future, but it’s “slow, steady work.” It has reshaped who he is as a person. Being able to talk to a Black therapist who understands where he comes from has helped heal a lot of trauma, “a generation of trauma,” he adds. “My son is 16 now,” Jones shares. “I’m proud to say, he’s an All-American [athlete]. He was [just] in Boston for the national track [meet].”

In 2023, there was a 43 percent drop in homicides in the city. The team agreed unanimously that it was one of the most successful parts of the program. Pathways to opportunity, to hope, to healing, to a future–these are the bricks that pave the way to health and divert a community out of violence. 

Pete Lewis, also a High Risk Interventionist with the Street Team, is considered the unofficial mayor of his block. “[People] who need a window fixed, some ice...Everybody comes to Pete,” Jones comments. “He does everything, he takes care of everybody.”

While the Trenton Restorative Street Team is focused on immediate needs, they are part of a broader collaboration that is working to build long-term change that can grow opportunity, wealth, and power over time so there is less of a need for these emergency fixes for future generations. 

Caring for the health of a community means growing opportunity and collective power.

Queen Billingsley, born and raised in Trenton, was a patient at Capital Health Hospital as a child. The healthcare system offered her not just care–but hope for the future.  

She was born to young parents who couldn’t afford to raise her. Billingsley’s grandmother cared for her and pushed her to finish school as a pathway out of poverty. Her dream was to work as a nurse, and Capital Health was the place where she wanted to bring that care back to her community.

Eric Schwartz, Vice President of Community Health and Transformation at Capital Health and Executive Director of the Institute for Urban Care, was born in Brooklyn and grew up with a bad case of asthma that inspired him to go to medical school. Schwartz came to Trenton in 1999 to work as a primary care physician and has been with Capital Health for the past nine years. 

“As a physician, you take care of an individual person, which is a great privilege and a real honor,” he says. “But also in this role, working with this health system and the community, you can also put programs in place that can impact the entire population.”

Finding jobs is important, Schwartz says, but building careers that can sustain a family and allow them to plan for the future is crucial, which is why Capital Health has created the Trenton Neighborhood Initiative (TNI). TNI is just one piece of the larger plan to make Trenton a place where people can thrive. The TNI is a five-year, $10 million community investment by Capital Health to improve the way people live, work, grow, and connect. This includes building generational wealth through access to home ownership, job training and employment opportunities, access to computers and the internet, and supports for family and child wellbeing. Down payment assistance and internet access may not be obvious causes for a hospital system to take on, but all are tied to better health outcomes. Knowing that it’s easier to be healthy when one has safe and stable housing, the TNI program has so far helped 31 first-time homebuyers in the community with down payment assistance of up to $20,000 each. 

TNI also provides scholarships to Trenton residents, one of which Billingsley was awarded to obtain her nursing degree from Mercer County Community College. She is the first in her family to graduate from college.

As a recipient of the Trenton Neighborhood Initiative (TNI) scholarship, Billingsley was able to focus on building a long-lasting, meaningful career as a nurse. “I want to try different things and see what I like. I feel like the world is my oyster, and I want to take nursing as far as I can,” Billingsley says, sharing that she will start her residency at Capital Health this month.

“I type in my name, and I just look at my [nursing] license number because I can’t believe it is there,” Billingsley shares. “It’s kind of emotional. Being a young Black girl, making it out and being able to give back, because now I’m a nurse. It’s just so exciting,” she adds, “knowing I could travel the world and just do what I want.” 

For now, though, she hopes she can contribute toward bettering maternal health care for Trenton residents. “Being a resident of Trenton, I see a lot of things that people from the outside, they're unaware of, like the poverty, the struggle, the financial barriers. I just really enjoy helping people. So if I could do anything to alleviate that, that would be really exciting for me,” Billingsley says. “I know I'm one person, but if I can make just a small difference in the city of Trenton…if I can save a life, and just mak[e] a difference in someone's life. It means a lot.”

