Dr. Cheryl Jackson

Dr. Cheryl Jackson HOW HUNGRY ARE YOU TO SUCCEED?

Dr. Cheryl Jackson knows what it feels to be like to be hungry personally and professionally. After getting married at the age of seventeen and having two sons she experienced hunger trying to feed her own family and was declined food stamps. She managed to bounce back and secure work in the corporate world. She also became a red-carpet correspondent for Entertainment Tonight and other award shows. In 2014, life for Dr. Jackson would suddenly change. Her father died at the age of 58 years old. It was that moment that a different hunger pain kicked in. Jackson did her soul searching and after two years of major anxiety and depression, through her pain she found her purpose. Jackson was hungry to let the world know who her only living parent was, so she founded Minnie’s Food Pantry, an award-winning charity headquartered in Plano, Texas named after her mother, the late Dr. Minnie Hawthorne Ewing. With two cans of corns and only the first and last month’s rent, on April Fools Day Jackson began feeding the hungry. She was intentional about choosing that day because so many people thought that it was a joke. They laughed at Jackson and said that nobody was hungry in their community, but she knew that was wrong because she was once hungry herself.

Well you know? I remember being hungry, growing up with my mother on welfare in Milwaukee.

It was also important that Jackson removed the stigma of what the face of hunger looked like. She had to overcome the challenge that people believed anyone that was hungry should be grateful for anything they received. Jackson knew she had to do something different, she had to create an environment, so people didn’t feel like just a number when they came to get a healthy meal from Minnie’s. Jackson also decided to create a red-carpet experience for every family that comes to Minnie’s Food Pantry and that created a viral effect for her charity. Jackson also knew it would be difficult to change people’s mind, that only the homeless people needed food. In fact, after providing over seventeen million meals and counting the statics show that it’s the working class that needs assistance just to get them through the month. So, when she began her mission, she set her goals to work with and be mentored by on one of the most powerful voices in the world, the Oprah Winfrey. Speaking of April Fool’s Day, everyone laughed when Jackson told them that one day Oprah would speak her name.

She was hungry to meet Oprah and to have her become an ambassador for Minnie’s Food Pantry. In fact, years prior to starting Minnie’s Food Pantry, Jackson had her first encounter with Oprah, it’s those chance encounters and moments at events that would result in an amazing friendship between the two of them.

Minnie’s Food Pantry started out in a five hundred square foot building and has expanded years later into a 28,000 square foot state of the art facility complete with a learning lab and a place and space of hope for people in need of their next meal. Jackson’s journey has been rough. She was invited to sit at the table for meetings but was never given any utensils to eat with. They always gave her the scraps, but she kept going. For over nine years, her charity provided healthy meals and she remembers telling her mother that she wanted Oprah to use her voice and platform to shine the light on hunger. Her mother told it will happen and she encouraged her to just keep working and believing. Then tragedy struck, Jackson was in a board meeting when she received the call that her mother had a sudden heart attack. Her world as she knew it would never be the same. Her heart was shattered as she tried to put together the pieces of her life. Jackson remembers sitting on the bed crying and looking to the heavens. She wanted to give up and she begged God to give her a sign to let her know that she was supposed to continue this mission. The person for whom she honored and loved was gone. 30 WOW Magazine

Why should she keep going? It was in that very moment her phone sent her an alert, it was a message Oprah Winfrey offering her condolences and telling her she was going to donate $100,000 to the charity in her honor. Jackson remembers wiping her tears and saying I believe I’ll run on to see what the end is going to be. Getting to Oprah wasn’t easy though, Jackson was faced with more challenges. However, she survived the storms. Today Minnie’s Food Pantry is an award-winning organization with twelve locations that includes a learning lab to train and educate children in school and help adults to receive higher paying wages on their jobs. When Jackson finally received a call from Oprah she was able to share her successes and struggles and she firmly believes that people say “NO” because they don’t “KNOW” who you are or what you believe but Jackson was hungry and Oprah heard her voice and after 8 times of telling Jackson NO, Ms. Winfrey changed her answer to “YES” and was the keynote speaker for Minnie’s Food Pantry Gala in 2018 and here is part of the transcript from the event. Jackson says when she needs to be motivated, she simply plays that video of her teacher and friend, and she puts on the autographed shoes that Ms. Winfrey gave her and pulls out the purse Ms. Winfrey gave her, and she walks into a room HUNGRY to succeed. Her question is, how hungry are YOU? Finally after years of Dr. Jackson working and waiting , Ms. Oprah Gail Winfrey took the stage at Minnie’s Food Pantry’s 10th Annual Gala.

This is a portion of her speech.

This really is a miracle. It’s a miracle because I don’t leave home unless I must, or I want to; because I’ve earned the right to do exactly what I want to do. And that is what I wish for you and everyone in this room. That is what real freedom is about. I did a movie years ago called Beloved and there’s a line written by the esteem-able Toni Morrison that says, “freedom is waking up in the morning and deciding for yourself what to do with the day.” So, I get to decide because I’m a free woman. I get to decide what I want to do with my time, and where I want to put my energy and where I want to be used—because my consistent prayer since I was a little girl and I thought God and Santa Claus were kind of’ the same—they both were keeping a list and checking it twice—I have always had the prayer of “Use Me.” How can I be used?

I’ve been free a long time. Which means you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do—so you are free to say “no.” And I say “no” and I mean no. Except if it’s Cheryl Action Jackson. She doesn’t even know that Jesus is my brother. And Jesus told me the first 8 years to say NO. And the reason he told me to say no is because I know that it’s easy to call the person that you think has the money, and that can give you the help and hand-out, but what is important and what I’ve come to understand after interviewing over 37,584 people personally, is that it’s only the people, not the people that just have the dream but the people that know how to execute the dream. You can’t help someone who just has a dream, most people have dreams. It’s the people that know how to execute the dream and sustain the dream. So, for the first eight times I said NO. Why? Because I’m waiting to see what you’re going to do. I’m waiting to see whether the organization you’re creating can sustain itself. Often, you can be told no and keep getting up. This I know for sure.

