CINCINNATI — The Lord’s Gym STORM bus makes regular stops in East Price Hill, offering lost souls a ride to redemption.
At the wheel is Lynn Woods, chaplain in charge of the nonprofit’s Street Outreach Ministry, or STORM. He brings food and encouragement to women struggling with addiction, sex trafficking and domestic violence.
“This is a newer house that I haven’t really been to yet,” Woods said, as he circled blocks near the Lord’s Gym headquarters on Warsaw Ave. “Word on the street is that there’s a lot of girls staying here. We continue to just show up for them and encourage them to take that step into freedom.”
Riding with Woods is Olivia Messer, a Lord’s Gym volunteer who left a life on the streets and is now trying to convince others to do the same.
“Those moments of clarity for someone in addiction are very few and far between. So, when it is there, it’s important that we grasp it,” Messer said. “That window of opportunity can be there for an hour and then it’s gone for another year.”
‘Subtracting life years out of neighborhoods’
The urgency of this work is underscored by new data from the Cincinnati Health Department. It shows East Price Hill led all Cincinnati neighborhoods in years of life lost to drug overdoses between 2020 and 2022.
East Price Hill had 56 overdose deaths that robbed the neighborhood of 758 “excess years of potential life lost.” That’s an estimate, derived by a complicated formula that compares the age of overdose victims when they died to the city’s overall life expectancy rate of 75.3 years.
Applying that formula to 38 different causes of death, health department data crunchers found that all Cincinnati neighborhoods lost a combined 26,052 years of life over three years.
Nearly half of that damage came from four kinds of death: Overdose, homicide, heart disease and infant mortality.
More than a third of the losses happened in five neighborhoods: East Price Hill, Westwood, Avondale, Roselawn and the West End.
“What we’re hoping is that people will look at this data and be able to see the things that are subtracting life years out of neighborhoods,” said Dr. Grant Mussman, Cincinnati’s Health Commissioner.
Mussman shared the new data exclusively with the WCPO 9 I-Team because he hopes it will spark a new kind of public health conversation in Cincinnati, one that focuses money and attention on game-changing innovations.
“These are the types of problems where you have to be not only very involved at the granular level, but you also need a broader understanding of what’s going on in a neighborhood,” said Mussman, a pediatrician who joined the health department in 2019 and rose to its top leadership position in 2022.
“We think we can use this data to make a compelling case as to why we should focus in certain areas,” he said. The goal is to “find where those gaps are and expand services that need expanding.”
Cincinnati’s approach is unusual and worth watching, said Dr. Marc Gourevitch, a life-expectancy data expert who leads the national City Health Dashboard project.
“Measuring life expectancy is important but it doesn’t always translate into action,” said Gourevitch, chairman of the population health department at New York University’s Langone Health Center. “What’s novel here is focusing the data right at the neighborhood level.”
U.S. life expectancy reached its peak of 78.9 in 2014 before tumbling to 76.4 after the pandemic. Other wealthy countries spend far less on health care but maintained life expectancy rates above 80 years since 2004, according to an October report by the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.
“In the scientific literature, you’ll see there’s lots of things that are contributing to cutting life short,” Gourevitch said. “But it becomes paralyzing because you can’t do everything at once everywhere.”
That’s why Gourevitch is intrigued by Cincinnati’s focus on neighborhoods, allowing targeted investments that are easier to manage and fund.
“I think it holds a lot of promise,” Gourevitch said.
Searching for solutions
The I-Team spent several months investigating what the numbers mean for East Price Hill, a 1,400-acre neighborhood that boomed in the late 1800s when the Price Hill Incline made it accessible to workers who wanted to flee the crowds and pollution of the downtown basin.
Its 2020 population of 15,241 was about 5% of the city's total. But its excess years of life lost from all causes of death is 2,813. That's nearly 11% of the city's total.
The neighborhood includes Mt. Echo Park, the Incline Entertainment District and the Warsaw Ave Business District, where Lord’s Gym Ministries has operated since 2016. It’s among dozens of organizations trying to make a difference in East Price Hill by operating food pantries, providing job training and education, connecting residents with welfare benefits and promoting wellness.
The I-Team invited 77 organizations to participate in a survey about their work in East Price Hill. The 12 who responded said they have a combined 179 employees and 2,650 volunteers that serve East Price Hill and its neighbors to the east and west, Lower Price Hill and West Price Hill. Collectively, these groups brought home ownership opportunities to nearly 100 families, led 56,000 hours of music instruction, taught 83 people how to work in the printing industry and helped hundreds of Central American families find food and clothing.
What do they need to be more effective? More money and better collaboration were the two biggest answers we got from survey respondents. Among the specific ideas mentioned: A “harm reduction vending machine” to distribute syringes and Narcan, a “robust street outreach program” for teens and an effort to “force institutional investors to be good partners” in neighborhood development.
Mussman was surprised by the number of activists already engaged in East Price Hill. But he adds it would be “a mistake to say that we’re already doing all we can do. I’m sure these organizations, as they pointed out, they need more money and more volunteers. That doesn’t sound to me like they don’t see the need for more to be done in this area.”