The less than 8-square-mile city of Trenton was once an industrial powerhouse, exporting much of the country’s Lenox china and ceramics. A 210-year-old, two-lane truss bridge owned and operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad, spans the Delaware River. The city’s 1910 slogan, “Trenton Makes The World Takes,” glimmers red on the bridge when entering New Jersey’s capital, celebrating the city’s industrial legacy. In its golden age, union jobs were plentiful and Trenton became a symbol of the American Dream, attracting immigrants from Europe and Black migrants from the South. The Great Depression hit and marked Trenton’s initial decline; but after World War II, as in many cities across the rust belt, factories shut down and manufacturing jobs were moved abroad, leaving few opportunities for employment, especially for lower-income families. Discriminatory policies made it even harder for people of color to find employment and stable housing. For instance, the VA loans that helped mostly White veterans find suburban homes, fueling White flight out of urban areas like Trenton, were largely inaccessible to Black veterans.

But the community is tight, collaborative, and honest with each other. As a 130-year-old community institution in Trenton, Capital Health serves as an anchor for this work and its leaders feel a deep “responsibility to really be there” for the community. This sentiment is shared across the city by community leaders who have been consistently gathering to build a complex web of support for one another and the entire community. “Trust comes from every pocket of identity in the community,” a leader shares. “And we spend a lot more time in the learning mode,” they add, noting that self-reflection and humility are key tenets to their continued progress and to building the synergy necessary to not just treat community members’ illnesses, but to work together to build the kind of place where it’s easy to be well and to be healthy. “We have a culture of welcoming feedback. When we haven’t done something well or when it can be done better, the leadership ask[s] and trust[s] the feedback from the frontline workers and put[s] them in a position of power.”

Integrating and co-locating services in cooperation with different organizations is part of this practice. One example is Arm In Arm, which partners with Capital Health to locate food distribution and other services on site at the health center, providing more than 150 families with healthy groceries every week. This program is promoted by the TRST and together, with its countless other partners, they are committed to identifying gaps and opportunities to improve the services offered.

Homefront aims to help families become self-sufficient.

Walking through the front doors of HomeFront, light streams in, illuminating artwork on the walls and colorful trees through the giant picture window on the opposite wall. There’s a buzz of energy as parents and children of all ages gather around tables and help themselves to art supplies for their latest creation. Haydee stands at a table and her four children, ages 7, 6, 5, and 3, roam around the communal space.

Homefront aims to support those experiencing homelessness and help families become self-sufficient by providing shelter and an extensive list of wraparound services. Haydee and her children are glad to have a safe space to live while they get back on their feet. They’ve been set up in one of HomeFront’s adjoining rooms to allow Haydee and all four of her kids, pictured below, to have a space to call their own. This rooming versatility is important, Sarah Steward, CEO of HomeFront acknowledges, so that they can best support families of all sizes.

Culturally diverse care and economic opportunity boosts health for everyone. 

Building health across the city includes creating long-term economic opportunities and pathways for people to give back to their community in a meaningful way, across cultures and demographics.

Uzo Achebe is a  first-generation Nigerian American who grew up with four siblings on the outskirts of Trenton in East Windsor. She recalls times as a kid stopping by her father’s internal medical practice and grabbing a pizza slice from the shop next door. Walking down Olden Avenue, she passes familiar beauty shops and a diverse slew of locally owned Dominican, Puerto Rican, and more recently, Haitian restaurants. 

“They’re still there and [the owners] still remember me, my mother’s name, and my dad’s practice,” Achebe laughs. “It lets me know that people care a lot in this community.”

Trenton is surrounded by farmland, and a large portion of her dad’s patients were farmers. Many of them would gift the family with their fresh strawberries or other produce as a thank you.

“His work went beyond just clinical, robotic care, you know…he touched his patients in a way that they actually thought of him outside of those 15-minute appointments,” recalled Achebe. Seeing the compassion and heart her father brought to his work is what pushed her to become a full-spectrum doula and birth justice advocate, to intern with the United Nations Population Fund, and eventually find her way back to deliver care back where her roots were planted–the heart of Trenton.

Achebe is now 26 years old and works as the Safer Childbirth Cities Coordinator at Children’s Home Society of New Jersey (CHSofNJ). Her goal at the clinic, alongside its greater Trenton partners, is to close the gap in access to maternal health care. A typical 15-minute prenatal visit can't possibly cover all of the barriers to healthy babies and families, including food insecurity, housing issues, and mental health concerns. Events held by the clinic work to address some of those barriers. They host baby showers, highlight the important role of fathers, and offer pre- and post-natal care, alongside support for families that have lost loved ones to violence.

