This year’s recipient of the Peacemaker Award was longtime villager Joan Chappelle. Upon accepting the award from MLK Day Planning Committee Chair Linda Cox, Chappelle spoke briefly, thanking both the committee for the award and Dr. Ron Wyatt for speaking about the inequities that Black and Brown Americans often experience in receiving healthcare. (Photo by Matt Minde)
Villager Joan Chappelle honored with MLK Peacemaker Award
- Published: January 31, 2025
Though the march through Yellow Springs that typically launches the beginning of the local celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day was canceled due to extreme cold, a warm gathering of several hundred local residents in the John Bryan Center gym Monday, Jan. 20, marked the importance of the day.
The theme of this year’s MLK Day celebration was “Stepping Up for Freedom 365” — a call to remember and mirror King’s dedication to promoting justice and equality through daily effort. The theme was reflected in a dance from Coretta Scott King Center Director Dr. Queen Meccasia Zabriskie, music from the World House Choir and essays and poems written and shared by students from Mills Lawn Elementary and McKinney Middle schools. (The News plans to publish these works in its pages over the next several issues.)
Dr. Ron Wyatt served as this year’s focus speaker for the celebration. Wyatt, a medical doctor who has specialized in health equity, gave a wide-ranging talk that gave intimate glimpses into the life and work of Coretta Scott King, with whom he grew up in Highbury, Alabama.
In particular, Wyatt touched on what he called Scott King’s “distrust” of the American healthcare system, in which he acknowledged there are economic and racial disparities. When he told Scott King he was headed to medical school, she warned him off of that path — but he stuck to it, noting a need to create greater equity within the healthcare system. He currently serves as a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement as the president of Achieving Health Equity, LLC.
Dr. Ron Wyatt, has specialized in health equity, gave a wide-ranging talk that gave intimate glimpses into the life and work of Coretta Scott King, with whom he grew up in Highbury, Alabama. (Photo by Matt Minde)
“The primary driver of U.S. healthcare is nothing more than greed,” he said. “Another root case for the outcomes that we see in our work is racism. … At the root of it is white supremacy — what we call whiteness. So part of my work is to undo that whiteness that, in the U.S. healthcare system, kills people — it makes Black and Brown people invisible, and it makes us sacrificial.”
Wyatt also acknowledged that Jan. 20 marked the inauguration of President Trump and called forth the words of musician Gil Scott Heron, saying: “It’s winter in America.” He ended his remarks, however, on a note of hope — and offered encouragement for those present to keep “stepping up for freedom.”
“We have to be hopeful — but hope is not a plan. ‘Some’ is not a number, and ‘soon’ is not a time. We have to be impatiently optimistic, not complacently optimistic, and certainly not pessimistic,” he said. “So I’ll ask you to commit to doing the heart work for equity, equality, fairness and justice, and underneath that — you’ve got to love each other. You can’t change the world unless you love each other.”
Peacemaker Award
This year’s recipient of the Peacemaker Award was longtime villager Joan Chappelle. Upon accepting the award from MLK Day Planning Committee Chair Linda Cox, Chappelle spoke briefly, thanking both the committee for the award and Dr. Ron Wyatt for speaking about the inequities that Black and Brown Americans often experience in receiving healthcare.
“Thank you for talking about equity in the healthcare system,” Chappelle said. “The one I work in, mental health, there is not equity, but inequity, and I hope that will change someday.”
Chappelle is known in the village for her efforts as both an advocate for social justice and as a mental health counselor — but it was a different focus that brought her to Yellow Springs.
In an interview with the News last week, Chappelle said she was an athlete throughout her secondary school career, competing in team sports including volleyball, badminton, field hockey, soccer and lacrosse. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts in 1961, and the same year, joined the faculty of Antioch College as a physical education and dance instructor.
“The requirement [at Antioch College] at the time was five classes in PE or health,” Chappelle said. “It was a required part of the curriculum, and the staff at the Curl Gym — there were eight of us — were teaching around the clock.”
During the six years that Chappelle taught at Antioch, she also served as an academic advisor — a part of her work, she said, that led to her eventual career in counseling.
“[Students] would come to their advisors and want help with everyday problems,” she said. “They were so beyond me and my experience that I started taking psych courses.”
