Instant Recess: Building a Fit Nation 10 Minutes at a Time by Toni Yancey MD MPH

Author:Toni Yancey, MD, MPH [Yancey, Toni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-520-94721-4
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Real Gatekeepers

I know one group of people who could seriously make it happen, and whose role in health promotion has been grossly underappreciated, namely, journalists. Everybody’s on board with working to understand the culture of the target population, and public health people are starting to zero in on the cultures of business and politics to understand what drives the decisions of these gatekeepers and influencers. But only a few public health investigators—Matt Kreuter at Washington University in St. Louis being a notable exception—and even fewer public health practitioners are talking about journalists and their culture—motivation, drivers, constraints, and the like.

So I’m throwing in my lot with the journalists! Shari Roan and that ′94 Los Angeles Times article about our pilot study taught me a thing or two about reach and exposure, about what makes something memorable, and about what cuts through the crowded, sometimes oppressive information environment and seems fresh and inviting and motivating and inspiring.

I’ve benefited tremendously from their creativity over the years. For example, Gordon Hickey, a writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch who covered local government when I was there, was an alum of the venerable Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Could he ever turn a phrase! The excerpt below is from his July 14, 1996, article introducing me to the city, titled “Dressing, Dribbling and Now Directing.” In one fell swoop, Gordon’s flattering portrayal conveyed a ringing endorsement from a very popular and high-profile city manager, laid out my agenda for my tenure there, burnished my academic credentials for Richmond’s white elite, communicated my values and perspective and grounded them in black culture, linked me to a sports phenom in a place where high school football matters, touted my deep family ties to the region, and most critically, distanced me from California. The city manager and the police chief had also been recruited from California, which many non-Northern Virginians view as one step up from the seventh ring of hell—in no small part because they feel people in the Northeast and on the West Coast look down on them as hicks and underestimate their intelligence. (Gordon also wrote the “Richmond Mayor Rocks World of Physical Fitness” article shown in fig. 10 in the previous chapter.)

Antronette K. Yancey is a mile-a-minute rhyming dynamo with a medical degree and a mean jump shot.

She’s a 6-foot-3-inch former basketball player, former international model, current physician and current writer who’s coming to Richmond to be director of the city’s Department of Health….

Yancey “possesses outstanding qualifications as well as the enormous energy, enthusiasm and vision necessary for success,” Bobb said.…

Yancey, 38, starts … officially on September 1. But she was in town recently to accept the position, buy a house and get the lay of the land.

During an interview in City Hall, she said she likes what she’s found.

“I have roots here,” she said. Though she was born and raised in Kansas City, Kan., her father was reared in Louisa County. Her 80-year-old aunt, Rebecca Thurston, still lives on the property there….

“A number of things have happened that sort of directed me to Richmond,” she said.

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