Come Together
Speaking to a large audience at the University of Richmond on Jan. 30, Jepson School leader-in-residence Dr. Danny TK Avula recalled a Wednesday night in March 2020 when he got a call he had been dreading. Canterbury, a long-term care facility in western Henrico County, Virginia, had just confirmed its first case of COVID-19.
“Our staff was on site the next day to try to contain the virus,” said Avula, who at the time was director of the Richmond and Henrico Health Departments. But at this early stage in the pandemic, the virus was not well understood. Canterbury soon became the site of one of the nation’s deadliest nursing home outbreaks.
“It was an unthinkable trauma for nursing home staff, residents, and their families,” Avula said with emotion. Soon, social distancing became a primary strategy for preventing the spread of COVID. But this approach was not without drawbacks.
“Extreme measures for social distancing led to the epidemic of social distancing,” he said. And this is the epidemic he addressed in his Jepson public presentation, “Healing Our Social Distance: Community as Remedy to Polarization.”
Each year, the Jepson School of Leadership Studies invites a local, state, or national leader to meet with students and give a public talk as its leader-in-residence. Last semester, Avula, a pediatric hospitalist, led a lunch-time discussion with students on public health vs. clinical practice.
As a public health physician, Avula has considerable experience working with diverse populations. He led Virginia’s COVID-19 vaccination effort in 2021, helping the commonwealth become one of the top 10 most-vaccinated states in the country.
To achieve this level of success, he said he worked with his team to understand the history of trauma and betrayal behind some communities’ resistance to vaccination efforts. And then he leveraged trusted voices within those communities to encourage people to get immunized.
“My team started calling me Brown Fauci, which got contracted to Brauci,” joked Avula, the son of Indian immigrants.
Since February 2022, he has served as commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services, the agency charged with promoting the well-being of children and families statewide. Once again, he cited the healing potential of community as critical to the agency’s work of stabilizing Virginia families.
Twenty years ago, the doctor and his family found their own community when they moved into Church Hill, an East End Richmond neighborhood that was predominantly low-income and African American at the time. “Making the choice to be part of a community that is formed across differences has changed my life,” he said.
The leader-in-residence offered three prescriptions for fostering communities to combat the social distance and polarization plaguing America today. First, he encouraged reliance on legitimate news sources, not social media, to access factual content rather than content designed to divide.
Second, he suggested intentionally seeking out and getting to know individuals from different backgrounds. And third, he advocated approaching interactions with others with empathy and understanding.
Avula concluded his public talk on a positive note: “Hope is not found in building coalitions of sameness. There’s something sacred about encountering the humanity of the other that allows us to tap into the universal reality that our thriving is bound up in the thriving of all others… This diverse community makes us more human.”