Four Years After Cleveland Was Ranked the Worst City for Black Women, Survey Reveals Continuing Adversity

In 2020, Bloomberg CityLab published a report that dubbed Cleveland the “worst place in America” for Black women to live based on a wide range of livability metrics including income, educational and health outcomes.

In response, Enlightened Solutions, a Cleveland-based non-profit research and advocacy firm, initiated Project Noir to collect and analyze the lived experiences of Black women in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. To see how accurate the study was. To find first-hand accounts of what life was like. To collect ideas for how to improve.

Four years later, Project Noir 2024's survey has revealed that Black women have seen no progress in treatment within areas of healthcare, education and the workplace.

“[It] highlights that the systemic challenges Black women face cannot be addressed in isolation,” says Bethany Studenic, the co-founder and managing director of Enlightened Solutions.

Between February and April 2024, Enlightened Solutions distributed the Project Noir 2024 survey to more 1,300 Black women from rural, suburban and areas in Northeast Ohio – including Cleveland, Lorain, Youngstown and Akron. The response rate from Project Noir 2024 nearly tripled from its 2020 response rate, with 85% participation this year.

In healthcare, a main theme found in the survey was that Black women frequently encounter apathy and dismissive attitudes from healthcare professionals, impacting their trust in the healthcare system and overall health outcomes.

The survey shows that 56% of respondents say they’ve been spoken down to about their health or symptoms, with 55% of respondents saying they have felt uncomfortable with a healthcare provider and 35% of respondents saying healthcare providers have at times refused to provide treatment.

“[Enlightened Solutions] are putting words to paper for Black women,” says Dána Langford, co-founder of Village of Healing, a predominantly Black healthcare center in Northeast Ohio. “They were validating my experience [being in a] predominantly white healthcare system as a patient, as a caregiver and as a worker in the system.”

A key theme for Black women and girls in education was isolation, with 63% of respondents feeling that they needed to work harder to get the same grades as their peers, while 54% said they felt excluded or were excluded from partaking in advanced educational opportunities and 53% of respondents reporting that their grades did not reflect the quality of their work.

In the workplace, 77% or respondents felt that they had been micromanaged and felt that their work had been unfairly critiqued, with 72% of respondents being subjected to comments and debates about racism, sexism or other issues. 50% of respondent say they have had their work destroyed, sabotaged or interfered with by their co-workers, management or other work peers.

“A coworker and I both applied for the same promotion. He told two colleagues that if I got the job, it must be because I was performing sexual favors for leadership. I reported it to leadership and HR, had the witnesses come forward, but they took no action against him,” said an anonymous Project Noir 2024 participant.

As a result of Project Noir 2024 final report, Enlightened Solutions has implemented a call-to-action plan to provide elected officials, stakeholders, community members and media recommendations on immediate actions and strategies that can be used to ensure and advocate for Black women’s voices to create change.

“My mission here in Northeast Ohio is to continue advocating and advancing racial and gender justice here in Cleveland through data and backed research,” says Chinenye Nkemere, co-founder and director of strategy of Enlightened Solutions. “While there is much discussion nationwide about Project 2025, we need to be talking about Project Noir 2024 here. Black women have long been the pillars in their communities. We are leaders, we are matriarchs, we are experts in our own experiences, but we are still confronted with systemic racism and misogyny that impacts our success, that impacts our mental health and our well being.”

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