People talk about power this and power that, but real power comes from building strength. And you don’t get strong unless you’re told no enough times to develop the strength. Strength is muscle. Strength x strength x strength x strength = power. So, when you have acquired the power of one, you’ve been told no enough time, you’ve been told its impossible enough times, you’ve been told you can’t enough times but you still say I will find a way—that’s somebody worth lifting. That is why I chose to be here tonight and said yes to Cheryl action Jackson because she’s earned it. It is no easy thing to start out as one then builds yourself to 16,000 volunteers. All the volunteers stand up right now. No easy thing to get people to see your vision, join and execute it. I paid to be here tonight. I paid for myself. I paid for my gas. I paid for my hotel. I paid for the room. I paid to be in the room, to be with you tonight, to support Cheryl and to support not just Minnie’s pantry but what it means to create a Minnie’s pantry. And to say to you that there’s a Minnie’s pantry in your own life. There’s a dream that you have in your own life that has yet to be fulfilled that requires the kind of determination, perseverance, will and strength x strength x strength that equals the power of one to get it done.

How many of you in this room have ever been hungry? Raise your hands high and proud. Thank you for that. I happen to live in a place so beautiful that every time I pass my front door, I sing a little mantra: “Jesus loves me, this I know.” Every single time I pass my door I sing it because I live in a place so amazingly beautiful that I know Jesus lives there too. And even though I paid for it and paid big money for it, I think of it as a gift. I never even want to leave it, so it takes real motivation to get me to leave the place where Jesus lives, ok? I don’t call it the Promised Land for nothing. It feels like that. I’ve been that blessed in my life.

So, I’m sitting this past Easter with a group of my girls from South Africa. I’m sitting with twenty-two girls that come from townships and villages of nothing. Nothing. So, I ask the question as we’re sitting around the table—“does anybody remember being hungry?.

I shared with them—I said, “Well you know? I remember being hungry, growing up with my mother on welfare in Milwaukee. And I remember the morning we had corn flakes but no milk in the house and only grape Kool-Aid and I poured the grape Kool-Aid over the cornflakes. They got soggy quick. All day being hungry because my mother wasn’t home and having to take care of my half brother and sister and nothing to feed them. I went to Ms. Thomas’ house—she lived downstairs—and I said, “Ms. Thomas me, Pat and Jeffrey are hungry. Can we have something to eat?” and Ms. Thomas made peanut butter sandwiches for us. My mother came home and found out and gave me a whopping. She said, “How dare you put our business in the street? How dare you going down there for food acting like you were hungry?” I said, “But Mama I was hungry.” She said, “You not hungry. We have enough food in this house.”

When someone tells you something you know is not true, you know it’s not true. I think I’m still hungry. Now I’m just ashamed about being hungry. Now I know that it’s not ok to be hungry. It’s something I’m supposed to not let anyone else know and if I let someone else know that means that I’ve put our business in the street. And this is what I love Cheryl Jackson for. She understood that nobody should be humiliated because they’re hungry. You should not have to feel ashamed to say, “I just can’t make enough to get food on the table this week.” She knew that when she started feeding people in honor of her mother and she knew that to put them on a red carpet and to put people in the room that understood that everybody that has been pulled up by their bootstraps had somebody to help them with the straps. She understood that, understood something I just realized so profoundly recently when I did a piece for 60 minutes: It’s not about what’s wrong with you that you don’t have enough food on the table. It’s not about what’s wrong with you that you couldn’t keep your job. It’s about what happened to you. And so that everybody at Minnie’s operates from the point of view of we know something happened cause we know that anybody raising a family trying to do the best they can in the world wants the most basic need of every human being and that is to have food on the table. So, we realize that something happened, and you don’t even have to tell us what happened. The fact that you had the courage to reach out and ask for help to put food on your table to take care of your family means that you also deserve the dignity to be served by people that understand what that means. So, she started as one. I think it’s amazing that you can start with two cans of corn and move to 80,000 meals a month. That is living in the stream of consciousness. That is living in God’s flow. That is living God’s dream for you in such a way that you attract all the people in this room.

When I called Cheryl, I had no intention of saying yes. I saw that DM so many times it was aggravating me. The time I called, and her mother had died, and I gave the $100,000 I was like, “Ok I’m really sorry that your mother had died.” The second time I gave $250,000 because I thought that would relieve me of the DMs. What had happened was I called Cheryl and I said I’m going to give you $250,000. She kept talking and I said, “did you hear me? I said I’m going to give you $250k.” Then she said, “but will you come?” I said, “Cheryl, I just gave you a quarter of a million dollars in four minutes. That’s not going to do?” and she said, “No girl… no girl.” I said, “Ok… I guess I’m coming to Texas.” So, I came to Texas because I wanted to raise money. I had to spend money to get here, and I still donated $250k. I’m going to donate another $250k and I want another $250k from this room. And before you decide, let me tell you about paying it forward. This is the thing. This is the one rule that I live by. You know the line in The Color Purple when she says, ‘Anything you try to do to me already been done to you?’ That is law. That’s not just Whoopie. That is law. The law says that whatever you put out into the world with the energy of your intention is going to come back to you. And every pastor in this room can back me up. What you’re putting out into the world is going to come back with the intention that you gave. That’s why I don’t do anything unless it is intentional. I give from the purest, strongest, Jesus centered place in my heart.