‘We work with the most broken people’
Drilling down on the survey results, the I-Team spent several days with the staff and volunteers of Lord’s Gym Ministries, the local operating arm of a nonprofit known as FOCAS, or the Foundation of Compassionate American Samaritans. It was founded by former GE Aviation executive Richard Taylor in 1986 as a Christian nonprofit, working in Haiti. It established Lord’s Gym in Over the Rhine in 1993, then relocated to Covington and East Price Hill when the streets around Washington Park were redeveloped.
“The people were being displaced from Over the Rhine into different neighborhoods,” said Executive Director Scott Bowers. “We followed them.”
Bowers is a former human-resources executive who believes in the Lord’s Gym vision statement: “To see transformed lives reproducing transformed lives that change cultures and communities for the glory of God.” The effort relies on peer-to-peer counseling, in which recovering addicts learn the gospel to change their own lives and inspire such change for others.
When he arrived in East Price Hill, Bowers found a community hit hard by the foreclosure crisis of 2008 and the opioid epidemic that began with the abuse of prescription drugs in the early 2000s and continues today with illicitly manufactured fentanyl products from Mexico.
“When we first got here, we had a couple of lockdowns because right outside our doors there was a gun battle going on,” Bowers said. “My understanding (is) a lot of those violent exchanges, are gang-related, territorial disputes, revenge shootings.”
Lord’s Gym countered that turmoil with a robust outreach program that served 1,250 adults in 2023 and works with about 90 children a week in after-school and sports programs. It partners with Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Freestore Foodbank to feed clients, or “friends,” as they’re known at Lord’s Gym. Those it can’t help are referred to food and clothing providers nearby. It also offers meeting space to 10 organizations that provide mental health and substance abuse counseling.
As a result of those efforts in 2023, Lord’s Gym referred 52 people to detox, but lost eight to drug-related deaths. That’s the highest number of deaths in the last three years.
“We work with the most broken people in Price Hill,” said Danny Gomez, director of the family activity center at Lord’s Gym. “I’ll be honest. There’s a lot of days when I say, ‘What am I doing wrong? Why don’t I see changes?’ Every day is a struggle.”
Gomez believes outcomes would improve with more feet on the streets.
“If we had more people that really engaged, not only with adults but also kids, male people, that would be awesome,” he said. “That’s something that we’re lacking so much in our sports programs.”
Others think a more clinical approach is needed.
“We’ve seen our friends repeatedly (saying) ‘I want to go get help.’ And they go. But there is something that is triggering them, something they cannot let go,” said Valerie Perez, a community liaison employee for Lord’s Gym. “We don’t have the capacity – the counselors, the therapists, the social workers in these facilities helping our friends deal with these deep-rooted traumas. That mental illness and that substance abuse disorder is not just going to go away.”
Can data analysis solve the problem?
Cincinnati’s Health Commissioner thinks East Price Hill would be a great place to use the department’s new data resource.
“What we really want to see is to find those places where those disparities are narrowing, and then take a really hard look at those community-based interventions and say, ‘Hey, what are folks doing here?’” Mussman said. “Five years from now, I would love it if we had an apparatus to be able to dive that deep into the data.”
The Hamilton County Addiction Response Coalition offers one way the city’s data could be used. In October 2021, the coalition began working with Cincinnati police to identify 14 people who collectively made up almost 25% of overdose runs in District 3. By visiting those individuals weekly and continuously offering treatment options, the coalition achieved a 20% reduction in emergency room runs from people who overdosed in the 45205 zip code, which includes East Price Hill.
The health department’s data shows the coalition also had an impact on overdose deaths. Between 2020 and 2022, East Price Hill averaged one overdose death every 10 days. But after the coalition began its work, the neighborhood saw two long stretches with zero overdoses. One lasted 66 days, another ran for 133 days.
“At the end of 2022, the project was clicking,” said Tom Synan, founder of the coalition and police chief of Newtown. Excited by the city’s research, Synan asked whether it could be expanded to the entire county.
“We can use this data to customize the response based on the community and their needs as part of an overall plan to reduce overdoses and overdose deaths,” Synan said.
Mussman is seeking funds to expand and upgrade Cincinnati’s data capabilities. He wants to get better tools and use them to analyze trends and provide more frequent updates. Mussman also hopes to establish funding relationships with foundations and health care organizations to foster a kind of startup community for public health improvements in Cincinnati.
“If you have lots of folks who are doing this work independently with their own ideas and maybe to their own ends, then I think you can get a lot of innovation,” he said. “We want this data to contribute to that ecosystem. If it’s successful and we can really show where change is happening, then I think it could snowball. It could become a driver.”
That can’t happen fast enough for Balenda Wright. One year ago, she was living on the streets of East Price Hill, having overdosed dozens of times herself. She lost custody of her children and watched friends die from their addiction.
“When you overdose, it’s like you don’t really want to die,” Wright said. “But then a part of you gets mad because you’re awake again, because you feel like you’re sentenced to another day of life.”
After being rescued by the Lord’s Gym STORM bus, Wright is nine months sober. She hopes to re-unite with her children and sees a bright future ahead.
“It’s just so much peace,” she said. “And it’s just filled with Jesus. He’s there and he loves me and it just shows me that I can do whatever I put my mind to. And the sky’s the limit.”
