32 minute read
BLACK WOMEN ROC
YOU ARE ENOUGH. TIFFANY PORTER
BY NICOLE HEROUX WILLIAMS I PHOTOS BY NSP STUDIO BY ALLISON GRACE HARPER I PHOTOS BY ALLISON MCDONALD
Advertisement
TIFFANY PORTER AND HER QUEST FOR RADICAL HONESTY
Described as “a tremendous leader, willing to grow and learn,” by one of her nominees, Tiffany is a powerhouse at the intersection of the All Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA and the disabled peoples’ rights movements. “People don’t know that when they look at me that I am disabled. I flair up for days and sometimes I can’t get up. I physically can’t. Other days I feel like I could run a mile.” Tiffany was diagnosed with fibromyalgia when she was pregnant with her first son, and has been dealing with it since. Despite the pain, Tiffany kicked it into overdrive this last year, amplifying Black voices and building anti-racist culture in the suburbs around Rochester.
She’s been changing the discourse, for underrepresented groups, but the work she’s been doing has not been without backlash. People and hate groups have been angry enough to send her death threats and post her address online. “It’s disgusting. I’ve been getting attacked regularly. My youngest son has really bad anxiety, he says he’s afraid I’m going to die so I had to get a camera for my doorbell. It’s dangerous.” Despite the personal risks, Tiffany has been calling out racism where she sees it, calling in allies, holding food, clothing and bike drives, and hosting events, panels and organizing protests. She focuses on mutual aid, food sovereignty, antiracist curriculum, and she advocates for mandatory anti-racist training at all levels of government, education and public facing positions. “She has been a bright light during a very dark year for so many,” said one nominee. “She is an unapologetic Black woman’s voice that is so needed in the suburbs.”
A little over a year ago, her activism shifted into full throttle.
“My tipping point was when George Floyd was murdered. My boys were the first who told me about it because my older two are on social media, and they got it on their Snapchat. We were watching the video together and crying. My youngest son kept asking me ‘Mom, why is he holding his knee on his neck like that? Mom? Why?’ and he had tears coming down his eyes.”
Tiffany didn’t have an answer.
“They looked completely depleted, they looked soulless, like someone had taken the light from their souls, and all I could see in that video was my brother or sons on that ground. I thought, ‘If I don’t do something, this is going to hit closer to home.’ People don’t care until it happens to them. It’s someone else’s issue, and it will never happen to them, but it can. It will.” Tiffany believes that empathy can be a powerful call to action. “When something shitty happens to someone else, just imagine that it happened to you, and ask yourself what you would need to make yourself whole or closer to whole again.” For Tiffany, that was activism. She started engaging in conversations in Fairport groups, but was censured and muted. “I tried to talk about the realness of structural anti-blackness in other groups, and they would delete my posts and tell me that the topic of race was too political. How is my Black life political?” She decided to create her own groups, founding Being Black in the Burbs and co-founding the Fairport Coalition for Justice and Equity.
“I created these groups so I could focus on anti-blackness and focus on education and anything the hell I wanted to and also so I could organize protests.” Organizing
is Tiffany’s happy place and a calling. “I needed to protest, hit the pavement, and just do more. I knew it was not good for my soul to be sitting here, so I started protesting. And I’m thinking all these folks came from their suburban homes, me being one of them too, and we went and protested in Rochester, and came back to our suburban homes where it was peaceful and euphoric. I realized we need to be agents of change where we live too. That’s what Being Black in the Burbs is about, building anti-racist communities in the suburbs.” Tiffany’s work creating mutual aid programs is in part inspired by the community she grew up in.
“I grew up in the apartment complex in Perinton Pines. We had a community of mutual aid before the concept even existed. In that apartment complex we were our own, because we all had something in common which was poverty. We looked out for each other. My mom liked to feed whoever needed a meal, and if you liked her food she would cook you more. We grew up with a lot of kids who were mixed, so sometimes their parents didn’t know how to do their hair. Before holidays, my mom would stay up until two and three in the morning doing hair.”