The celebration included music from the World House Choir and hip hop artist Tronee Threat and dance from Coretta Scott King Center Director Queen Meccasia Zabriskie (shown here). (Photo by Matt Minde)
While still working at Antioch, Chappelle pursued her master’s degree in counseling at the then-newly opened branch campus of Miami and The Ohio State universities — now Wright State University. After earning her master’s degree, she undertook a three-year post-graduate program at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland — an institution that focuses on a holistic approach to mental health and awareness.
“You don’t just look at a person’s mood, you look at the whole person, integrated in their environment,” Chappelle said. “Your relationships, your work, your sleep habits — the whole person. You don’t look through a narrow lens.”
Apart from its helpfulness in therapeutic work, Chappelle said the “whole person” approach is a good one for interacting with and caring for others in general. It’s an approach, she said, that reflects her upbringing in a Finnish community in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Her parents and grandparents were active in immigrant outreach work and labor unions, and she described both her home and community as having an “appreciation for inclusion.”
“Every other neighborhood was a different European culture, and we grew up knowing their culture — their food, their dance, their music,” she said. “Though there wasn’t an African American component in our hometown, the idea was that there’s respect for every culture.”
The ideas of respect and inclusion, she said, set her up well for the social justice work that she would undertake in the 1960s and beyond, including helping to organize “Take Back the Night” marches — events intended to bring visibility to the ongoing prevalence of violence against women. She also worked at the state level to help establish the first domestic violence shelters in Ohio.
Locally, she was involved with anti-racism activist organization Help Us Make a Nation, or H.U.M.A.N., which was co-founded in the 1970s by her husband, the late Bill Chappelle, with Jim Dunn and Glynna Garrett. Chappelle said that, as a white person working with H.U.M.A.N., she tended to “step back,” deferring to the leadership of Black Yellow Springers.
Hundreds of local residents gathered in the John Bryan Community Center, Monday, Jan. 20. (Photo by Matt Minde)
“I’d be the person who put up the chairs at a meeting, who brought the snacks, who mediated when necessary — supporting all the time, but not taking a leadership role,” she said.
And, she added, she would work with other white people on “deconstructing their whiteness” — which she said often began by asking, “When did you first learn you were white?”
“That question gets into how you have privilege, power and agency, and how someone else doesn’t — and you learn that very early,” she said. “How do you use your whiteness, and is there any way you can use it constructively?”
Chappelle has also had a long involvement with the local Human Relations Commission, or HRC — a commission of Village Council that was established in the 1960s, and aims to “work to eliminate prejudice and discrimination within the Village against any individual or group because of race, religion, nationality, heritage, gender, age, physical disability, sexual orientation or economic class,” according to the Village of Yellow Springs website.
Chappelle joined the HRC in the 1980s, she said, when there were “issues of discrimination” with regard to both housing and hiring, allegations of racial profiling within the police department and accessibility concerns for those with mobility limitations within the village.
“We worked with the police; the chief at the time was John Grote, who came to our meetings and listened and did something about it,” she said. “[The HRC] served a big purpose back then.”
Outside of addressing prejudice and discrimination, the HRC has held a broad interest in “building community,” Chappelle said, and sponsored events and workshops on mental health and youth leadership, as well as community potluck events and block parties. A need for mediation between community members spawned a “second branch” of the HRC, she said — the Village Mediation Program.
Chappelle continues to work with various community organizations around town, including The 365 Project and the Who’s Hungry? soup kitchen, as well as volunteering weekly with kindergarten students at Mills Lawn. She said she’s increasingly interested in, and concerned by, the “education gap” that can appear between students, depending on various socioeconomic barriers. It’s another avenue, she said, in which she considers the “whole person.”
“With these 5-year-olds, the kid who, for example, didn’t get to sleep until midnight acts differently the next day than the kid who got to bed at eight,” she said. “That child who has lost sleep because there wasn’t a bedroom or a closed door or darkness, or they were out in the living room on the couch — gee, it’s no wonder that some have a harder time reading than others.”
It’s the whole-person view — a “wide-angle lens,” she said — that she believes is the best approach to peacemaking.
“People are unique in their own ways, and it’s important to support that uniqueness,” she said. “From a worldview, it’s about supporting the celebrations of the Haitian people in Springfield or sending help and support to Gaza — but on an individual level, maybe it’s helping a 5-year-old come to know that hitting is not the solution.”
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