The meeting was held to kick off discussions on how best to spend $1 million in new funding to address health and life expectancy gaps, and to craft a request for proposals. Only the morning portion was open to the press.

Boston’s Black male population experiences disproportionately high rates of preventable illness and premature death from screenable cancers, cardiometabolic diseases, and unintentional overdoses. These are also the leading drivers of early death citywide.

But for Black men, organizers say, those health threats are compounded by structural barriers: distrust of medical institutions, lack of culturally competent care, economic precarity, and neighborhoods that have long been under-resourced. Those issues result in Black men living, on average, 71.8 years compared to a city average of 82 years. According to data presented at the summit, they are also more likely to suffer from persistent sadness and isolation.

Between 2022 and 2024, Black women also had the lowest life expectancy compared to all other women, with an average of 80.1 years, about 6.4 years fewer than white women in Boston, who lived 86.5 years.

Ojikutu said the needs are urgent and stem from historically unequal practices.

“This is about racism causing chronic stress and leading to increased risk of chronic disease,” Ojikutu said. “It’s about racism leading to limited access to all of the resources that one needs to promote both their physical and their mental health throughout their lifespan.”

Wu said poor outcomes are the result of racist systems that the city’s Live Long and Well initiative is designed to address. She said the city was showing its commitment by “Convening every resource in our city to take meaningful steps so that every Boston resident has the opportunity to live longer.”

“We do not shy away from using the words that reflect the diversity of our community, the strength of our people, what it means to include everyone, and what it means to deliver outcomes that truly touch every part of our city in equitable ways,” Wu said. “And we’re going to highlight that data and keep talking about it, because it empowers us to set goals that we must reach.”

Groups held four breakout sessions as mini think tanks on a variety of challenges facing Black men, then shared their feedback as a group.

“I’m not naive, I know $1 million isn’t going to get us to the point where we can deal with all the upstream issues,” Ojikutu said. “It’s about community investment and interventions, specifically, how can we address the root causes?”

Dr. Kevin Simon, Boston’s first chief behavioral health officer, presented data showing that Black men report persistent sadness more than others in the city. The data led Simon and his colleagues to look at mental health-related emergency department visits, excluding substance abuse.

“Black men have nearly double the number of mental health ER visits compared to peers,” said Simon, adding that they then asked whether they would seek care from a mental health care professional. Black men were 15 percent less likely to seek care compared to white men in the city.

“This is really not about a lack of willingness to engage. Our systems are not designed to make it feel comfortable showing up as they are,” Simon said.

Nine years, he added, “is not just time.”

“This is nine birthdays, relationships, lives we shouldn’t ignore.”

The summit drew 100 attendees, including representatives of insurance companies and community health centers, the majority of whom served the city or state in an official capacity.

Joseph Bennett, founder of YardTime, a Boston-based organization that supports people returning from incarceration, said the recent conviction of his friend Tyler Brown in the Memorial Drive shooting highlights broader failures in mental health support.

“Mental health is a dangerous thing that nobody takes seriously until somebody’s in the middle of a street shooting,” said Bennett, who was wrongfully convicted and spent 22 years in prison before his release in 2019.

Bennett said community leaders with direct experience are too often left out of conversations about violence prevention and mental health. He criticized the gathering as insufficient outreach.

“We need to support people who are directly involved, not the people who read the textbooks,” said Bennett, from Mission Hill. “We’re rich in resources but poor in collaboration. I wasn’t even properly invited to this, even though I lead one of the largest Black men’s mental health groups in the city.”

Ideally, interventions would support community groups led by Black residents, Ojikutu told the Globe after the event.

Dr. Kiame Mahaniah, Massachusetts secretary of health and human services, said research into inequities is especially urgent now that tens of thousands of people in the state are expected to lose Medicaid coverage next year.

“At the federal level, there’s this aspiration to believe in conspiracies and falsehoods, which really weaken our ability to move the needle,” said Mahaniah.

He also echoed Simon’s comments about the need to address loneliness and social isolation.

“As we decide how we want to fight inequity in front of us, we have to remember to accompany each other and to draw strength from each other,” Mahaniah said.

Sarah Rahal can be reached at sarah.rahal@globe.com. Follow her on X @SarahRahal_ or Instagram @sarah.rahal.