Many of Tiffany’s friends were first generation immigrants. “In my friend group I was the minority, because I didn’t have an accent. My childhood friends, who I am still friends with to this day are Lao, Indian, Vietnamese, and Russian. We stood up for each other in school and out of school. Some of us had it harder than others, but we were our own little community. If somebody didn’t have money to go to the local pool, or the amusement park, we would figure out a way to get their money up. So it was those kinds of interactions, taking care of each other that inspires me and pushes me. It’s that kind of community that I want for everyone.” It’s a community model of care that she believes could be scaled up to any city and even globally with enough awareness and intention.
“I love my community. My community inspires me. I can point out the flaws and try to fix it and still love my community. That’s what people need to understand. People say I am trying to throw Fairport under the bus, but that’s not it at all. We all have flaws, nobody is perfect, but we need to get honest about what we can work on.”
When people say they can’t imagine a society without police, Tiffany can help put that idea in context. “I say ‘Look at the suburbs now. They are only there for traffic. It’s not over policed.’ The suburbs are a model of how well a community can thrive when people have their needs met. All of the high crime areas are over policed and the crime rates are still rising, so the police are not deterring any of the crime, they are inflaming it. If community members have their basic needs met, crimes will drop, and there would be no need for policing.
People are in survival mode, and they need to survive. It may not be right, but you can’t judge the things people do to survive. My apartment complex in the Pines did not have that survival instinct kick in, because we took care of each other. If we put resources into community programs that focus on meeting the basic needs of its citizens, crimes will fall.”
It’s not just Rochester that can benefit from a collective embrace, but the world. Lately, Tiffany has been listening to Angela Davis’s books on tape, “She is my hero,” says Tiffany. Davis’s philosophies have helped inform Tiffany’s perspective on how destructive racism can be for all people of all races who exist in the lower socioeconomic brackets. She believes racism only benefits the rich and that this and other social constructs only serve to divide the working class and ensure the wealthy continue to hold onto power.
“I think the middle class right now is being wiped. It’s just going to be the poor and rich. We can’t even address that because there’s so much racism. And it’s intentional and it’s to keep us divided, because if the poor alone were on the same page, we would have all the power to make movements and changes. But that’s the thing, can we get over racism? That’s what my journey is right now.”
APPROACHING RACISM AS AN INTERSECTIONAL, GLOBAL ISSUE
Similar to racism, Tiffany believes homophobia is a construct rooted in white supremacy and introduced through Christianity to control and divide people. “Black people have
“Black people have to be on the same page and not be homophobic, and not transphobic. We have to unlearn the parts of Black culture that are rooted in white supremacy. It took me 37 years to come out and say ‘I’m queer,’ and I’m 38. This is my first pride being openly queer. I never put any boundaries on love. Last week, my cousin told me if I got married, she wouldn’t come to my wedding.
I have to take a look at people telling me I’m going to go to hell for choosing to be myself. The most violent wars we’ve ever had were religious wars started by Christians and Catholics, killing people in the name of God. I can’t subscribe to that. I still believe in a higher power, but my God is not male. I find it funny that women are the ones that can produce, but a man made the woman? And you’re taught in Black culture never to question God, so I’m gonna question y’all then,” she says laughing.
“The issues that we have here in America, whether with homelessness, ableism, racism, homophobia; Angela Davis sees these as worldly issues. It’s happening in Palestine, it’s happening in Africa, it’s happening in China. Exploitation and oppression are global, so we need for this movement to be international. We have to make those connections and bring them there. People need to start thinking globally about our movements. The bigger we can get it, the more we can make out of it.”
Tiffany’s hope for ending racism and building supportive community structures is anchored in the future. “People aren’t born racist. I think the only way to end racism is by raising our kids better than the generation before them. That’s why I focus on education and getting the message to kids to be anti-racists. They have the power to eradicate this themselves. They don’t have the mindset of their parents, grandparents and so on and so on. I’ve got to focus on this next generation because if we don’t, racism will always curse us.”