“We step in to ensure that even after that visit, you have a support system surrounding your pregnancy,” says Achebe, who carries pictures of the most recent babies born to Nigerian women she met at CHSofNJ. With the support of Capital Health and the clinic, she was able to throw them both baby showers. 

“I think it was beautiful seeing another Black woman–another Nigerian–happy for the services that are provided,” Achebe says. The mom wrote Achebe a note after she had given birth to her now one-year-old, saying that although she had no idea what she was signing up for, she is so happy that something like this clinic exists. Without it, she “would have had no idea where to turn.” 

The Children’s Home Society also connects families with providers at Capital Health so that patients’ midwives and doulas can collaborate with medical staff for better integrated care. This relationship also allows the clinic to connect hospital patients with lifesaving resources and supports, creating a two-way partnership that fills in any gaps. Maritza Raimundi-Petroski is now the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, Prevention Programs, and Community Engagement at CHSofNJ, but she was first introduced to the organization as a patient. For the past 24 years, she has worked her way up from recipient of care, to caretaker, and now leader. In her position, she hires and involves others with lived experience to make the organization more inclusive, more holistic in its thinking, and more responsive to the many needs of Trenton’s diverse community.

“We invite residents who have been clients to be part of our parent advisory boards,” she says, adding that their “family success centers on having a voice.”

Like Raimundi-Petroski, Silvia Corado was pregnant and spoke little English when she arrived in the U.S. in 2002 to join her husband who had secured a job as a home cleaner in Trenton. Corado found herself trying to navigate the medical system alone while her husband worked long hours. Twenty-six years later, Corado is a Community Doula Supervisor at CHSofNJ where she co-founded a program to support postpartum care for mothers.

Corado’s journey as a community caretaker began two decades ago when she went to Capital Health’s hospital for pregnancy care. The support she received there was transformative and she still refers to the healthcare worker she met that day as her “angel” for connecting her to the CHSofNJ’s Cultivando una Nueva Alianza (CUNA) program for Spanish-speaking pregnant women. 

“There was only my husband–nobody else," Corado says with a smile, her voice soft as she remembers those early days. “And you find these people who give you the opportunity to [access] all these resources and have information in your language.” Corado was so moved and buoyed by the program’s support that she started volunteering there after she gave birth and kept doing so until she was offered a job. She eventually graduated as part of the organization’s first cohort of trained doulas.

As her children have grown, her impact and that of the CUNA program on improving maternal health in the community has had a ripple effect on other communities–so much so that the CUNA program is now working to be replicated in Puerto Rico. The program is currently part of a retrospective five-year study on maternal and child health outcomes led by Brown University. 

Corado’s story is just one of many examples of how those who’ve experienced the benefits of the clinic are now the ones designing and leading the programs. This model is equally beneficial for the individuals and the community. The women involved find long-term economic opportunities and a way to belong and contribute back to their community. The community and the organizations, in turn, benefit from the wisdom and expertise of people closest to the heart of their mission, ensuring that the programs and systems they design speak to what people need.

Trenton is a place where change is possible because its roots are strong and fed by love and compassion. So many people in the city are nurturing that vision of a healthier future together–because they know what it looks like when compassion and lived experience guide policy and resource decisions. They know what happens when your community truly cares for you and your future, no matter what language you speak or the color of your skin. They know everyone has something to contribute. And they know that the seeds they’ve planted, together, will yield a better future for the next generation.

From food and employment, to housing, safety, and care for families and children, Trenton organizations are working hard to fill the gaps that exist, collaborating with each other to identify missing pieces, and building solutions to eliminate them. These gaps did not emerge overnight–they were created by generations of disinvestment, economic blight, and lack of opportunity. But the people in the community are creating new pathways, new opportunities, and new ways of caring for each other so that Trenton becomes a place where all can thrive.

Written by Jess DiPierro Obert and Naomi Ranz-Schleifer. Photography by Kriston Jae Bethel.