This includes excerpts from Dr. Danny Avula’s recent interview with RVA Magazine’s Christian Detres. For the full interview, click here.
Here’s my conversation with Dr. Danny Avula, candidate for Mayor of Richmond VA. This completes the set of all my conversations with Richmond’s prospective Mayors for November 2024. One of these people is going to be leading the city next year. Who it’s going to be is ultimately up to us. I encourage you to compare and contrast them, but here’s a quick takeaway.
All of them like you. All of them are like you. The gas in their engines straddles a leader/servant complex that many don’t relate to personally. I couldn’t imagine anyone without that mission in their veins responding to the call of the office in the first place. The absolutely beautiful thing is, I truly believe their hearts are in the right place. No one here wants to strip you of any rights. All of them want you to be safe, served, and thriving. They don’t all have the exact same plan, but they’re definitely all on the same track. The consistency of sentiment in their goals builds confidence, the same way getting a second and third recurring opinion on car repairs undoes suspicion in your mechanic.
Like choosing a schoolyard basketball team though, you start with your ace. We’ve got a row of aces to pull from up our sleeves this year, but we only get to pick one. If there’s anything I’ve gotten out of this process, it’s the knowledge that we are rich in public servants willing to go to work for us. And if there’s anything they’ve learned, I’d like to think it’s that I will continue to follow up on their promises with hard questions and an expectation for results.
…and of course, the subject of this article, Danny Avula.
I have gone out of my way to rile up these cats on subjects that have no easy answers. I’ve tried not to accept deflections, pablum, pandering, and hopefully, where I can give it, maybe provide some insight on Richmond that’ll inform their journeys forward. Most of the time, they would be educating me – as it should be. This is no different today. I’m meeting the man who led the COVID mission in the state of Virginia. I found myself in conversation with a genial, sincere, and cool dude. His boothside manner (we were in a restaurant) was calm, confident, and patient with my ranting.
I was impressed with his magnanimity. He, no lie, actually edified my outlook on a few key issues intrinsic to being a journalist, and moreso, just an empathetic person – which I strive to be. Without further intro, meet the would-be physician for the city’s ills:
Christian Detres: We’re sitting here at Get Tight Lounge and we want to get to the bottom of who Dr. Danny Avula is. What do you want? Why are you taking this race on? What’s up?
DA: Well, who is Danny Avula? Hmmm, I am a husband and a dad. I’m a longtime resident of this city, I’ve been here for 20+ years. I have absolutely fallen in love with Richmond. I moved here back in 2000 to go to medical school at MCV. I was born in India. I grew up in California and then ended up in the DC area late in elementary school.
After graduating high school at 16, I went to UVA for undergrad and taught high school for a year after college – before medical school. I got a taste of Charlottesville, which is so different from the suburban lack of culture, lack of connectivity and experience of growing up in NOVA. When I came to Richmond for medical school. It was a bigger town than Charlottesville, which had its challenges and benefits. It was easy to find pathways to connect with people and to connect with communities. As a medical student, I was leading a bunch of health fairs and working with organizations on public housing. We were mobilizing med students to try to connect with the Richmond community. Towards the end of that time in my life, I just said, “You know what? I love the city. I’d love to be a part of where it’s going.” So we made the decision to stay.
CD: I would ask you what you did with your spare time if I didn’t understand that to be a joke for a med student. There is no spare time. What parts of Richmond’s culture or community felt like home?
DA: My first apartment was in the Fan. It was on the corner of Monument and Meadow. It was a very cool apartment. Living in the midst of the weight of the ‘history’ there while also spending all my time downtown at MCV serving a predominantly lower income African American community was just, jarring. All of this was happening in the same city. So much of my motivation in getting into medicine was wanting to serve communities, and wanting to connect with the patient population. We were leading a lot of health fairs in Chimborazo Park, in Creighton Court. I was living on both ends of the divide in the city. Ultimately, when we decided to stay for my residency, we ended up moving into North Church Hill and have been there since 2004.
My wife and I have raised five kids in the city. Our kids have all attended Richmond public schools. My wife actually teaches kindergarten at Chimborazo Elementary. Our life for the last 20 years has been about the city and about trying to help it move forward. Her through education, me through public health and human services.
I served as the Public Health Director here for a long time. So much of the work of public health is looking at why some communities are thriving and other communities are not. Particularly in the last decade, we’ve seen Richmond on this tremendous development arc. We’ve seen incredible growth in this city. There’s so much cool stuff happening. New housing, new amenities. But my lens as a public health doc was tuned to recognizing health disparities, right? I was having a personal crisis as a resident of the East End, living with lower income neighbors who were having a hard time and, in some cases, getting pushed out of the community. While Richmond was thriving, some communities were suffering. You started with the question, “Why am I doing this?” Yeah, that’s the crux of it. I want to be in a place where I can help shape Richmond’s future. We need to ride the momentum this city is experiencing, continue to drive development. But we need to do it in a way that ensures that the vulnerable and marginalized members of our community get to flourish as well– that everyone gets to benefit from that growth.