WE MUST LEARN TO HOW TO BE RADICALLY INCLUSIVE
The one thing that scares Tiffany is the pushback teachers are seeing to exclude Black Americans from American history, cutting out mentions of slavery, civil rights, Jim Crow, redlining, the KKK and racism (to the minimal extent in which they are even mentioned). The idea that teaching all of American history, about all Americans is somehow not patriotic feels like a dangerous path to go down. “The school board debate about removing Critical Race Theory (CRT) curriculum scares me. When you are messing with my kids, and you’re messing with other folks’ kids, you are messing with the future.”
To underscore the importance of addressing racism not just in textbooks, but in our school hallways, Tiffany organized an event where several Black students who came through the Fairport school system spoke about their experiences to the school board. “They talked about the aggressions they experienced on a yearly basis from kindergarten all the way through graduation, and I was the oldest sitting at that table at 37. The video is here on our Being Black in the Burbs Facebook group page. The superintendent was in tears by the end and was shocked. She didn’t have any idea what these kids experienced every day in their school system. They wanted to speak, but it is traumatizing to have to give your lived experience of racism. That was the only event I’ve done like this, and it will probably be the only one, because I don’t like triggering folks. We had tears on that stage. Folks telling about how horrible it was, how little they felt.”
“One of the things that parents keep saying in PTA meetings is ‘My kids don’t want to learn about racism.’ I think about all those kids at that event, and how I’ve been experiencing racism in this place since I was 5 years old. If we are living it, the least your kids can do is learn about it. They can learn not to be racist. I get a lot of feedback from hate groups out there that say, ‘You’re trying to radicalize our kids and make them little activists!’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I want these kids to learn how to be radically honest, radically inclusive, and radically loving. Yes, that’s the one thing you got right.’”
You can find Being Black in the Burbs or the Fairport Coalition for Justice and Equity on Facebook. Join Tiffany in her fight for the future. Support Tiffany’s work today by making a donation:
Venmo: @Beingblack-InTheburbs Cashapp: $Beingblackintheburbs PayPal: PayPal.me/beingblackintheburbs
YOU ARE ENOUGH. TARA BANKS
BY NICOLE HEROUX WILLIAMS I PHOTOS BY NSP STUDIO BY ALLISON GRACE HARPER I PHOTOS BY ALLISON MCDONALD
TARA BANKS: IF YOU PUSH, I WILL PULL
Tara’s nephew was killed by Rochester police the day before our interview. Her eyes are swollen, but she showed up. Tara always shows up. She has been showing up for 20 years, since the day she decided to do this work. She tells me “I really hope you can pull this story out of me.”
Tara believes that a simple human connection can be powerful enough to change lives.
She is Director of Programs at Compeer Rochester. Compeer takes a nonclinical approach to behavioral and mental health, prioritizing relationships and coping skills over diagnosis labels and pharmaceuticals. Compeer combats the loneliness and isolation people with mental health challenges can feel by matching individuals with volunteers who can provide supportive relationships.
“The biggest obstacle to mental wellness for the Black community is trust. There have been so many disappointments and stigmas put onto the Black community that people have found ways to self medicate and cope. Even if they know there are other options, they don’t access those resources because of the history of being let down. I work to build that trust by spreading the word through love and positivity. We look at people as people, not patients.” Having a friend on the other side of a difficult situation can make all the difference. “When I think about the community reaction to the 9 year old little girl who was maced by police, I think about what that would have looked like if she had a volunteer she could connect with, a volunteer she could call, a volunteer that could take
her away, or that teach her coping skills and tools to de-escalate.” Tara’s journey to the heart of human services and the human connection began in her childhood where there were no volunteers to connect with her, or take her away.
