Hello, I'm with Marcus Owens the
executive director
of the African American Leadership Forum.
Marcus, welcome to this present moment.
It's a delight to have you here. Can you tell us
about how these times are impacting the
African American community, and what
you're seeing.
Yeah, so a few things have happened since
COVID has started. So right away one of
the first things that we identified was
the need for information to be presented
to the community in a
cultural specific way.
There was a lot of misinformation around
this disease or this virus and what it
would do to our community
and how we protect ourselves. So we
created a virtual town hall called We Good?
which is a euphemism in the community to
check on each other to make sure that
we're all right. And we have the
information that we need.
What we really want to do is bring in
the health experts from our community to say
hey this is what's really happening with
COVID, how it's impacting us
health-wise, but then we start to bring
in other community leaders
in education and economics and health
and wellness to just talk about
the other impacts of COVID
in the community. So that's the first
thing that we've done. And we see that as
something that we're going to continue
on. The second thing that we really focus on
is the economic impact.
And we brought together black-led and
serving organizations that support
businesses within
the state of Minnesota. They're really
working on how do businesses open safely
through this this period of COVID and
they came up with the concept of
creating a PPE, or personal protective equipment
marketplace this is a collective buying
agreement across these organizations
that would then buy these supplies
so that they can provide
it to the businesses at little to no cost tied to that.
They're also looking at how do we
look at the mentors, the business mentors,
in our community and bring them so
we can create one-on-one mentorships
with the businesses in our community.
And then lastly,
how do we build awareness of these
businesses and tell the consumers and
the customers across the the state that
they're safe to come back to.
Because what we're seeing right now is
people are very wary about
coming back to these businesses.
What kind of creative solutions are you
implementing that have helped you
connect even more broadly with the community?
What we've really been focusing on the
last two years is taking that 1,500
people that are in our network and
saying okay how do you want to contribute?
It's not just enough to show up to an
event or be a part of a mailing list,
but it's saying well how do you want to
contribute to the community? And we say
we call them Network Contributors and
we say you can give your time your
talent or your treasure, right. 
And when you tell us how you want
to contribute now we can find more specific ways for
you to get involved. So our thought
leaders came together in
a task force and their job is to identify
problems in a human-centered design
approach we call it Black Center Design
and from that, they come up with a problem
statement, then they identify who in the
community is already working on that
problem to solve for it.
And then we go out and reach out to them
and say well how how are you approaching
this right now? What do you need?
And from there we created a project plan
that we launched back in January.
Then we brought the rest of the network
in to create work streams in the areas
of economics, education, health and
wellness
and family culture. We've got some
fantastic projects that create
a directory of community healers for the
city of Minneapolis, and then across the
region, actually. Where it says
you can come to this place here's a hub
and you can find cultural practitioners
that are culturally specific and trauma
informed. The other project is saying
around education. How do we think about
cultural specific ways to provide curriculum and
then work with teachers in other
institutions that are training teachers
to be more culturally relevant to our students. And then
economics. It's all really around
this is. What I'm really excited about is
how do we start to create a self-determined model
to provide funding resources to build
a community that is very specific and
owned and led by African Americans. That's one thing
that's missing in our region right now.
Is a place that we can call home so that
then we can actually fulfill what we
see our purposes as a community so that
then we can participate in the rest of the region.
In the midst of the murder of George
Floyd,
we've also had a need to bring the
community together to heal.
What are some of the examples of the way
you and your partners and your
leadership cohort have been doing?
You know, this kind of reminds me at the
beginning of the year I wrote on my
my whiteboard you know this one
quote that says, "To bear trials with a calm mind
robs misfortune of its strength and
burden." So right now it's all about the
mind. How do we calm ourselves, and how do we
heal ourselves through this dramatic moment?
We said okay let's create spaces both
virtually and in-person
so people can have spiritual healing.
they can have physical healing, and they
can have mental healing.
And we've see 90 days of this right now where it's just
let's not talk about strategies, let's
talk about healing each other right now
and working through what we're feeling.
With that you know we've done virtual
therapy sessions. We've done physical
activities on fitness Fridays,
which has been fantastic working with
some of the cultural practitioners
within the community to just say,
"Hey, I can do this just give me the space for it."
which has really been helpful because we
see ourselves as a hub and a portal.
So it's just figuring out who are the
leaders, and how do we empower
them to do what they do best.
I just love the way it embraces all of the issues,
and all of the capacities of the
community. So you've done
an incredible job of working with people
who are self-identified leaders.
People who the community points to and
says these are the leaders, they're doing
it. But you also help grow the next
generation of leaders.
Can you tell me more about the Josie Johnson Leadership Program?
Yeah so we're in our sixth year of the
Josie Johnson Leadership Academy.
And this is a program that has evolved
over time. Now we have 95
leaders in our network that are alumni
of it, and this year we have 18 fellows
that are cross-generational they're
cross-sector and they have such a rich experience of
what they're bringing right now and this
academy is really about saying
how do we invest in the leadership of our community?
How do we say these are the emerging
leaders whether they're emerging because
they're young or emerging because they
found a new way to lead in community.
And how do we invest in them through
professional development so they all
have coaches, professional coaches that are helping
them with personal development? How do we
connect them to leaders within our
communities so we have torch bearers
that have you know been well established
and have been doing work for a long period of time?
And then how do we start to help them
understand the connections across our
community? To say this is the history of our
community. We bring them on
what we call community excursions where
they learn the history and they learn
about the different work that's already
happening. And then we put them to work afterward
for the next six months.
We say, now that we've invested in you we
need you to do some work for the community.
Practice what you've been learning over
these past six months
and then apply it in a real way so now
you can lead the rest of the community.
And they connect to that task force that
I mentioned before
where now they're going to work to build
a workstream of projects that
really move our community forward.
In all of your work, you seem to
take the expected and the unexpected
leader and the programs and
opportunities that are already
existing in community. Weave them together
to make it a stronger fabric that just will endure
with even more resilience than before.
That's right, it's really about community.
I mean, there's not one leader we have to get
out of this idea that there's a
monolithic leader that will move us
forward. If you look back at the days of the
Civil Rights Movement where you had
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and
many others that were prominent leaders
that you saw and you heard from.
There were so many other people around
them that
led and did things that were behind the
scenes even that
really moved that movement forward. And
we have to see ourselves in this moment
right now to say everybody has a role to play and our
role with the forum is to say
how do we create lanes and spaces so
people can fill them, but then also invest in them so
that they see themselves in that
leadership and they can start to weave
that fabric together as you mentioned
because then we're a lot stronger and
you can't just take out one person.
It's about a collective people that
are coming together to do something
right for themselves. But then for the greater whole.
Thank you. Thank you for all you do.
Can you tell people who are watching today
how they can support you your work in your community?
Yes, so come to our website you can see
all the wonderful things. You can even
see the events that we're doing
now and in the past.
Come there, visit us on Facebook as well.
Marcus Owens, thank you for joining me in
this present moment.
Thank you for all the work you do for our community.
MARCUS: Thank you.
