A French City Embraces Public Health—and Dr. Bob
In early July, as a brutal heatwave blanketed France, Robert “Dr. Bob” Fullilove, Columbia Mailman School Associate Dean for Community and Minority Affairs, was invited to meet with Agnès Bourgeais, the mayor of Rezé, a municipality outside Nantes, in the western part of that country. Their meeting, which touched on climate change and other topics in public health and urban policy, set the stage for future collaborations between the Rezé and the School.
“I had the honor of hosting Robert Fullilove, a great American figure in public health, a professor at Columbia University, and a companion in the fight for Martin Luther King’s civil rights. With him, we talked about prevention, mental health, social justice, and what political choices have very concrete effects on the lives of residents,” the mayor wrote on Facebook (translated from the original French).
Fullilove has forged public health connections in France dating back more than 30 years. In the 1990s, he and his then-partner, Mindy Fullilove, a Columbia-trained psychiatrist, teamed up with the celebrated French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart to investigate the impact of the urban built environment on the social fabric and health of communities. Since then, in Nantes, Robert Fullilove has facilitated summer internships—known as Applied Practice Experiences (APEx)—for Columbia Mailman students to gain hands-on public health experience there.
At the recent meeting in Rezé, Fullilove shared his personal and professional history, starting with his participation in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer voter drives and internship with Martin Luther King’s organization. A member of the Columbia Mailman faculty, he has long facilitated links between the School and the surrounding community in Northern Manhattan and worked to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities. Earlier this year, he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Bard College, in part for his work as senior advisor for public health programs at the Bard Prison Initiative, through which he has taught public health courses in six New York State Prisons since 2010.
Fullilove also told the group about the French origins of his last name. Fullilove was originally rendered Plein D’Amour (translation: full of love) until it was anglicized following the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th Century. Subsequent generations of Fulliloves left England for North America, where they enslaved African people from whom Robert Fullilove is descended.
At the meeting were Mayor Bourgeais, who also serves as Second Vice President of Nantes Métropole, responsible for housing and health, and her cabinet—among others, including Xavier Cantal-Dubar, son of Michel Cantal-Dupart and current municipal councilor whose portfolio includes urban policy, territorial cohesion, history, and memory. The group takes a progressive approach to urban policymaking, espousing a kinship with the political orientation and goals of New York City Mayor Zohran Mandami. As public health goals undergird Bourgeais’s policy choices, the mayor is interested, among many other potential areas of engagement, in measuring how well they are hitting their mark. To that end, Fullilove has designs to create APEx opportunities for Columbia Mailman students to conduct program evaluations beginning as soon as next summer.
Because the gathering took place during a string of 100-degree days in a country where air conditioning is rare, it wasn’t surprising that the conversation turned to climate change and protective measures implemented in response. Fullilove observed: “There was a visceral feeling imparted from that extreme heat that we’re all in this together, and we have to build support for a set of urban policies that start by protecting vulnerable members of a society while also finding ways to lift up the possibilities of a better collective future.”
