Breaking the cycle: A team of UB students and faculty have forged a partnership with Buffalo’s Seneca-Babcock neighborhood to improve residents’ health

BUFFALO, N.Y. – One day last year, a man walked into the Seneca-Babcock Community Association center in Buffalo and said he needed help. His family had no food. He had untreated diabetes and cancer, and his daughter needed vaccines so she could enroll in school.

A team of University at Buffalo student volunteers and faculty member Jessica Kruger sprang into action. They set the man and his family up with items from the food pantry and brought him to the student-run Lighthouse Free Medical Clinic, where he received referrals for more advanced treatment. The man and his family have since moved to Canada, but he keeps in touch with Kruger because he was so grateful for the help she and her students provided.

“There’s probably one-hundred more stories like that, there’s just so many people who have been helped here,” says Brian Pilarski, the community association’s executive director.

Kruger, PhD, a clinical associate professor in the Department of Community Health and Health Behavior in UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions, forged a strong partnership between the community association and UB about five years ago, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, hundreds of UB students have assisted with bolstering the community association’s weekly food pantry while expanding access to free health services for residents in Seneca-Babcock, a Buffalo neighborhood that has a lot of unmet needs.

Students from all of UB’s health sciences schools now have a presence there, providing residents everything from oral health screenings by students in the School of Dental Medicine, to weekly videos created by students in the School of Public Health and Health Professions’ dietetics program on how to prepare healthy foods — videos that are now shared among other food pantries in the region — to specialist referrals from students in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

“The best aspect of this partnership is the relationship UB is making with the residents in the community, and that’s always key for us,” says Pilarski. “This is long term. This isn’t just a one and done. It is by far the best partnership our organization has ever had with any entity.”

Kruger’s partnership in Seneca-Babcock is exactly the kind of community-based work she hoped to do after completing her PhD.

“One of my advisers asked me if I really wanted to get a PhD because I was more of a boots on the ground person and they told me you can’t do the boots on the ground work once you have a PhD,” Kruger recalls, gleefully adding, “And I said, ‘Watch me.’ It’s an honor that I get to be in a community a day and a half each week between here and Lighthouse.”

Kruger and her team have been partnering with the Seneca-Babcock Community Association to host free school and sports physical days, which include a wellness fair where parents can bring their kids in to receive health information and screenings administered by UB student volunteers under the supervision of faculty. This year the school physical day will be on Sept. 6 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Beginning this fall, students from UB’s physical and occupational therapy programs will have a regular presence at the community center. They’ll be meeting with residents who come in to learn about their health and wellness needs; the PT’s will draft exercise plans for them and the OT students will engage others in healthy activities. It’s all being integrated directly into the PT students’ fall curriculum and is an existing part of the OT program.

In addition, the School of Dental Medicine’s mobile dental unit (S-Miles To Go) has been screening food pantry clients for oral health care needs and connecting patients to the dental school, and plans are in the works to provide more mental health services, which is a big need in the community, as well as tools to help people quit smoking.

Aug. 20 will be a particularly busy day. In the morning, 20 first-year UB students will help distribute some 400 backpacks filled with school supplies for area kids. Then, in the afternoon, Kruger and Pilarski will gather with UB leaders and local elected officials to celebrate the debut of UB’s Health on Wheels mobile van.

“We’re figuring out how to put the community into the classroom or bring the classroom into the community, which is an incredible experience for the students,” Kruger says of the team’s efforts in Seneca-Babcock.

That’s been the case for Andrew Levine, a Long Island native and student in UB’s MSW/MPH program, which combines the Master of Social Work and Master of Public Health degrees.

“We often see the same people each week and just knowing they’re safe for another week and they’re getting healthy food is very rewarding,” says Levine.

Kruger and Pilarski have a slew of ambitious plans to help meet the needs of the residents — all of it centers on helping people live longer, healthier lives.

“People die here at age 65 and many people think it’s normal because that’s what they often see,” Kruger says, adding that structural factors such as a lack of clean air and access to health services are often to blame. “People aren’t living their healthiest lives and it’s not their fault,” she says.

“We want to break that and say it’s not normal to see your neighbor die at 65,” Pilarski says.