EMPOWERING COMMUNITY
“At one point in my life I felt hopeless. I grew up on the Northeast side on Berlin street in 14621. It was a nice community, but then the community changed. It became more violent. It became divided. As a little girl, I started to see the changes. I began to deal with direct tragedies in my family and in my life, and in my friends’ lives and witnessed some of the tragedies. I was put in foster care after my mom was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was 11 years old. My father was absent because he had challenges with behavioral health. I grew up in foster care and started to look at my residential counselors and social workers. I saw the work that they did and the efforts that they put into me and the other youth that were struggling. I appreciated it. I grew up around a Whitney
Houston song, ‘Greatest Love of
All’ that talked about children being the future, and I said to myself,
‘Children are the future’. That song conditioned me to believe in myself.”
“When I graduated, I knew I wanted to pour into the community and be a trailblazer for people like me; people who were impacted by the oppression and trauma in the Rochester community. I wanted to get to work immediately. There were things I had picked up from my own experiences, like navigating the social service and social security systems. I knew I could help those who struggled to access resources. Rochester is a very resource rich community, but the resources are hard to navigate if you don’t know where to look, or how to advocate for
yourself. Once I realized I had that skill set, I wanted to empower other people to access services. I realized along my journey of being a teen mother that once I got my associates degree, it would be challenging to get further education. I wanted to see how far I could go without hitting a ceiling.”
“The day I turned 19, I called the Hillside Family of Agencies. I had been placed at the Hillside Children’s Center as a child, and they promised me that when I grew up, they’d give me a job. I called them every day until they finally said, ‘Alright, we’ll give you Friday, Saturday, and Sunday overnights. It’s a crappy shift, but if you want it, we’ll give you your start.’” Tara has since become a leader in human services and as one nominee puts it, has “shown successful leadership to agencies like Center for Youth, Willow, HCR Care Management and Monroe County,” and of course Compeer where she is today.
ALWAYS BELIEVE IN YOURSELF, EVEN WHEN OTHERS DON’T
Tara made the decision to believe in herself when others didn’t. “I try to be careful not to let negativity rent space in my head. As a Black woman, I have definitely struggled with bias. I had a white woman tell me I was a horrible public speaker, that I would never be a leader, and that I would never have the opportunity to train because my tone was too deep, and I talked with my hands.” Despite the double paneled glass ceiling that Black women face, Tara kicked her way through. best tools I have. Solving problems has led me into my leadership roles. I was housing domestic violence survivors from homelessness, housing young teen moms with homelessness. I was providing skill building.”
Tara has prioritized the needs of her community over pursuing the more traditional decorations of leadership with continuing education. One nominee points this out, “When asked if Tara was going to continue her education, she decided that there was too much work to be done in the community and that she wanted to devote her life to being hands on, actively supporting people that had similar struggles to her own. She is self taught and barely gets recognized for all of her sacrifices and accomplishments.” Tara wasn’t sure if her lack of higher level degrees would stop her trajectory, but realized it’s given people the chance to see her. “It has been an opportunity for people to believe in me; people like my current director Sara Passamonte who gave me my first admin role. I appreciate her so much for that because I knew that I could do the work.”
Tara wants to see a battalion of Black women doing this work beside her.
“I’m a big advocate for Black lives, and Black women trying to break that glass ceiling. I want it shattered.” When asked to speculate what a future beyond white supremacy could look like, Tara sees a place where people can stand shoulder to shoulder. where everyone has access to resources. When I say resources, I mean equity. There would be appreciation of diversity and people would be inclusive with each other. In the future, I would want people to have more opportunities for job placement, professional development and more opportunity for independence. I would want everyone be able to have a life that’s worthwhile, where people are able to afford to take their family on vacation, to be off the system and independent and not having to worry about where your next meal is coming from, where you’re going to stay at, if your son is going to get killed – that type of unity, peace of mind unity. Unity and a healthy relationship between the people privileged to have the opportunities of leadership in our county and state, and the people they represent.”
WE MUST HAVE COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS
The loss of her nephew has plunged Tara back to the days before she was supporting the mental health of the community, to the days of being a person at the receiving end of the impact of violence. “I look through the lens of a person who has poured her life into supporting the community through their pain and trauma. I have been trained in trauma informed therapy, solution focused and patient centered care, in compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma, and the list goes on and on, but when I am directly affected by someone in my own family who was killed by the police, I start to look through a different lens. What does this lens look like? I find myself asking,
‘Is there compassion? Is there empathy? Are there people who understand the trauma that I’m facing? I just want more of that, and more people in these fields. I want the officials in power that are responsible for the livelihood of others to really pull their boots up and say ‘I’m going to get there with you. I’m going to come with you. I’m going to grab your hands and take you to a safe place, a place where people can thrive.’ The question becomes how can we ever find equity when we have been oppressed for so long?”
Tara, ever the solutionbased thinker, finds her own answer. “I think we have to believe that there is hope. We have to believe that if you push, people will pull. We have to trust in the process that we will get to where we’ve got to go. We are all human, no one person is better than another. It takes courage to keep going. I understand. That’s why I am here today. I am so hurt right now but I like to think about what Lenora ReidRose from CCSI says. She says it’s important to have courageous conversations.”
I ask Tara if there was something that she needed to hear when she plowed ahead in her life and tossed the detractors aside. “Be wild. Be fearless and understand that there is opportunity and when you come across someone like myself, I am going to see you and try to open doors. I have to believe that there are a multitude of individuals fighting this fight alongside me in their own special mentors so that we can match kiddos who have challenges with people who look like them. Although we are an international agency, our Rochester chapter is a small non-profit with limited resources. Right now we really have a wait list of young African American males. By default our young Black kiddos that are diagnosed with mental wellness issues are not being matched because we do not have enough Black bodies here to match them with someone who is relational. Go to www. compeerrochester.org to learn more or come to our office at 295 Monroe Ave.
Need Help? Compeer takes referrals through service providers, therapists, case managers, and social workers. If you are challenged with a kiddo who could use the opportunity to connect with a volunteer, to go out and have a good time and work through their feelings, connect with Compeer.
way and that one day we will get there together.”
CALL TO ACTION
I need to get the word out that our Black community needs mentors. We need
YOU ARE ENOUGH. SHAMICKA JOSEPH
BY NICOLE HEROUX WILLIAMS I PHOTOS BY NSP STUDIO BY ALLISON GRACE HARPER I PHOTOS BY ALLISON MCDONALD
Shamicka was the first born child in her family, and as is usual for the oldest, she didn’t get to be little very long. “I didn’t have the best childhood. It wasn’t a fairytale or even standard of what you would want it to be. I grew up faster than I had to. I was the oldest child of 4 at the time, so I took that lead. I’ve always been mature and not easily influenced. I knew what I wanted life to be like.”
FAITH THAT IT’S GOING TO WORK OUT
In school and in life Shamicka always tried to walk the high road. “I wasn’t the best ‘A’ student, but I was always a good student, and I always did the right thing.” Her self-driven determination surprised even her own mother, who still remarks in disbelief, “Oh my God. You were such a good teenager.” Shamicka’s grandmother was a North Star in her childhood. “My grandmother was a minister, so she taught me about God and faith and prayer, and that belief gave me an outlet when everything was not great.” Today Shamicka still calls on these tools when things feel rough.
“Even when nothing feels right, I have faith that it’s going to work out. My faith keeps me from getting stuck in a bad space.”
Shamicka also realizes how much her teachers at Edison Tech influenced her path. “I didn’t know it at the time, but they impacted my decisions and they still low-key impact me today. That’s why I fell in love with Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection as a youth advocate. I felt like I was doing what those teachers had been doing for me. I was that extra adult in someone else’s life.”
At Hillside, Shamicka was able to plug in. “It was natural. I worked in the city
with students that went to The City School District, and with students who went to the Greece Central School District. It was very normal to me. I could connect with the children because I remembered that person in me, or I had seen that person before in a friend. I was able to dive into that and be very present. It was simple.”
MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT IS PERSONAL
When Shamicka accepted a position at East House to mentor and support people on their mental health journey, her breakthrough moment came later. “One of the questions they asked me when interviewing for the position was how I related to mental health and illness. I didn’t think that I really could relate.” It was all around Shamicka’s world, but at first she didn’t see it for what it was, or how it impacted her. “One of my close cousins struggled with mental illness. We all knew that he struggled from time to time, but it wasn’t a full-blown crisis. It was, ‘Oh he’s acting up again. Alright, someone go help him.’” Usually her family could get to him in time, until the one time they couldn’t.
“In that moment, he was killed by the police. It was a tragedy and it was in the news. My thought was, ‘What if he received the help that he needed? What if he was really getting the services that could help him?’ His outcome would have been so different.”
Shamicka sees many people who struggle with mental challenges, but fly under the radar and are afraid to get help. “The spectrum of mental illness is so wide that you would never know. We have clients that live in communities right next door to anyone, clients who flourish, who have families, who are parents raising their children, or who are in school and working.” Once she started seeing
TARA
its proliferation, she couldn’t unsee it. “East House made that connection for me and opened the door to that world. They helped me realize how close I am to mental wellness. I understand how much it really does mean to me. It is personal.”
ACCOMPLISHMENTS LOOK DIFFERENT WHEN WORKING WITH MENTAL HEALTH
You don’t get to a finish line with mental health where it’s over. You can manage it, and work at it, but it doesn’t disappear. “With mental illness, it is never ending. Someone can always go into crisis at any moment. Even though you work professionally during the nine to five hours, it’s just not a nine to five job. You’re talking about people, and life happens after hours.” One nominee admires how collected Shamicka is when dealing with patients in crisis.
“People may forget your name, but they will never forget how you made them feel. The work Shamicka does is not easy. It can take nerves of steel to help clients recoup from a crisis in real time.”
Working at East House has changed her definition of success. “Yes, you have some people who are not doing well at all, who are in the hospital regularly, but you have some people who are doing great and living healthy productive lives all around us in the community. Being able to impact those outcomes is rewarding to me.
How I defined rewarding work when I was working with youth was different. You didn’t see it right away, but you knew what you poured into the youth would come back 10 fold, and I did see that. I’m getting older so a lot of the youth I worked with are now adults and are parents and run their own businesses and graduated college, or in the workforce, and we are still connected. That rewarding part looks different with mental health. It can be more immediate.
When you’re working with mental health, success for some clients can be taking a shower that day, and that’s amazing. ” After years at both Hillside and East House, Shamicka has been able to identify where the gaps and synergies are in these organizations. She has reimagined a more powerful way to address human services that works out of a single community-centered source.
CHANGING THE SYSTEM TO MEET THE ENTIRE SPECTRUM OF NEED
“There really is something needed right in the middle to blend these organizations. There’s value in something that can tie services together and provide an entire spectrum of community support.” Shamicka envisions a central organization that could work as a catch-all operating under one roof.
“Once you get the people in, you would be able to identify their needs and offer different services. You would have people from different professional backgrounds that do the footwork, mentors, life coaches, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. You have to have the whole gamut because it’s all needed. There are so many different collaborations that have to happen for individuals. Having someone that you feel comfortable meeting with regularly is important. It might not look like you go into a building and sit on a couch, but maybe someone would feel more comfortable coming to a therapeutic session at a coffee shop.”
“It’s about removing the stigma and changing the definition of what health looks like.”
The amazing thing about Shamicka is that she is able to identify each person’s comfort level and meet them where they’re at. One nominee points to Shamicka’s super power as “supporting others and nurturing the light within all people.” However, they way our systems are set up, many people fall through the cracks.
“Right now, a youth could be struggling and need mental health support, and people may not recognize the behavior for what it is. They might also be the child of a parent who is struggling with mental health support, but no one is recognizing it, and so the opportunity for support is completely missed. If you’re serving youth and it is recognized that something is going on just from the story they are sharing about what’s happening at home, you should be able to act and offer services and resources directly and immediately to the family.”
If you are at a facility that does not offer services or resources for the issues parents may be going through, then intervening when you see red flags can be ineffective if you have nothing to offer but referrals to other places. It can also be a deterrent to have to recount traumatic situations
our program, and you don’t have to tell your story to another person,’ this would remove a barrier.” There is of course also the obstacle of insurance that treat healthcare as a billable privilege instead of a universal human right. “In a perfect world everyone could afford health care, they would not think twice about going to the doctor because they wouldn’t have to make a choice between their wellness and the electric bill.”
BALANCE AND BOUNDARIES ARE IMPORTANT
Human services can be as draining as it can be rewarding for empathic people. Some people take harbor in Shamicka’s energy. One nominee says, “In a world of chaos, Shamicka is the calm, the hope, the sprinkle of optimism that everything will be ok.” Shamicka is able to maintain this energy by setting boundaries around her time.
“I do maintain a life of balance. I love working for people, so I pour 100% into it. I also love my family. I told myself I cannot pour everything into this and not pour into my husband and my children and my siblings. I still want to be everything for everyone, and every day you just can’t do that.”
While you won’t catch Shamicka saying “No” outright, she will say, “Not today” or “This is not the time.” I try to be mindful and allow myself moments where I cannot and let that be ok. I allow myself a mental health day to not go into work, or work a half day. I allow myself the ability to tell my family, ‘I’m not cooking today. We’re going to order out.’ I give myself that moment to say ‘I’m going into my mommy cave and I’ll see you guys in an hour.’ Trying to be everything all the time will get you burned out.”
When you ask Shamicka about something in her life that is just for her, that she loves just for the sake of loving it, she will tell you ‘travel.’ “If someone presents an opportunity to go somewhere, I’m going to make it happen. I allow myself this moment where I can check out, but I do recognize once you check back in, everything else is still happening. I give myself that breathing moment still. I tell my husband all the time ‘We still have to live.’ We have to enjoy life because if you just work work work work work, it’s going to pass you by. I can’t believe my husband and I are 40.”
“Life is going to continue to happen, days are going to continue to come, and if you don’t take the moment to smell the roses, you are going to regret it.”
ENVISIONING A FUTURE OF YOUTH EMPOWERMENT AND LEADERSHIP
Shamicka has been thinking about the future lately and about revisiting a passion project she started when her daughter was seven. “There was a period of time when my daughter struggled with knowing her beauty. She went to school in Greece in classrooms with predominantly white students. She loved modeling clothes, so I started to put her in little shows, not pageantry, just little modeling shows and she began to flourish. I decided I wanted to do something centered around that. I created a program called Renee’s Journie. etiquette classes, public speaking, and modeling training to prepare for shows and headshots. It was designed to help build confidence and self esteem in young girls who struggled the way my daughter did. I’d love to get back into that, but I promise you every time I started back into it, I ended up pregnant,” says Shamicka laughing. “Through some medical advances, that will not happen again,” she says. “It may be something I venture back into.”
Shamicka is also looking to join different community boards to magnify her impact. “Higher levels of leadership interest me. I went through the African American Leadership Development Program with United Way and I aspire to go through Leadership Rochester next, but it’s costly. I know I can have an impact working one on one with people, however I know that I can do even more if I’m sitting at a table weighing in on the decisions where the dollars go and how they are spent.”
She believes funding needs to be used to empower people and that investing correctly in communities can have a much larger ripple than what the monetary value of something can actually buy. She feels positive about the future of mental health for the Black community. “It’s been my experience that we (Black folks) don’t go to psychologists or psychiatrists. We kind of lean on our faith a little more. Right now we are in a time and a space where mental health is so out in the open and in the news. Everyone sees it. People are realizing that it’s normal, that it’s ok to seek help. Things are happening now.”
