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https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631131376940-GROPCUC57DPE71VWPCW1/image-asset.jpeg Highlights - Highlights Thanks to the publications and podcasts who turned the focus on us to share our story, to the places that loaned us their walls to exhibit our photos, and to those who celebrated our storytelling over the years! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631131150158-BBPI9VM8JO4SLEBP8Q7Y/DSC_+83013.jpg Highlights https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631131151387-Y5RHQBQIK9UGWZOEJP8L/DSC_+83014.jpg Highlights https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631131151689-HD88SZ83GB5S0D4TKCC3/DSC_+83015.jpg Highlights https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631131152602-CSRWTUL5MF3522R1BRV6/DSC_+83016.jpg Highlights 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I get a lot of ‘Holas.’ I really can’t be mad. A lot of Mexicans think I’m Mexican. The first interaction is usually, ‘Are you from Mexico?’ ‘No, I’m from Yemen.’ ‘Where’s that?’ ‘It’s in the Middle East.’ People are curious. A lot of times, the next question is, ‘Are you Christian or Jewish?’ Which, I’m neither. I was raised Muslim. But I’m a humanist more than anything, really. They want to ask me questions, but they’re always nervous or worried about offending me. I see myself as an ambassador for Arabs, and I’m not just talking about Muslims. Regardless of religious practices, there are many Arabs like me that are open. We want to change your view, and we want to have the conversation with you rather than you just watching one perspective on the news. So when people ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ I’m not offended. I’m happy to share. Maybe certain questions can be offensive, but if we don’t ask the offensive questions, how do you change the stereotypes you have? I mean, it’s uncomfortable for me to ask a stereotypical question. It’s uncomfortable for you to answer it. But if you don’t answer it, then where do we go from here?” Buthaina Noman, Sales Professional https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530844928970-862JVWS6XDNMKOQD7N28/image-asset.jpeg Forward Through Ferguson “There are certain folks who have accepted that St. Louis is a town whose glory days are behind it – that it’s a smaller, less successful region that it once was. That the forces that set us back are not forces that we have any control over. That it’s just how the city is. It’s not going to change. The people are the people who’ve always been in power. Whether people talk about old money or political dynasties, there’s this sense of stasis or, ‘Yeah, we were once great. But we’re not now.’ I don’t really know what it’s going to take to move us forward. Sometimes it’s outsiders who come in and say, ‘No, this is a great city. There’s so much history here and the people are great.’ And even though some of the smallness of communities and how interconnected everything is can seem a little obnoxious, it’s also a huge value. Investments can be made to move us forward. There is a future that looks different than its most recent past. Understanding how Racial Equity fits into that, there are all sorts of tangible economic and social benefits for being a more equitable, inclusive St. Louis.” Paul Sorenson, Founder and CEO at GoodMap, and Former Director of Strategic Communications and Planning at Grace Hill Settlement House https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530845080635-EX6F9DZTKWW3FH15O0ID/image-asset.jpeg Forward Through Ferguson “Starting from my earliest memories of school, I was told by teachers, ‘You’re so great. You’re so smart. You’re gonna do great things. We have high expectations from you, we’re certain you will meet those expectations, and we’re going to provide you with the resources, the nurturing, and the love that you need to meet those expectations.’ So to think that that’s not the experience that Black students encounter from their education was infuriating and heartbreaking. I’m staying in St. Louis, I’m in school, and the topic that it looks like I’m going to be studying for my dissertation, and for the foreseeable future beyond that, came out of my work for the Ferguson Commission in the area of educational equity has has to do with the discipline gap – the racial disparity in the rate at which students are removed from the classroom. That gap, in Missouri, is larger than it is in any other state, at least at the elementary school level. For every White student that’s suspended out of school per 100 White students, about 15 more Black students are suspended out of school. As a public health practitioner, you know that kids that are suspended are put on a track to end up being more likely to end up in a juvenile justice system and incarcerated. But, I wondered if there weren’t other behavioral health and even physical health outcomes that resulted from being told, ‘You’re a troublemaker, and the best thing we can do with you is to kick you out and keep you out of the way of other students.’” Karishma Furtado, Forward Through Ferguson Data & Research Catalyst https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530845773932-Q7AZH09VS1M70BWKV2Q6/image-asset.jpeg Forward Through Ferguson “When we’re making the assumption that no progress has been made, we have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This is a movement for Black lives, and this issue of the dehumanization of Black lives has existed for over 400 years. So, one year responding to Ferguson – or if you take it back to when the Black Lives Matter organization was created after the shooting of Trayvon Martin – two to three years of organizing is not going to unravel everything that’s been happening over the last 400 to 500 years. So, I think there has to be a space for grace, and a space for patience, and a space for resilience if we’re all going to get through these moments in this movement.” De Nichols, Co-Founder of Civic Creatives, Senior Product Inclusion UX Researcher at YouTube and Core Organizer of Design As Protest, and past Forward Through Ferguson board member, https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530845281159-QKVEQRRDZNHE364C7CUA/image-asset.jpeg Forward Through Ferguson “Are you familiar with Jane Elliott? She was a teacher in the 60s who did this fascinating experiment: the brown-eyed, blue-eyed video. You have to watch it. There’s another great video clip that’s about 60 seconds. She is in an auditorium of White people, and she says, ‘If you want your experience to be like the experience of Black people on a day-to-day basis, stand up.’ Nobody stands, of course. Then, she says, ‘Wait, I do not think you understood the instructions.’ She asks again, and no one stands. She basically goes on to say, ‘That tells me a lot. That tells me that you know what is going on, you know you would not want it to happen to you, and you are not willing to do anything about it.’ Then she says, ‘I do not know why you are willing to allow it to happen to other people if you know.’ There is something to the idea that once you have your eyes opened, then you are going to have to do something different. As a White person, you are going to have to play a different role.” Claire Schell, AVP, Employee Experience, U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530845638227-SIR9RGVN1GS08SIXIP9I/image-asset.jpeg Forward Through Ferguson “We were at Target two Halloweens ago and one of my sons noticed one of these superhero costumes with muscle arms, but the muscles were his color skin. So he said, ‘Well, what if you have brown skin and you want to be that character?’ It wasn’t prompted by anything other than his brain. I’m like, ‘Yes! That’s how you think because that’s not fair.’ The other thing is that the boys use the terms brown skin and tan skin to describe people. They don’t use White and Black, and I don’t correct them because I like their way better. It’s an objective description and not a racial connotation. Yeah, I’ve definitely talked to them about history, and segregation, and whatever I can whenever it comes up. It’s hard being a parent, dealing with your own kinds of anxieties and grief because of national and local events and then helping your children not be too sheltered. I think about that with my 7th graders that I teach, too. They’re all coming to me at different levels of awareness, and different levels of exposure and experience to the ‘real world,’ or to issues of racism, oppression, or prejudice. I can’t expect them all to master the same things at the same time because they are in different places. I try to make them cognitive of respecting that and to keep that in mind now as I facilitate conversations. Some of us aren’t there and aren’t going to be there for a long time. Some of us are already there and we’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ That’s the hard part on all levels with students, with staff, with the district, with the world, with adults that my children interact with, with everything.” April Fulstone, Teacher at Wydown Middle School https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530845461774-44E137BD3D8G0XGMOV5M/image-asset.jpeg Forward Through Ferguson “I want to make good use of my time and I want to show people how it’s your daily practice. It’s not something you read, or somewhere you go, or a conference you attend. It’s your daily practice of how you think about yourself and how you think about other people, and how you think about the world. It just takes slowing down and making it important. I’m influenced by what I read and what I listen to. We talk about financial literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy. Why? Because those are big systems that are hard to understand, we have to make important decisions in them, and we don’t know everything that’s involved. Race operates the same way. So why don’t we try to get racially literate? We have to get fluency in the language. We have to learn that behavior. We have to learn the interactions. How do I interact with other White people? How do I interact across race and get out of the Black and White paradigm that is so St. Louis?” Mary Ferguson, Racial Justice Consultant, YWCA of St. Louis, and Rudy Nickens, Director of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, Missouri Department of Transportation in Jefferson City https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530906721575-1XKWLNKEBTSCKBO9UUSI/image-asset.jpeg Forward Through Ferguson People ask, ‘What do your eight-year-old and five-year-old know?’ My eight-year-old was at his baseball game, and two of the young men explicitly would not high five him and the other black children after the game. Some people might say, ‘Oh, he’s too young for you to engage him in this,’ but if he’s not too young to be treated in a racially hateful way, he’s not too young to start to understand the systems that we’ve created. We have white people in our family. We have interracial marriages in our family. Rather than let them make sense of it themselves, in their own growing brains, we’ve been conscious about talking to them about racism. They know about our country’s history of slavery and that we’re all the same, but there are these differences in terms of melanin, we’ve created these – we talk about race as a social construct – we’ve created this construct around race, and if we don’t like it, that’s why we work to try to make things different. Sometimes, you wonder though. You feel like you’re putting too much on your kid. But I’ll tell you, when my eight-year-old experienced those boys not high fiving him, I was like, ‘No. We did the right thing.’ Because how hard would it be at that moment to explain to him all of these issues and dynamics? And not that he gets it all, because he still cried. It still made him sad. But I don’t want him to ever internalize that that’s something about him.” Dr. Kira Banks, Associate Professor of Psychology and Founder of Raising Equity https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530845598163-COD766GBOHI20DBX5NJN/image-asset.jpeg Forward Through Ferguson “We have the Forward Through Ferguson (FTF) definition, and there are a few other definitions, locally and nationally, of what equity means, but it’s hard to define something that you don’t have a frame for. We, in the U.S., don’t really grow up thinking about equity. We feel like we reflexively know a lot about equality, or diversity, or inclusion, but equity can seem so foreign. The key thing is that equity, unlike equality, brings in this idea of justice, of not just giving everybody equal resources or access, but it challenges us to dig deeper and think about what is just, or what is fair. That means taking into account historical implications and current outcomes. It’s so much more profound than equality. I have almost completely removed the word equality from the way I talk. I will almost never use equality in my everyday language, because it’s not my goal anymore. I remember starting to work with FTF, and there was definitely a moment where the former commissioners who were serving on the interim board expressed, ‘It’s great that you all are looking at these different priority areas and people that are implementing in the various spaces, but FTF needs to own this Racial Equity piece, and put that at the core.’ For me, that was difficult to reconcile. I’ve since realized that that’s the North Star of it all.” David Dwight, Executive Director, Lead Strategy Catalyst, Forward Through Ferguson https://www.humansofstl.org/missourifoundationforhealth daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849577845-2T2RSK7TMFUKWLO50FC5/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “To be successful in life does not mean that you make a lot of money. To be successful in life means that you did the right thing to help people. Sometimes you come in here and there’s tension. People are upset or mad. People have bad days. Our saying is, ‘What are we going to do today to help someone?’ Just one person. And if you can have that philosophy in your store, success is going to follow you. I had a cancer patient come in this morning. This person doesn’t have insurance. This person doesn’t have much money and can’t afford to spend a dime in our drugstore. But he doesn’t have to. God’s given me enough that I can give back. We pick patients up, take them to the doctor, and then take them back home. I hope other people do this. So, am I a safety net? I hope so. I hope Butler Drug Store is a safety net for a lot of people. And I think it is, or we wouldn’t have so many patients that keep flooding in here.” (Portageville, MO) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849182441-G134VACPGHZ8YYO7GQUU/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “Mama right here found out she had breast cancer the very last week of December. My dad had just filed for his insurance in December, but it wasn’t approved until January first, so they called her cancer a pre-existing condition. It happened days apart, and they wouldn’t cover it for her. So she had to get Aflac and Blue Cross Blue Shield. But before that could kick in, she still had to get regular chemo treatments. She was going for her chemo treatments every two weeks in Memphis and Jonesboro where her doctors were. The doctors told my dad that he had to come up with $3,000 out of pocket every week before the insurance kicked in, or she couldn’t have the chemo. It gives me chills just talking about it. My dad’s a very prideful man. He doesn’t ask for stuff like that. But when it came to her, the whole family gathered and did what we could to make sure she got her treatments. Everybody came together to help her out. There were only two chemo treatments before insurance took care of the rest, but that was scary. Like, ‘If you don’t pay $3,000, she’s going to die.’ The bills were gigantic. They’re still paying for it, but the insurance did help. When something like that happens, it opens your eyes, and you learn you took things for granted that you shouldn’t have. Thank God, she beat it. She’s good now, but that was a rough time.” (Greenville, MO) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849219614-JYADZCK74C9NJ40STV2C/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “What do you think makes someone healthy?” “A balanced diet. Being fit. And, mentally, having lots of compliments at hand ready to use.” (Hermann, MO) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849354872-PHZGTPISZTAVCQDMLHLZ/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “The only hospital here is shutting down completely. But we need it. There’s so much crime in this town – shootings and stabbings and fights. And there are babies being born. I’m speechless.” “So where will people go for healthcare?” “Cape. Poplar Bluff. About an hour or more away. I’ve been here all my life. I’m 51.” “Why do you stay?” “Because my mom’s been here all of her life, and she’s not going anywhere. She had nine kids, and this is where all my family is.” (Kennett, MO) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849267123-3SJWCRXLZHK3A5MB0XZD/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “Something I won’t eat? Sloppy Joes. I don’t like the name. I don’t like how they’re sloppy. And they don’t taste good.” (St. James, MO) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849410152-QPBMHTSMY4OAXDPBMIPM/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “Pastor Meg and her husband, Brad, saw me and my wife come in there every day. When I first moved here, I had some money, but I couldn’t find a job. I spent all my money on motel rooms, eating out, going back and forth to St. Louis, and I went broke. We heard about an overnight shelter that you could go to during the wintertime from November to March, from six in the evening to seven in the morning. We did that for one year. When they found out that we were sleeping downtown, they walked by where we were to see for themselves. The next day we went to work, Pastor Meg asked my wife, ‘Would y’all like to move in downstairs? It’s got everything that you’ll need. There’s a restroom. Y’all can cook. There are two bedrooms.’ So we agreed. They let us stay at their place for free, but we ended up eventually moving into the Welcome Inn. That’s the cheapest motel out here at $165 a week. They even helped us out with rent there, too, because I didn’t have enough to maintain the place and get to the next payday. Brad said, ‘Don't worry about that. We got you.’ So for a time, they paid the rent at the motel for us. I found a job at the Broadway Hilton and tried to get my child support paid up. After that, we got a three-bedroom place, which is pretty good and where we’re at now. Everything worked out for the best. That’s what it’s all about – helping you turn your life around.” (Columbia, MO) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849128060-ZV1QB4CBE5JWJSTRLDD3/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “When I was growing up, it was always me and my mom as a single parent. She worked long hours. She worked all the time. It took a village. My grandparents filled in a lot. We have the strongest relationship. She lives three minutes away from me. I would never even think of moving unless I could pick her up and take her with me. When I was 19 years old somebody asked me what my favorite memory was with my mom. I said, ‘We used to have vegetable dinners.’ We had green beans, corn, and a bunch of vegetables. She had this blue dress with little white flowers on it, and I used to twirl around in it. So we dressed up and used to eat vegetables by candlelight. It was my favorite. We dressed up, ate dinner by candlelight, and watched Titanic on repeat because we didn’t have cable. When I was 19, I was telling the story to somebody, my mom was there, and she got tickled. She said, ‘We did that because we couldn’t afford meat.’ It just goes to show, you don’t have to have a lot to have a lot of love.” (Hayti, MO) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849628554-OF3LSXGKQQPQY4B4QUA6/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “The third of the month is Overdose Day. They’ve gone without. They’ve used all their money up. And they’ve kind of gotten a little bit clean. So when they go to buy drugs, when their SSI and their disability checks come in, it hits them hard. And the calls come in: overdose, overdose, overdose.” “The quality of the drug varies. They’ll get used to something and then the stronger stuff comes out.” “And the last time they used, it didn’t do anything. They’ve been without for a week or a week and a half, so they double the dose.” “Or lace it with something else. One time someone cut heroin with fentanyl, an opiate” “They make these fentanyl patches, too, and people chew them or smoke them. They poke holes in the patch, lay it on aluminum foil, heat it, and inhale the vapors. That is an extremely strong high they get off of it.” “I’ve seen people save their urine, let it dry out and crystalize, crush it, and resmoke it.” “You can’t take care of those who don’t want to take care of themselves. I learned that a long time ago. You can just give them some chips, and a sandwich, and a bottle of water.” “What’s your biggest need right now with the work that you do?” “More help.” (Poplar Bluff, MO) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530849699341-PR06EY5K7T0PIUH34LYP/image-asset.jpeg Missouri Foundation for Health “At the school district I was at before, during one of my worst years, one student had to have 13 teeth pulled because they were all abscessed. He constantly had a fever. I had him in first grade, and when I moved to second grade, I begged my principal to please let me keep him. I said, ‘He has so much potential.’ He didn’t have any running water at his house, so imagine when that child came to school. He had so many other outside factors affecting him that learning was near impossible until he was healthy. We had an amazing school nurse who found someone in town to do all the dental work for free and basically told the parents, well, his aunt, ‘You have to get him there. This is happening. And if you don’t, there will be consequences.’ His mom ended up going to jail, and his dad ended up dying during in those few years. My husband and I agreed that we would foster him, if he was going to be put in the system, and our school nurse was going to take his sister. Collectively, together, we all worked to help this family. He fell in between the ages of my kids, so we sat down with our two children because we had to let them know he might come live with us for a while. My son gathered up a bunch of his clothes, and we gave it to somebody else to give to him because I didn’t want anybody to see that I was sending them home with him. But, of course, he would show up to school wearing them, and I thought, ‘Good! He’s got some new clothes.’ His grandparents ended up taking him, the last I heard. He was so sweet. I will say, one thing I miss about public education is fighting for that underdog. The ones where, when they came to school, you were the only one who sometimes could help them feel that they truly were loved.” (Cape Girardeau, MO) https://www.humansofstl.org/mica daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1530850759601-QHB49LAFW1SP05AKXUYN/image-asset.jpeg MICA “She tells me that she sees the news and the reports. We saw a movie about how immigrants from Mexico come here. How an immigrant gets here is very sad. She asked me, ‘Mama, how did you come?’ And I talked about it with her. ‘And you all suffered over there, mama? You didn’t have water? You didn’t have food?’ She started to put all of this together. And I’d say, ‘Yes, that was almost everything that we went through.’ ‘But, mama, why do people come from there to here? Don’t they have anything to eat in your country?’ She thinks about a lot of things. She is an intelligent girl that is starting to connect all that. She was shocked by all the people in the movie, and she said, ‘Mama, then all of the people here have come over here that way?’ I tell her, ‘Not all of them. Some, perhaps, have a visa, a passport, and then they can travel and come here.’ And she asked me, ‘Mama, when are you going to go to Mexico?’ ‘I don’t know, daughter. Maybe one day we’ll go to Mexico. What if I send you for vacation?’ And she said, ‘No, mama. If you don’t go with me, I’m not going.’” https://www.humansofstl.org/lindy daily 0.75 2026-01-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1531269546784-2ZN3X73CVD95ZCGLYE75/Lindy+Drew.jpg Lindy Drew https://www.humansofstl.org/caroline daily 0.75 2025-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1531270201055-PX4QP06KDTTXGEZDGJFJ/Caroline+Fish.jpg Caroline Fish https://www.humansofstl.org/dessa daily 0.75 2026-01-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631132539752-CZA0JCRBC7K8UDQGYEZ0/image-asset.jpeg Dessa Somerside Photo by Lindy Drew https://www.humansofstl.org/yetunde daily 0.75 2025-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602015009837-9L4706A95YLF05XEJOOQ/Yetunde+Janski-Ogunfidodo.jpg Yetunde Janski-Ogunfidodo Photo by Lindy Drew https://www.humansofstl.org/hannah daily 0.75 2025-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/8d615f27-9bf6-49fe-b777-8b825281cb2a/Hannah+Burtness+02.jpg Hannah Burtness https://www.humansofstl.org/jon daily 0.75 2025-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1531271313138-DX5VQKWOWG48D67ZZILB/Jon+Alexander.jpg Jon Alexander https://www.humansofstl.org/anna daily 0.75 2021-06-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1531271860936-4MN81L9NDDJIG81WPUIF/Anna+Shabsin.jpg Anna Goldfarb Shabsin https://www.humansofstl.org/andrew daily 0.75 2021-09-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1531272769215-GO9G20620PS9QEV9S9TX/DSC_7381.jpg Andrew Doty Photo by Lindy Drew https://www.humansofstl.org/maleeha daily 0.75 2025-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1574353780865-4PJ4BU4UAIIJCBRST4R2/_MG_4981.jpg Maleeha Ahmad Photo by Honor Heindl https://www.humansofstl.org/acknowledgements daily 0.75 2022-10-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631044744572-7I42KHAKPCTHHU89IRHU/image-asset.png Acknowledgements https://www.humansofstl.org/colleen daily 0.75 2025-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631061099744-7YEAAFV5WUSHTQJJOUQA/Colleen Colleen Smyth https://www.humansofstl.org/disclaimer daily 0.75 2019-05-21 https://www.humansofstl.org/whatwedo daily 0.75 2024-05-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1558635165624-3YJSH75X7W7VFCKRRSQU/IMG_7470.JPG What We Do - What We Do When we started Humans of St. Louis (HOSTL), we were two social work students inspired by Humans of New York (HONY), wandering around Downtown St. Louis in the winter, and a lot of people wouldn’t talk to us. Week after week we kept at it, feeling out our approach, going to different neighborhoods. And eight years later, we're still talking to strangers to share those random run-ins with all of you. As the audience has grown, there have been a lot of questions about who we talk to, where we go, what we ask, and why. How do other “Humans of” sites work, and why did we choose to become a nonprofit? So we thought it would be helpful to share more information here about how HOSTL started and how it has evolved. https://www.humansofstl.org/rebecca daily 0.75 2025-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1558581790013-KJ4G59I5QHOB0MVDLTIX/RLK_Profile.jpg Rebecca Leffell Koren https://www.humansofstl.org/partnership daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://www.humansofstl.org/audra daily 0.75 2019-06-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1560308807270-E9GTBL0UW025HY1R266C/Audra.jpg Audra Hubbell https://www.humansofstl.org/alexbelongshere daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602008690288-OXWXW5G9ECDPKSPDULAF/DSC_0008.jpg Alex Belongs Here “From the moment I saw him, I knew. I was like, ‘This dude is everything.’ I think it was the way he looked at me. And whenever I looked at him, it’s like I saw right into his soul. We met in a restaurant at a get-together spot in Poplar Bluff. One day after work, he was out with his friends and I was out with mine. He gave me the wrong phone number by accident. So I couldn’t call him. Later on, I saw one of his friends at Buffalo Wild Wings where I was a waitress and I asked, “Where’s he at?’ They were joking around like, ‘Where’s who at?’ and then told me, ‘Oh, he’s at work. Being out around a lot of people isn’t his thing.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ Well, a week later, they had their company Christmas party at Buffalo Wild Wings and I happened to look over to see them all. I saw him hunkered down in the booth trying to be out of everyone’s view. That’s when we actually switched real numbers. And our first date was…” “With the kids. And the other ones were with the kids, too.” “We both had a child in common. He had his son, Ayden, who just turned two. And I had my son, Caleb, who wasn’t quite two. We decided to meet up all together and that’s where most of our first dates were –– at parks and walking trails and then fishing and at the river. I remember telling my friend, ‘This is it right here.’ And he was like, ‘You don’t even know the dude. You haven’t even gone on your first date.’ ‘I don’t need to. I know.’” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602008744934-L8X80BYZN5F8X1WI1WR5/119009320_610732886478192_7638158622227115655_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here “The first time I met her, I felt like, ‘This is the girl.’ That’s when we started hanging out and dating. And here we are, 12 years later.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602008793737-YO7T0L45HGM9HGE556NO/DSC_9936.jpg Alex Belongs Here “Alex and I were together for two years before we got married in 2010. After that, we knew we had to establish ourselves because that’s one of the rules when it comes to marrying an immigrant. We applied for his Individual Taxpayer Identification Number number so he could start paying taxes. Then we started putting his name on bills so we could pay those together. We ended up having Xander together, our oldest. And I remember I was telling a friend of mine about how we were getting ready to try to start the legal process but we were running into complications. First, we had been told this, then we were being told that. Then, we paid $300 just to have documents translated. We did all of these things just to find out that it really wasn’t how we were going to be doing things. My friend gave us the phone number to the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project where we met our lawyer, Nicole Cortés. Talking to her, we filed some papers and did background checks to find out that because of Alex’s previous deportation order in 2000, in which he reentered the U.S. unlawfully, he was subject to a permanent bar. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted him to leave the country for 10-15 years to be able to apply to come back. And there wouldn’t have been a guarantee that if he left he could come back. It was like, ‘You can leave for 10 years, hang out outside the country, and then return and file more paperwork.’ But if they still say, ‘No, you can’t stay,’ then no is no. Unless they actually detained him, there was really nothing we could do at that time. So, we went back to our lives – back to what we were doing – fishing, camping, working, hanging out with the kids. All that fun stuff.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602008923001-GEPGNF22SHCLNUV6PVLI/DSC_9945.jpg Alex Belongs Here “In 2015, Alex’s sister and nephew came to Missouri from Honduras undocumented and they had to go to their first check-in. She was told to do that in Kansas City. So, Alex drove them there and the building was a sketchy warehouse on a dead-end road. Without a name on the outside and with cameras overhead, he was like, ‘I’m not letting my little sister go in there.’ Instead, he walked in first to make sure they were at the right spot and that’s when an ICE officer connected him to his deportation order. Then ICE did the check-in for his sister and nephew and ended up releasing them even though they didn’t speak any English and knew nothing about the city they were in. They just let them go. That’s when his sister got in touch with my dad to let us know. I was at the finance company where I worked when my dad stopped by. He said urgently, ‘I need to talk to you.’ I went outside with him and he told me Alex got detained in Kansas City. Immigration told my dad that my car Alex was driving would be towed if it wasn’t gone by close of business. My reaction was, ‘Oh my God, they have Alex.’ Immediately following was, ‘Where’s his sister and her son? We need to hurry up and get there before something happens to them.’ As I grabbed my belongings, I told my boss, ‘ICE detained Alex. I have to go.’” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009012133-3US139H3WJCUSG6FCJ35/118984503_341917823669087_7664256353601035740_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here “My dad drove with me five and a half hours all the way from Poplar Bluff to Kansas City because I was a wreck. When we arrived, I remember seeing a van pulling up and I looked over to see Alex getting out. I was sitting there knowing my husband – who’s not a mean person, who’s not aggressive, who won’t even kill a spider – and watching him get out of this vehicle in shackles and an orange suit. I was like, ‘What the hell? He’s not some angry madman.’ I went inside the facility and my ignorant self – because I didn’t know immigration law – handed them Alex’s Honduran passport to show proof of who he is. They said, ‘Thanks.’ And we were like, ‘Well, now what?’ I got on the phone frantically with our lawyer and I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t already had a relationship with her. We were contacting people asking them to write letters in support of Alex and getting so many signatures for a petition. We also had to gather medical records from his son’s doctor since his son has Asperger’s and needs his parent, but the doctor didn’t want to help us. After a fight, our lawyer was able to finally get the medical paperwork and it’s been like pulling teeth getting anything from him since. It’s also been hard getting any records from the therapist. When people found out Alex was undocumented, a lot of them were like, ‘We had no idea he was ‘illegal.’’ And it’s like, ‘You grew up thinking that all these Latinos are bad people and they’re not.’” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009247818-Z2S28LLM1G67PTU3KTVB/DSC_9952.jpg Alex Belongs Here “About 50 other families living across the United States are in the same situation with a member of their household living in sanctuary. Alex is in touch with a few of them. They have weekly calls together. I’m still no expert on any of this just because information changes so much. One minute, ICE is saying this, the next minute they’re saying something else. Just recently, we were told the ICE office here in St. Louis won’t even accept his paperwork. Then, when we finally got them to accept it, they turned around and denied it. They said because of the pandemic, we can mail in our stay of removal applications. So we did. They received it in the Chicago field office, sent it to St. Louis, and the St. Louis office called our lawyer to say, ‘We have this paperwork here and you need to come to get it.’ The money order was returned to us, there was no denial stamp, no nothing. Just, ‘We’re not accepting it.’ And that was earlier this year when we had 1500 signatures on a petition and ended up getting the mayor of Maplewood and Alderwoman Annie Rice to take it. They were told that even if Alex’s kids or wife were on their deathbed, ICE wouldn’t accept the paperwork until he delivers it in person – in which case, they’d snatch him up in a heartbeat. They’d probably have him on a plane and out of the country before we were even able to take a breath and realize what happened.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009339678-O2GC00VUWOGPIKTTCTJA/DSC_9989.jpg Alex Belongs Here “The community support within St. Louis has been amazing. I’m shocked at the willingness of people to put themselves out there, confront what’s going on, and also call people out when they say something about our situation. The most recent petition I shared on the MapleGood Facebook page and the Moms of Maplewood/Richmond Heights group got a lot of hits. We had so many signatures just from the STL community sharing and their families outside of Missouri would sign. And then people would bring him food when he first got here. That was actually really hard for me though because I’m his wife. I’m not the best housekeeper. I’m not the best cook. I’m not a fancy mom. At home, I’ve tried the whole meal prep thing, like, ‘Okay, Monday we’ll have this. Tuesday we’ll have this.’ It worked for a while, but then I was over it. Still, having other people cook for my husband was so hard for me. I’d ask him, ‘Are you eating? Do you need anything?’ And he’d hate to tell other people, ‘I need this. I ran out of that. Can you get me this?’ So he’d wait until I’d drive up here and then shop for him so he’d have everything he needed. Even then, people wanted to make sure he had home-cooked meals so they’d bring him food. Then, when I finally moved here, everyone was like, ‘Okay, the wife is here. We’ll let her do her thing.’ I don’t want to say the support stopped, because the support was still there. It’s just, now that I was here, I guess people didn’t want to intrude on that part. So then I felt like, ‘Nobody wants to bring you anything or hang out with you anymore because I’m here now? Oh, great. Awesome. Doesn’t anybody want to hang out with me?’ Here he is, the introvert. And here I am, the extravert.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009072865-UC1UCF2G1GLRD6Z5RPYC/DSC_9935.jpg Alex Belongs Here “What do you like about hanging out with your mom?” “She’s loved me the best.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009123161-G1CFFNUJXM253731EBZ9/DSC_9978.jpg Alex Belongs Here “It was really hard opening that letter and reading it. I didn’t know how to tell Alex or what to say to him. I called our lawyer and sent her a picture of it. I sent her a message again. I started to wonder, ‘Why is she not contacting me?’ Turns out, she was out of the country at the time. A few days later she called saying, ‘Carly, I am so sorry.’ She ended up getting a continuance and bought some time, but Alex had to turn himself in. A month later, when he was supposed to do that, I told my lawyer, ‘We can’t lose him. What am I going to do? We’ve got five kids. There’s no way we can do this on our own.’ And that’s when she connected me with The St. Louis Inter-Faith Committee on Latin America (IFCLA) who told us about their sanctuary efforts. They explained to us that the group hadn’t done anything like this since the 1980s, and it was very different then. They were just dipping their toes into learning about sanctuary work. They had talked about it that Spring with Christ Church UCC in Maplewood in particular and had their first meeting here. It was wild! My first reaction was, ‘No! I am not doing that. That’s, like, so illegal. That’s horrible! We can’t be running from the Feds.’ They explained, ‘It’s really not though. We’ll tell them where he’s at. They’ll know where he’s at. It’s sanctuary.’ So, I read more into it and thought more about it. I asked Alex, ‘What do you want to do?’ It was a tough decision, but I knew that him leaving wasn’t an option. So we gave the organization a call and told them, ‘Let’s do it.’ That’s when we came here and got introduced to the church.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009301163-WKC5NQ7YCO8VW07KGNGL/DSC_9971.jpg Alex Belongs Here “My dad’s from Guadalajara. I remember when he got his citizenship in 2010, it was nothing like what I’m going through. My parents got married, had some years, had some kids, got their paperwork in order. They never used a lawyer. And, then, here we are. I had no idea it was going to be this complicated.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602011085539-ZAEDQ3YG4VBYFSA5QT76/119181731_3372509512829130_6550918701319948486_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009634860-DSMLYRQY0SQWDAK6MV21/94737772_233357214652849_4148300661127118848_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009634036-GDGIZS1W206GJBFFL1V4/118817920_2733463960297758_5963806455750523296_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009636384-CDN6A26ZTH5Z0YNR3V4F/119020477_397697584549243_1346299734923198316_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009633081-TM0PV8EBYWXKAFWSLP7N/75557394_2610574342310944_4148835672318279680_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009637682-65E13XWKZS9PF7CXCMHR/119047831_1256820081328708_6239294394766510000_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009638261-FG8GFIMDZ0LA9KJHT9C5/119057292_600867773890796_5205750873727472170_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009638373-XM8HSZRPRROTNBZ4YWZ2/119059617_1195078947533820_7211637684825710009_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602009639870-UZCZCTOG0YD42WLTW7GS/119067025_355177282517035_2097176645715974701_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602012295976-OLYQUOW4DSISOEJIWIEQ/119462659_364347587933498_2267987214327340674_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602012325732-GAV32F00GFZSP0D7OAZ8/119168672_1537160033134914_7359323970265137436_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602012331822-14FJKP07PY6XHL3QTLSM/119140924_1282625098742284_768474452452936122_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1602011881934-BRZJXOL59EWB4DBAP4GL/DSC_9958.jpg Alex Belongs Here “We had a pilgrimage march last year for Alex’s two-year anniversary in sanctuary and when I showed up there were so many people gathered where we started outside of the ICE office. I asked myself, ‘Who are all these people?’ I didn’t recognize half of them. The event was an idea some of our supporters put together inspired by a story out of the Bible. You know, the pilgrimage where they walk in solidarity for justice and stuff? I don’t know the whole story. Like I said, I’m new to the whole religion thing. Anyway, we walked seven miles from downtown to the church in Maplewood. There was a mixture of different congregations at the mile markers and they would have signs and bells and water and snacks. Everyone stayed with us and I’m pretty sure there were a few who saw us, parked, and joined us along the way. I used a megaphone to let people know we were coming. And people were coming out of their houses yelling at us in support. I was amazed. We were quite a way ahead of the group when my lawyer told me, ‘Stop for a second. Turn around. Look at this!’ I turned around and there were so many people behind me, I started crying. They were all just walking with us and Alex was waiting for us at the doors of the church. I’m not going to lie, it was the worst walk of my life. I was all sweaty. It was horrible. Seven miles is for the birds. They can just fly it. It’s too much for me. But, I did it! And everyone else did it. And everyone else did it with me for him and it was huge. I definitely saw God that day, for sure.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631461385164-G3539B1INSFM50568SIX/233389723_1812913598913369_6254208522555029244_n.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027523994-FG24AKJC7XXPW1N9B3K7/2.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027524115-BPR15SD36WERWZS8O0X7/3.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027525000-EZ2KVAEL5GHZ04IVJSN0/4.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027525185-8Y0SCX8E8IWEQ8WA6Y83/5.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027526015-XJR8OHHOQKOU392WNADI/6.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027526203-NMT841R1P2AIS7236NIO/7.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027526844-0XTMNRTETPYUK1EZOGHG/8.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027527130-W4YJG3RC4FRMPXW34K0D/9.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027527494-LUQAFFROU3VME3I7J0IP/10.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027527738-6AXPNQ6CXVPX7JC3NK3T/11.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027528048-IBKP9C6OGHAKWBC1411W/12.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027528550-6IJR7GB3B39MPK7GG5QF/13.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027528789-5FV9FBOW8SYP8J48FZJX/14.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027529697-6RPDDU29XRE0CVQGH1HL/15.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027529952-F77VSOM9A4GITV2CDA1W/16.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027530662-ZIVFUM6HVWX6CDPUWLQR/17.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631027531301-0KFZASRJNM9RMN53CPGW/18.jpg Alex Belongs Here https://www.humansofstl.org/elaine daily 0.75 2022-03-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1633022349621-6PE2G9BSS4EVMG6E9GSO/DSC_6137.jpg Elaine Cha Photo by Lindy Drew https://www.humansofstl.org/erin daily 0.75 2026-01-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1628301307768-T1K5ROSC0AVG2LAY5DK8/Erin+Hopkins.jpg Erin Hopkins https://www.humansofstl.org/reviews daily 0.75 2021-09-04 https://www.humansofstl.org/retailers daily 0.75 2026-03-28 https://www.humansofstl.org/faq daily 0.75 2023-07-31 https://www.humansofstl.org/faq-copy daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://www.humansofstl.org/communitybuildersnetwork daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631047056264-H6OOP32Z5BA75F3EM25E/image-asset.jpeg Community Builders Network - Make it stand out “My son is 17, but when he was a kid, several large anchor stores in our neighborhood started closing. There were these massive empty buildings in our neighborhood and he and I would ride past them and play this game: I would ask him, ‘What would you open there? What kind of business would you put in that building? What would it look like?’ He was a kid in elementary school at the time and he always came up with some cool ideas. He thought of a Chuck E. Cheese or something similar to Monkey Joe’s or Sky Zone. We didn’t have anything like that in our neighborhood or on our side of town at all. He’d say, ‘We can put that here! And what if we had a go-cart place? Mom, there’d be pizza and a Subway!’ It was so cute. As he'd just think of stuff I’d ask, ‘Who would work there?’ and he’d name people in our family. There we were, a legal aid attorney and an elementary student, making stuff up. We didn’t have the resources or skills to do any of it, but, ‘It would be really cool if we could turn that old Lowes into a rock climbing gym!’ At that time, the only thing I knew about development was that you needed people with capital to come in and create businesses. So we’d just dream about how we could make a Magic House in North County and North City. Then all the kids who went to school in Kirkwood could come over to our neighborhood and play in the castles over here.” Latasha Barnes, Attorney with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631047320244-JQIWABIWFTTPMTR8JKFN/image-asset.jpeg Community Builders Network - Make it stand out “You can’t do it all. Community building means so much. The definition is so broad. It’s important to remember to stay in your lane and focus on things you can have an impact on through your expertise. Don’t get distracted by the things you can’t control. I’ve learned, although I haven’t always embraced it, that change is slow. I follow politics as a frustrating side hobby, and change doesn’t happen overnight. I keep in mind that you can’t just abandon places. Places are going to exist whether you invest in them or not, so why not invest in them? And I’ve also learned that we can too easily let the noise get in, especially local noise, so I try to not get bogged down by the noise of the news. Like, ‘Oh my gosh, there is so much violence and crime,’ and the 30,000-foot belief is that communities are just that way. But we’re talking about people who have lives there. I remember at another job, someone told me, ‘You’re sending me into this neighborhood, but is it safe for me to go there and do a credit fair?’ I said, ‘You’re probably gonna pass kids waiting for the school bus. It’s going to be 8 a.m. This is where families are raising their kids. Remember that.’” Nikki Woelfel, Vice President of Community Development, Carrollton Bank https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631047717291-4ZJYU6TE8A6TMG6YRGEL/image-asset.jpeg Community Builders Network - Make it stand out “My partner’s probably used to it now because it’s been almost 12 years doing this work, but I’ll always be looking for addresses. I have an app on my phone. I know how to look up who the owner is. I get the parcel number. And then when I get home, I go into the City's land title system. So it’s just constant. There are 10,000 problems to solve all over. When I drive around, it’s like, ‘I wonder how that property got to be that way? What is the story behind that one?’ They’re often terribly tragic: someone died, there was a fire, somebody was evicted. But in order to take that property and turn it into something positive, you have to understand how it got there in the first place to fix the problems associated with the title and then try to push the place back out to somebody who can do something with it. We’ve got a lot of stories like this because we do like 50 of these cases a year. There’s this physical blight that you see, but then there’s this hidden legal blight. That’s where our team really gets into it. Like, ‘What are all of the other issues that aren’t visible but just as much of a barrier to solving a problem as fixing up the roof or windows or whatever it is?’” Peter Hoffman, Managing Attorney for the Neighborhood Vacancy Initiative at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631048148441-INRR12J0U628XSP4FBX6/image-asset.jpeg Community Builders Network - Make it stand out What did you think you were going to be when you were younger? “A ballerina or a civil rights attorney. Although I do wonder what it would be like to live in New York and travel the world dancing, I think it makes perfect sense to be where I am right now. Since I was a little girl, I’ve always felt a deep responsibility to my community. And my community’s here — it’s Fairground Park and O’Fallon Park. So I’m just grateful that I get the privilege to be here and pursue my dreams and see them come to life with my neighbors. I think it’s exactly where I need to be. It’s so, so, so hard, even traumatizing, and there are definitely days when it feels like, ‘You need to go somewhere else, Charli.’ But I’m not giving up.” Charli Cooksey, Founder & CEO, WEPOWER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631048467952-O3H3P6IWPJPJUOQRWQIJ/image-asset.jpeg Community Builders Network - Make it stand out “When I was in second grade, I was president of the Busy Bee Club, so I knew I was going to be in charge. I always had to be in charge. I was the president of my youth group too. Then in college, I thought I would be a teacher. At one point, I was an English major. I was of the generation where teaching or nursing was what I was told to do. Social work wasn’t in our framework. My mother came to this country when she was 19. Neither my mother nor my father got beyond eighth grade, but education was really important in my family. So going to college was a big deal. My sister went to art school and worked hard to pay for that. I went to a state school because it was cheap. The year after I graduated with a BSW, my school implemented a one-year MSW combination. I was part of the first class to come back and get an MSW with advanced standing. I wanted to go to law school at that point, but I was also tired of school: ‘Three years of law school versus one year to get an MSW? Ah, I’ll do the MSW.’ Of course, I went the clinical route because that’s what everybody did. And I never used it because I immediately got hired by a Jewish youth group to do program development, leadership training, and nonprofit advising. In the beginning, I did some therapy as volunteer work. But I always felt like I need to fix things. I can’t sit for an hour nodding my head and keeping my mouth shut going ‘um-hum.’ Still, I use clinical work every day and I tell that to my students all the time.” Barbara Levin, Teaching Professor, Office of Field Education, Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631048906340-5J8YW40ROPWLFTBPYYFK/image-asset.jpeg Community Builders Network - Make it stand out “The level of participation in the community is strong but it’s also on life support. And I love the word ‘community,’ but I also love the word ‘neighborhood.’ For a long time, in my neighborhood, I never knew a Walnut Park East and a Walnut Park West. We were just Walnut Park, united. And I think about how at some point, we dropped the word ‘neighbor.’ The atmosphere just becomes the ‘hood.’ What a contrast. A name is critical. It has such an impact. My name is Sundy, and something seeps in there to permeate in my cells that causes me to be kind of sunshine-y. Anyway, remember Sesame Street and how they sang, ‘Who are the people in your neighborhood?’ Oh my goodness, it’s true! When I looked out my window to see the landscape, we had Mrs. Sneed across the street and Mrs. Ashley — we had neighborhood and that sense of community. We really knew who the people were in the neighborhood — the person who drove the bus, the person who delivered mail. Now so many residents don’t even want to get to know each other. It’s a different atmosphere. In my neighborhood, we do have a groundswell of community. We have those pockets of neighbors we all love and give a card to or vegetables from our gardens. Still, it used to be stronger.” Sundy Whiteside, Board President of SLACO - St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, Co-Founder of the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative, and Co-Chair of the Vacancy Advisory Committee https://www.humansofstl.org/doh daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631225224208-XFZX1F16LLDTXFVH8B68/DSC_+84277.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Will Ross, MD, MPH, Associate Dean for Diversity at WashU School of Medicine and professor of medicine in the Renal Division “I left the St. Louis Regional Medical Center in 1996, and it closed a year later. I had been running four community health clinics and as I walked out of the hospital for the last time there were some dialysis patients outside waiting for the van to take them home. I saw a couple of my patients including Bea, who had to have been like 78 years old. Bea saw me, grabbed my hand, and said, ‘Dr. Ross, I know you’re going on to a new place, but please do not forget about us.’ I said, ‘Bea, how could I forget about you?’ She said, ‘Do you hear what I’m saying? Do not forget about us.’ All the patients gathered around me and she wouldn’t let go. She said, ‘You’re not hearing me. Don’t forget about US.’ And I really got it the third time. It wasn’t about them. It was about what we were doing at that hospital providing culturally appropriate care and showing humility towards individuals who were falling through the cracks.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631225373145-6L1N9Y4LCFQDJ8CZ0786/DSC_+84348.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Rhonda BeLue, PhD, Professor and Chair of the Health Management and Policy Program at SLU Public Health and Social Justice “Public health is important because it’s all those things that are highly visible. Of course, right now, everyone thinks public health is COVID shots, precautions, mask-wearing, not being able to do what we want to do because of restrictions. Public health has been brought to the forefront because of the pandemic. But it’s also why you go to a restaurant like Burger King to have a Whopper or Impossible burger and you don’t get diarrhea. You can go jogging and not get bit by a rabid dog. You can get a tuberculosis test. You can get an HIV test. Your water’s not contaminated. It’s all of the things that don’t happen to you because of public health that people don’t usually think about on a daily basis. Until something bad happens, like COVID, it’s not like it’s this hot social media meme. It’s not exciting. Like, ‘Hey! I went to St. Louis Bread Co. and I didn’t vomit after. Thank you, public health.’ But, I mean, who says stuff like, ‘I went jogging today and I did not get bit by a rabid dog.’ Maybe I should start a social media campaign about that.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631226002557-MKVN8BVRHHH9FNPUKUK7/DSC_+84402.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Timothy D. McBride, PhD, Co-Director, Center for Health Economics and Policy, Institute for Public Health, WashU “As a health economist, I’m a data person. So sometimes I meet people through the statistics. In a discussion, I try to bring in the numbers. If someone shares an anecdote, I can say, ‘I’m sorry, the statistics contradict that point. Here’s what the study cites.’ With fighting for Medicaid, for example, I get prepared with the numbers and say, ‘The truth is, 80% of the uninsured are working.’ Sometimes it’s heartening to do this work. I’ve gotten emails out of the blue from regular people throughout Missouri who were thrown off Medicaid or couldn’t get on it. They’d write a long story about how their son is disabled and they tried to get coverage, the State wouldn’t respond, and the people would ask if I could please help. One time I got an email with a problem, sent it to MO HealthNet staff at about 9 a.m., and we met at noon. When I raised the issue at the meeting, the director said, ‘We already fixed the problem.’ I tell that story not to pat myself on the back. But those were the kinds of experiences that make my work worthwhile.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631225756015-THAY75L4AG03YSQACQT3/DSC_+84134.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Cyril D. Loum, ED of Caring Ministries, Inc., Assistant Director of Venture Development at Skandalaris Center at WUSTL, and SLU Adjunct Professor “My fiancé came here from Cote d’Ivoire when she was 13 because of the war in Liberia, and she witnessed people in camps sleeping with four families in an 800-square-foot space. Just horrible conditions and that’s what they’ve known for a while. Then they come to America, transition to St. Louis, and anything is great compared to where they’ve come from. In the United States, we’re aware of what living standards are like and what it means to live in a great condition. So we have to educate new arrivals because in their African context, for example, their previous living conditions may have been great. But in St. Louis, it’s not great. You shouldn’t sleep on the floor with bed bugs on your mattress, rats running around your house, and asbestos in your walls. You shouldn’t have a ridiculous fever sitting at home when you should be at a hospital. Getting regular check-ups is something for the rich where they come from, so it’s not normal to them because they never had that. Then they arrive in this country and, I was going to say, we give them the bare minimum. But maybe we actually haven’t given them anything. Maybe we’ve just let them into the doors of our country and it appears that they’re happy when, in fact, we’ve failed in educating them. Organizations have had a great start, but we still have a long way to go.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631226714360-YSVRV18BLTGG1AUN6XJ3/DSC_+84049.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Susan Kendig, MSN, JD, WHNP-BC, FAANP, Women’s Health Integration Specialist with SSM Health–Maternal Services “For years, we focused on keeping babies healthy and we focused on high infant mortality, which in St. Louis is something we need to keep an eye on. In some zip codes, Black babies are dying at a rate three times greater than their white counterparts. Infant health gives us a snapshot into the health of a community and into the disparities because infants are among our most vulnerable members. But, as a women’s health provider, I like to invite us to back that up a bit. We’ve always looked at the baby’s health as the canary in the coal mine. I would argue that their mother’s health is equally important. Because if we pay attention to the mother’s health before, during, and between pregnancies, we are more likely to have better outcomes for both. If people are healthy before pregnancy, even if a pregnancy never occurs, we may have delayed or prevented chronic disease later in life. We may have been able to make sure preventative services are available so we’re screening for things like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes early.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631226288463-L5R4GVTYC0GBR3D6KZO5/DSC_+84323.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Paul Lee, DC, Chiropractor and Acupuncturist “There’s no such thing as being too healthy. Even though you’re healthy, your health can be improved even further. A community depends on the health of its citizens to be healthy. That’s why we need to keep the public as healthy as possible. As we’ve seen when a pandemic comes through, if you’re healthy, you’re more resistant to catching a disease versus if you were sick. A lot of us tend to put more emphasis on priorities like our clothes, our houses, our cars, and not our health. But without good health, you wouldn’t even be going outside. It’s usually the case that good health is something we tend to think about when we don’t have it. We take it for granted. And without it, it can be really debilitating.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631227847586-WAJ7ONXXL5MTVTYATK0T/DSC_+84104.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Linda L. Raclin, J.D., LL.M. “I’ve been very fortunate because my parents were both public school teachers and, as union members, they had very good health benefits. And I benefited from a college education, a law school education, and employment that gave me healthcare access. So I have not gone through a period of my life when I didn’t have healthcare. What a great privilege. My husband had a stroke recently and I realized how fortunate it is for our city to have world-class health care facilities right here. We’re just so extremely blessed. My husband was at Barnes Jewish Hospital’s neuro-ICU for two weeks. In that time, I was struck by the number of individuals who were in the waiting room from all over the Midwest with their suitcases piled up, using showers in the hospital, sleeping on couches. And I was so privileged to go home to shower, to catch a nap, or whatever else. To know that there have been half a dozen hospitals across the State of Missouri that have closed their doors and that so many people must travel to St. Louis when they have a serious health incident is a serious problem that we must confront. We need to make hospital access more available to everybody.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631227596329-UY7APN0VVBUUFMMBGMHC/DSC_+83985.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Luis Giuffra, MD, PhD, WUSTL Professor of Clinical Psychiatry “Addiction is the most human of diseases. It affects so many aspects of society and not just the person with the addiction. It affects the legal system, the healthcare system, the foster care system. As time goes by, more hospitals are treating these conditions instead of turning patients away. Hospitals have been notorious for neglecting this problem. The uninsured and underinsured addicted populations are not sexy topics for hospital marketing. Nobody’s going to have a fundraiser for people addicted to heroin. So for years, hospitals looked the other way for the most part. People can be taken to the ER on near-fatal overdoes and then be released an hour later without any treatment and with a bad taste in their mouth for how they’re treated there. In Missouri, a lot of very smart and dedicated people have been working to address the opioid epidemic. They’ve made remarkable contributions like popularizing a ‘Medication First’ model that has attracted national attention. They have made it easier for patients to access life-saving medications with little to no barriers. It is sobering that despite all these amazing efforts, the number of overdoses is climbing so much.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631228441585-RVAZWH0S0ZTTET880UDX/DSC_+84256.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Lisa Richter, founder of Stakeholder Insight “In St. Louis City and the inner suburbs, there are multiple zip codes with lead paint on and in old buildings. Children were eating the paint resulting in impaired cognitive developmental from brain damage that can lead to learning delays and permanent physical problems. The Department of Health hired a graphic designer to create posters asking parents to bring their kids to clinics and test them for lead poisoning. But before the campaign launched, my colleague said, ‘We need to hold some focus groups with people in our target audience to see if these drafts really convey the call to action and encourage people to get their kids tested. How do we do that?’ For almost 20 years, I was employed at FleishmanHillard, an international communications agency, where I led the market research group. My next role was at the United Way of Greater St. Louis as the Senior VP of Marketing and Brand Management. Eventually, I was introduced to the City of St. Louis Department of Health through a colleague who was then serving on the board. That’s when they were creating this public information campaign to encourage parents, grandparents, and guardians of infants and young children to have kids tested for lead poisoning. I recalled the importance of pretesting campaigns, so I volunteered to help.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631228780514-H1U4Z37WXOQBEGGFDRC5/DSC_+84197.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Serena Muhammad, SLMHB Deputy Director of Strategic Initiatives, Managing Director at the COVID-19 Regional Response Team “My first experience understanding what public health means came from working on environmental justice issues when I was in the public school system. We had this mandate to do outdoor experiential learning, which for us meant gardening. I was at a middle school in the City. Getting our first soil samples back from the lot next door to our school showed us wherever we grew, we couldn’t eat because the land was contaminated by lead. We were a part of a cohort of school districts across the region doing this initiative around urban agriculture and farming. And it was clear that many schools throughout St. Louis had to work around environmental hazards and our counterparts in the region had a whole different experience. I started to understand more about being stewards of the land we were working on and how asthma rates and lead poisoning were all impacting students. And it wasn’t just that we couldn’t get out and garden. We had more students diagnosed with learning disabilities, more families experiencing housing instability, and all of those things were environmental justice issues. So whenever I approach public health, I come from environmental justice because that was my background that led me into making sure people had safe places to live and thrive. And I’m not just talking about from gunfire, but that the land you’re walking on is safe, that the air is breathable, and that you’re not more likely to have asthma or lead poisoning because you live in the house you’re in and not somewhere else.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631230032572-81MAXA3E4VEPCZVSUU9Q/DSC_+84207.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Dr. Fredrick Echols, Former Director of the City of St. Louis Department of Health “In my personal life, everything was put on hold. I needed to make sure I was able to do my best to lead the City’s COVID-19 response. Communities were depending on me and I refused to give them less than my best. My family and friends were concerned about my health and wellbeing, but I had to complete the mission. In addition to fulfilling my director role, I was also filling the gaps for other positions. Because some of our federal grants were up for renewal, we were being audited, and we didn’t have enough personnel to fulfill other roles, I had to serve as the grants manager, the fiscal manager, and the HR manager. Things I had to put on the backburner were sleep and free time — all the things we take for granted. It got to the point that I was working 16- to 18-hour days, seven days a week just to stay afloat. But, failure was not an option. City of St. Louis residents deserve our best and that is what we gave them.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631229632880-1ZHGC7UWQ3Y2CIREN2X6/DSC_+84067.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Alma Poljarevic Baigi, PhD, LMFT, LPC, Mental Health Therapist “I think telehealth is going to normalize mental health, which is wild to think about because we work so hard on normalizing it. Everyone has an adjustment disorder. For you to seek mental health services, you don’t have to have depression or some major diagnosis or illness — all you need is to feel stress in your life and feel like you can be doing better coping with it. Then you talk to someone to make things okay. Many assume that to talk to a mental health professional, something has to be ‘wrong.’ And in some cultures, there’s a lot of stigma around seeing someone for mental health. Yeah, there’s anxiety resulting from this pandemic, but it’s also a time to sit and reevaluate things for ourselves. A lot of people are going to talk to a mental health professional because of anxiety and fear. But people are also sitting down to think about how they’re going through this experience and asking themselves, ‘What do I want my life to look like after this?’ I get calls from people saying, ‘I have some anxiety and difficulty adjusting to the situation.’ With all of us going through this time together, seeking mental health services is just another way we take care of ourselves.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631229844557-V5FOORI32LIE99QHUCRA/DSC_+83069.jpg St. Louis City Department of Health - Franda Thomas, M.Ed, City of St. Louis DOH Health Services Manager II, Women, Children, Adolescent Health & Communicable Disease “I’m a hands-on Manager. I do have a staff, but I also work cases. So early on in the pandemic, I called people and placed them on quarantine and I’d hear them ask, ‘What does quarantine mean?’ ‘Well, you need to stay home, take your temperature twice a day,’ yadda, yadda. This one lady told me, ‘But I don’t have a thermometer. How am I going to report back? That means I’m out of compliance. So what does that mean for public health?’ Okay, it’s one person. Next call, same thing: ‘We don’t have thermometers.’ We quickly saw a pattern. And when I told the director, ‘A lot of people don’t have thermometers. We’re quarantining people. How are they gonna get their bills paid? Single moms, the elderly — how are they gonna get diapers, formula for babies, and all those things if we’re telling them they are under quarantine?’ We were able to get a supply of thermometers and arranged to have them dropped off on their doorsteps. But that’s something none of us thought about. I mean, I’m a mom. I probably have 10 thermometers at home because that’s my household. But you’d never think so many people would need thermometers. It’s something simple, but it’s not.” https://www.humansofstl.org/generatehealth daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631049851889-SO27N66L321CAPUKG78K/image-asset.jpeg Generate Health - Make it stand out “Both of my girls have locs. And I cut my hair off when I was 17, which was almost 30 years ago. I told the good Lord when I cut my hair off that I was never, ever going to grow hair again. I was done because my experiences with it were too painful. Plus, I found my look with a bald fade that was quintessentially me. Well, the spirit in its infinite humor gave me two daughters with heads full of hair. It turned out that ‘never’ was not as long as I thought it was going to be. So, there I was in the salon with my youngest getting my baby’s hair done as she was moving and crying and screaming. And she was not having it. She didn’t want to get her locs touched up, but she also didn’t want me to do anything else with her hair. To calm her down, I tried everything. I gave her the iPad, held her hand, had her sit in my lap, bribed her with candy and gum. She still kept crying and moving. After about four hours, I said to her, ‘I cannot take it. Look, if you don’t get it together, we are going to the barbershop. You want Uncle Randall to cut your hair off?’ Randall’s my barber, but he’s like my brother. ‘He can cut it off and we don’t have to go through this ever again.’ Well, she wasn’t interested in this option either and continued with her full-fledged meltdown. In that moment, I called on my ancestors and said, ‘Y’all gonna have to help me right now. I need an intervention because I’m done. I’m going to get this hair off this child’s head and I’m not coming back to the salon ever again. I’m about to cry, so do something now. Please!’ And I kid you not, within 30 seconds a peace came through that shop and my child settled down. She got her hair done and it only took another 15 minutes. I could’ve kicked myself because I should have called on my ancestors for help in the first hour. The change was so pronounced, I knew exactly what was happening. And I said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for me and her.’” Rebeccah Bennett, Founder of Emerging Wisdom, InPower Institute & the Black Healers Collective, and 2020 Generate Health STL Judy Wilson-Griffin Maternal Health Equity Champion https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631050035399-33K93OL7404JS4QTOIBS/image-asset.jpeg Generate Health - Make it stand out “At first, I didn’t want the job. I just wanted to do a job. And the girl who wanted to hire me kept saying, ‘You will be good at Queen of Peace.’ I was like, ‘No, baby. That job is too important.’ I didn’t want to have to be in charge of anybody’s life. I mean, even when I leave and the clients see me out and about, I’m still responsible for what they see. I’m always wanting to be a vision of hope for them and sometimes I know I’m falling short. I tell myself, ‘I can’t believe you just said or did that.’ But, God is not done with me. I used to measure myself by what other people are doing or what they have. Now, I just want to know that I’m strong and I can do what’s necessary to be there for somebody else. People have been there for me so many times when I didn’t expect it. So I want to show up, fulfill my obligations, and make a difference here. That’s why I pray for strength. And to put a lot of expectations on the people I’m here to serve. When I overhear someone say there are women who shouldn’t be here, I don’t think about ‘where’ she is, I think about ‘why’ she is. If you’re constantly wondering why somebody got here and how she got here, then you never have time to judge. And what’s rewarding is when a woman leaves here and has a job, a place to live, and her babies are healthy and thriving.” Angela Ross, Queen of Peace Center House Manager and 2020 Generate Health STL Alderman Gregory Carter Community Champion https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631050245986-7N7QWH8T6S2SQIY74PM8/image-asset.jpeg Generate Health - Make it stand out “When my dad went through chemo, he played tennis all the time. People were so amazed he was still playing. One day after chemo, he went outside to fertilize my grass, too. I was like, ‘Ain’t you supposed to be in the house?’ He said, ‘I’m not going to sit around and do nothing.’ In January, we got a CT scan which showed everything was clear. We were so excited. Everything was clear and we were so excited. The chemo was working. A few days later, I took him to the doctor again and thought something was not right. He was acting very strange. We got him an MRI and found out the cancer spread to his spinal fluid, which is a rare area for metastasis. At that point, he could only receive radiation. That was the second moment I knew I had to prepare myself for what was going to come. The nurse practitioner handed me the MRI results. I burst into tears. My dad looked at me and said ‘Kanika, what does it say, come tell me?’ I’ll never forget that moment because I walked over, I told him, and he said, ‘It’s okay.’ He stayed in the hospital for a few days to try radiation and after that failed, we took him home on hospice. My mom and siblings took care of him. We had family and friends who visited. We never left his bedside. He took his last breath on a Saturday morning. And even in that moment, there was something spiritual behind it and I actually felt okay. I often recall those feelings and gain strength and restore faith. It was more than just my father dying. It was a spiritual elevation, too.” Kanika A. Turner, MD, MPH, Family Care Health Center and 2020 Generate Health STL Dr. Corinne Walentik Provider/Practitioner Champion https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631050501078-DRCYUACACQ6GR68QINR9/image-asset.jpeg Generate Health - Make it stand out “Radical forgiveness looks like not having to hold onto the hurt. When we hold onto it, it doesn’t hurt the people who hurt us. It just hurts us. There’s power in that hurt and power in knowing when to put it down. Radical imagination looks like community. It looks like the most marginalized people sitting and speaking at the table while the most powerful are listening. It looks like humanizing equity and a place where everybody’s thoughts and ideas are taken into account and potentially implemented. This shows up in how I parent. My nephew wrote a story about how this little boy who was a really good kid, who did really good things, went to school and got really bad grades. His parents went up to the school to talk to the teacher and the teacher said, ‘It’s because your son is a bad kid.’ But the kid is trying to say, ‘No, I’m actually a good kid!’ Then the boy goes home and starts doing bad things because, ‘If you think I’m a bad person, that’s who I might be.’ The average parent would read that story and ask, ‘Why did you spend so much time talking about negative? There’s no balance.’ They might critique the story instead of asking, ‘What you’re trying to tell me is that you feel like school is unfair? Are you trying to tell me you feel invisible and stereotyped by your teacher? Or that you’re having thoughts about causing harm to yourself and others because of how you feel? How do we think beyond to help you deal with this moment?’ Radical imagination and my parenting look like lifting my babies up when they have an experience versus shutting them down, shaming them, and trying to force obedience.” Dr. Amber Johnson, Founding Director Of The Justice Fleet, Co-founder of The Institute for Healing Justice and Equity, Associate Professor of Communication and Social Justice at SLU and 2020 Generate Health STL Dr. Terry Leet Researcher Champion https://www.humansofstl.org/explorestlouis daily 0.75 2022-02-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644788377005-YMA71FI6PINCBMYJ5Y31/DSC_+82804.jpg Explore St. Louis “As I sat there pouring my heart out, one of my girlfriends turned to me and said, ‘Quit.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, quit? You don’t quit corporate America. Not at the level that I had gotten to. Everyone would think I was nuts.’ She goes, ‘Quit.’ I asked, ‘What would I do if I quit?’ My other girlfriend was laughing and she turned to me and goes, ‘You’re always complaining St. Louis doesn’t have good ice cream. And you love nothing more than to go home — when you are home — and make all these crazy ice creams for parties, for friends, for everything. That’s your passion. Go open an ice cream shop.’ I thought, ‘Hmm, that’s an interesting idea.’ Literally that weekend, we wrote my business plan, put together my PowerPoint deck, ran my financials, and finished my marketing plan. I resigned two weeks later and I’ve never looked back.” - Tamara Keefe, owner of Clementine’s Naughty & Nice Creamery https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644788676123-22O690HM89T8DXRG9DY4/DSC_4358.jpg Explore St. Louis “I love St. Louis. St. Louis has afforded me a 22-year career in media on my own terms. That is unheard of in the industry. I would not have been able to do anything I’ve done in my career had I tried it in New York, L.A., or Chicago. I don’t know what the next chapter is. That freaks me out a little bit, but I have to have hope and faith that just like Vital VOICE landed in my lap, something else is going to land in my lap, too. If I don’t have that belief, and I don’t have that faith that the right opportunity will come along, I don’t think that would be very St. Louis.” - Darin Slyman, former owner and publisher, Vital Voice Magazine and Maximize St. Louis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644789105218-U42TFXXR57YRW8Y5Z151/DSC_1723.jpg Explore St. Louis “The people of St. Louis are very loyal to our area. I noticed quickly that as a resident of St. Louis, you can say all the crap you want about St. Louis. But the moment you meet a non-resident of St. Louis talking crap about St. Louis, it’s on. I don’t care what neighborhood, what area — City or County — I don't care how far away you are, they will fight you to the death on that. Sometimes Chicagoans are like, ‘Cool. I’m from Chicago. Case made. Done. Bye.’ Overall, people have been so welcoming and so interested in me when I meet them. And it’s interesting that people here try to immediately identify you and want to know where you’re from and what your background is. ‘Well, I'm from Chicago. So you can’t ask me what high school I went to.’ Then when I say I’m living Downtown, it throws them a little bit, because they don’t know what to make of me. And I LOVE that.” - Barry Draper, Director of Partnership, Explore St. Louis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644789575874-1L7PH0MLJFD2VXHUD98S/Gabriella+and+Junior.jpg Explore St. Louis “I wanted to be a part of writing a book about networking because I finally figured out how to do it. And there are still a lot of people who need help understanding the importance of it. At the end of the day, I can't succeed if I don't help other people succeed. That's really what success should be about.” - Gabriela Ramirez-Arellano, owner of Don Emilianos, podcast host of Auténtico, author, and business counselor at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644789763554-3V5MNWG14PPGT9I25A38/DSC_4805.jpg Explore St. Louis “You visit here and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, St. Louis? I didn’t know you’re like that. You’re lookin’ kind of sexy.’ Then you come back and you’re like, ‘You can buy a three-bedroom house here for about $130,000? I’m there.’” - Katie Stuckenschneider, Marketing and Digital Media Manager, Forest Park Forever https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644789898111-Z6FZGYO149I2YHE666NS/DSC_5111.jpg Explore St. Louis “When you come to The Muny, the person next to you may look, act, or feel nothing like you. But if something funny happens on stage and you laugh, or something sad happens and you cry at the same time, it’s impossible to not feel that commonality for that split second.” - Kwofe Coleman, President & CEO, The Muny https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644790048725-MEN6NDKDPPNV83JTLUW7/DSC_1573.jpg Explore St. Louis “I’m proud of this city and the people in it. I’m proud to buy a coffee from La Mancha, a BLT from Crown Candy, and a lemongrass chicken salad from Sen Thai and know my money is going directly to the person who makes me want to spend time in St. Louis.” - Lindsay Pattan, Principal & Lead Publicist, PATTAN & CO. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644790270377-DPR5BWQGPOZPPXIBHP3X/NickBognar_Indo_Headshots+%281+of+9%29.jpg Explore St. Louis “I was finally getting what I wanted: a blank canvas, a little restaurant with 50 seats, sole proprietorship, creative control, and responsibility for everything. Mom was at City Hall getting permits the day before the soft opening. Dad was doing the accounting, running projections, and making sure we have credit lines. And I just wanted to be part of the young population that makes St. Louis cool to live in.” - Nick Bognar, owner, Indo - STL https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644790407407-MCCKWOV0MHPAPKJDYBFV/DSC_4940.jpg Explore St. Louis “Rolling Stones and U2 were my first concerts here. There was a country music festival we used to have, too. And we had all the screaming girls here for NSYNC and New Kids on the Block when they were big. It’s been a great experience, and I enjoy seeing what it takes to get things set up behind the scenes for an event.” - Nila Tuckson, Vice President of Human Resources, Explore St. Louis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1644790799676-QD6WV21Q5BQFKSL69EF2/DSC_0041.jpg Explore St. Louis “Even though I was born in Vietnam, I’m a St. Louis boy through and through. I grew up in The Hill in the ’80s and ’90s. I’m proud to be a St. Louisan. This is my city. I ain’t going anywhere.” - Qui Tran, founder of Nudo House STL, and co-owner of Mai Lee Restaurant https://www.humansofstl.org/bbbsemo daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631222362256-2QZG33C0WMXG7SDQZMQ9/image-asset.jpeg Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri - Make it stand out “When I met my Big Brother, man – you never seen a cooler breeze than Bill. He walked in the room and everybody’s shoulders just kind of relaxed. I think my Little Brother Kiari’s already figured that out. First words out of his mouth anytime I tell him about a stressful situation is, ‘Yeah, you just gotta relax.’ I’m 41 right now, and Kiari’s helping me learn that even more. The first time my wife met him, she sat there with her mouth open. She’s never met anyone that can make me stop talking. By the time I drop him off after hanging out, I’ve got to pull around the corner away from his house, get out of the car, and put my hands on my knees like, ‘Oh my goodness,’ because he’s just boom, boom, boom. Our very first hangout, Kiari asked me, ‘How do solar panels work?’ I wasn’t ready for that. ‘I’m going to have to get back to you, so let’s just enjoy this.’ When I came back the next time, I talked to him about solar panels. And he said, ‘Yeah… Then where does the energy go?’ I was like, ‘Hold on. Google, let’s talk solar panels.’ And Google was like, ‘Oh, you with Kiari again?’” Big Brother, Randy, and Little Brother, Kiari https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631133923218-PEVEFQIHLU5B8GERG3Z7/image-asset.jpeg Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri - Make it stand out “By the time I was my daughter’s age, I already had such a distrust and hate for adults. I had been violated. I already did drugs. My stepdad’s dad tried to rape me. I stabbed him, and I got 10 years. I’ve struggled with addiction, my mental health, and, now, my physical health – just daily living can knock the wind out of me – and she has to deal with it. I feel bad for her sometimes. And there are times I say, ‘One day, we’re gonna get to grow old together.’ It’ll matter that she wasn’t addicted to drugs and alcohol, it’ll matter that she wasn’t raped, it’ll matter that she wasn’t molested. It’ll matter that she didn’t go to prison. One day, these things are really going to make a difference in her life. It’ll matter that she got to do regular things like a regular kid. She got to go to high school, she got to graduate, she got to see and do things that I never would’ve been able to do. I don’t think my mother knew half the time what I did. But I don’t miss a beat with my daughter because that’s mine. That’s my moment. My biggest fear is that she’ll grow up and have all these resentments and anger towards me. I’m praying that because I went out of my way to keep her in a better position, one day she’ll look back and say, ‘Mom, thank you. I appreciate it.’” Kimmie and Synmar https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631223782836-FEJBUAQ9UG1UCTRHEH0Z/DSC_2724.jpg Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri - Make it stand out “If I wasn’t a police officer, I would still be doing some type of mentoring. I’m very committed to doing this type of work because it needs to be done. Like my current Little Brother who lives in North St. Louis, I grew up in the city in – I guess what you would say – a bad area for our standards: a lot of single moms, a lot of unemployment, not a lot of men in the neighborhood actually being family members, a lot of violence, poverty, drug use, a lot of hopelessness. Not a lot of opportunity. The biggest thing that my Little Brother and I have in common is a shared background when it comes to certain viewpoints, feelings, language. If he tells me his problems, I don’t have to try to understand them. I do understand them. Growing up in my neighborhood, we didn’t have a lot of positive male role models that looked like I did. Young black youth don’t have to follow the path that other men or their neighborhood have shown them, or what society has told them they’re likely to do. So when they have someone who comes from their neighborhood that looks like them, some Littles can relate, and that can give them hope.” Big Brother, D, and Little Brother, J https://www.humansofstl.org/forestparkforever daily 0.75 2022-02-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631049513092-99U9LC409KIT907E53JL/image-asset.jpeg Forest Park Forever - Make it stand out “After COVID shut things down, my kids and granddaughter didn’t visit for three whole months. I’m diabetic, so I’m at higher risk and they were so worried they might accidentally expose me to the virus. I was scared to leave the house and didn’t even go to work at our family restaurant. Then I started exhibiting signs of depression. I couldn’t sleep and was feeling overwhelmed about everything, which had never happened before. I’ve always been a positive person to the point that when people see me, they expect a smile. It got to be too much. Once I decided to come out of the house, the thing that helped the most was being outside in nature. My daughter tries to show me new places, so this is my first time here in Forest Park. She comes here two or three times a week. I love taking pictures outside, so I’ve been stopping us constantly. She keeps telling me, ‘C’mon, mom, there’s more over there.’ I don’t know if I can keep up with her!” https://www.humansofstl.org/seniorfund daily 0.75 2022-02-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631137395725-OKK71I0YEX31Y3O3M5MW/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “I was wild and ambitious, always wanting to party and never study. I didn’t get into any real trouble, but I was mischievous. Grandma kicked my butt — breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She’d tell me not to do something, but I had to find out for myself. I ended up married at age 17. We stayed together for 10 years. I was crazy and in love and my wife was persistent. My family wasn’t in such a hurry. They were constantly asking, ‘Why so fast?’ But right after my wife and I graduated high school, we jumped the broom Downtown and had a big celebration at her house. I had a good job and we were always going out partying on the weekends. It was great in the beginning, but she was spoiled and I paid for it. I caught her dating other guys. She told me she still loved me, but I used it as an excuse and started dating people too. She couldn’t take it. I disappeared to L.A. for a while to pursue a dancing career, and when I came back, we got a divorce. I ended up giving her everything — all the money, her white mink coat. Supporting her was a financial burden and I knew I could make more money having that lifted. It was then that I started trying to find myself again.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631137990807-A4PRW8DRUYSELQ63YQ6K/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “My family were sharecroppers in Mississippi, living on a farm and working in the fields. I told my grandad, ‘When I get older, I’m going to have a house with big trees.’ It was my dream ever since I was a little girl. I used to go from house to house watching people’s kids while the older folks worked. But then my mother got sick and I had to take care of her. I think she knew she was going to die. One night, I was combing her hair and she kept staring at me. I said, ‘What’s wrong, Mama?’ She just looked at me and said, ‘Nothing.’ I helped her get to bed and said goodnight. The next morning I walked into her room and she had already passed. She had a stroke. I fell down on the floor and started crying. It took me a while to start feeling better. And here I am at 85. I got all the time she never had.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631138114294-VZZXFH56WJJBIMKMLEBQ/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “If I really need something, Steve’s the person I reach out to. Every time I give him a call, he’s right there. I always tell people he’s my twin brother and the only difference between us is he’s a little taller. Our sons were about the same age when we moved into the neighborhood and they all lived one block over. After our boys started hanging out, it was just a matter of time before we met him and his wife. She passed about a year ago and I’ve been a widower for 17 years, so we’ve been good friends. But it definitely changed when I got my wheelchair. There’s a new level of vulnerability. I’ve got a good sense of humor and understand what it’s like to lose your partner, so I like to think I support him too.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631138227932-9MI792QLEIST3T1KZVPX/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “When immigrants arrive in a new country, most struggle with everything from language to culture. For some of my clients, I am the only person they trust. Whenever they have a problem or question, they call me right away. Mai Chinh’s family has been one that has needed a great deal of support. She told me once, ‘We depend on you for everything.’ I’ve been working with her and her family since I began as a Community Access Worker at BIAS. The first time we met, they needed help with a food stamp application. I couldn’t understand what they were saying on the phone because they spoke a certain dialect of Vietnamese. So, I drove to their house. The house had no heat, AC, or hot water. I got some space heaters for them and then contacted the landlord and the utility company. After that, I started visiting them every other week and we talk on the phone a lot. When Mai Chinh calls, she asks, ‘When are you coming home?’” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631138401879-PWN1K2B0VZSKDB8T27XK/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “I used to watch my husband when he fixed things. He knew how to do a lot — electricity and other minor repairs. I would say, ‘I can’t do that.’ If something had to be done, I just had to ask him. After he was gone, I told myself, ‘I can’t be calling on everybody all the time.’ I’m a fast learner, so I ended up installing a sensor on my back porch and then a thermostat in my son’s room. When the folks from Mission: St. Louis came out, they asked, ‘Who put that thermostat up?’ They were impressed that I did a good job. I had the screws just right and everything. But there are always still some things I need support with. My bathroom floors corroded and it was pretty scary. So the same folks came back to put in new floors and a shower. They even installed a grab bar so I could pull myself up in there. They’re going to fix my cabinets next. They’ve done an excellent job so far. Last time, I sent every one of them a thank-you note for everything they did for me and my family.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631138479960-4X7402QFN28JFPNYSGT9/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “Some of the houses I used to clean were for realtors and property investors so I got to see the basics of their work. After a while, I thought, ‘I can do this too,’ and bought my first property in Lafayette Square. I had daughters in private schools and one who was ready to go off to college. So I saw property investment as something I needed to do for my kids and it grew from there. Each house or condo I bought had a different personality. To me, it was almost like playing with giant dollhouses, going in and trying to put the pieces back together. The best part was when I found someone who came in after me and wanted to love on it too. I’ve owned around 50 properties over my lifetime and the last one I had was in Bevo Mill. I had owned and cleaned properties all over the City, but there was something special about this area. So I decided to stay. I’ve always had a love affair with the City. If you ask me, St. Louis is the heart of the state. Like a body — if the heart goes, then the whole body goes.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631138660037-OVGFIZ0PKYNJ2P44PIND/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “My sister, Vera, and I had been adopted together. We were so close. She was born in September and I was born in July, so we were the same age for a few months out of the year. We looked alike too. When we were coming up, she was always telling on me. It’s funny thinking about it now. There was this one time we were having a tea party in my room. Our adopted mom went to get lemonade and cookies. Vera lit a cigarette and had me watching the door while she smoked. I got distracted talking and didn’t see Mom coming back into the room. Vera tried to hide the cigarette, so she threw it in my closet and it caught on fire. She told our mom we were both smoking and I got a whooping too. I was so mad! Vera ended up dying from AIDS in 2004. She kept it a secret. She was incarcerated for a while and when she was released, they put her in a nursing home. I visited her one day after work and walked in on her in the bathroom crying. She had her back to me and there were these dark, round spots all over it. I said, ‘What’s wrong? You need to ask the doctors to check on you.’ But she didn’t say anything to me in return. Eventually, they sent her to the hospital. One of our close friends visited every day. The nurses assumed that was her sister and told her Vera had been battling AIDS since 1990. It hurt when I found out. I didn’t care what she had. She was my sister.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631139351617-UMBVSVDIJGQFSGDP0IE0/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “I’ve got four kids and I’ve got a favorite. If anybody tells you otherwise, don’t listen to them. I try telling my kids, ‘I love you all the same.’ But then they just say, ‘We know Dildred is number one!’ It’s the truth. She’s a straight shooter and tells you exactly as it is. Plus, she always follows through with what she says she’ll do. Recently, I needed some work done on my teeth. They’d been hurting bad, but my insurance wouldn’t kick in until I paid a copay. And they’d remove my teeth, but not replace them. I said, ‘That’s not going to work. How am I supposed to eat?’ So I asked a few people to help, but they didn’t come through. The copay was only $44. I finally called my daughter and she said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got you.’ She called up the dentist’s office and used her credit card to pay over the phone. That’s the kind of daughter she is.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631138762725-1XJM3VP279CFAMAL45KL/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis City Senior Fund - Make it stand out “Mom would get frustrated because she didn’t understand Dad’s dementia. She saw him physically, but who he had been wasn’t truly there anymore. She couldn’t fault him or talk to him in the same way and she had a hard time with that. My mother’s dementia was completely different. Early on, if she lost her train of thought in the middle of a sentence, she would say, ‘You’re going to have to excuse me. You know I have dementia.’ She started to have symptoms before my father’s death, but I didn’t notice because I was a daddy’s girl and it was all about him. There were three of us girls — me, my sister, and my niece — and dad was adored. In his lucid moments, he would say, ‘You’re always concerned about me, but you need to check your mother out. She’s not right.’ My mom had always been the strong one who kept us all together. It took my dad’s passing for me to see where my mom was in her dementia. If I look back, I can see it now. There were a couple of times when Mom was driving Dad and both of them got lost. Then there was the time I left the house and when I came back, I walked into a mini-fire with the dryer and the dryer vent and my parents didn’t know what to do. I told myself I was never going to put either of them in a home. But it came to a point where I was truly not physically able to take care of them and I knew I couldn’t leave both of them at home.” https://www.humansofstl.org/stlouiscommunitycreditunion daily 0.75 2021-09-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631140259136-9HMP6BO8OHTKXVEN9ZYO/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis Community Credit Union - Make it stand out “I’m not even that healthy of a guy. I eat junk food all the time. I have the privilege of choice, so I can choose to eat burgers and fries or eat healthily. But after moving from Houston to St. Louis for medical school, I realized not everyone could choose to eat healthy. As a student, I saw people in this city struggling to find and afford healthy food where they live because it just didn’t exist. And I got a double dose because, while on rotations in the hospital, I saw the side effects of this disparity manifesting as heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. This was especially frustrating because minorities are disproportionately affected by food inequity as many live where there are no grocery stores. Moreover, they have limited resources and transportation to be able to access good food in neighboring communities. So, over time, the lessons we’re supposed to learn about what to eat and how to prepare it are never learned. I was motivated to learn as much as I could about food deserts and food access. And I knew then that I had to do something about it. If good food didn’t exist in these neighborhoods, I was determined to bring it to them.” Jeremy Goss, Founder, The Link Market https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631141082844-8ZIE5D9P1BTAO02QWPR5/image-asset.jpeg St. Louis Community Credit Union - Make it stand out “If you stood in the lobby for a day and just asked people, ‘Tell me your story,’ everybody walks in here. Years ago, at 6:30 in the morning, I showed up and there was a guy sitting in the drive-thru. I said, ‘What are you doing? We don’t open ‘til 9:00. He said, ‘I’m an early riser. I don’t have any gas in my car and I don’t have any money. I can’t go anywhere.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll give you five bucks so you can get some gas and you don’t have to sit in this line.’ And he brought it back to me. There’s a woman who came in and said, ‘I need some money. I need a withdrawal because I need to get diapers.’ It’s not high finance. It’s getting people through the day. It’s easy to judge. Wants don’t diminish because you don’t have means. That’s just human nature. That’s behavioral economics. I heard it said that the consumer as a superhero would not be Superman. They would look more like Homer Simpson. We make a lot of bad decisions every day whether we have money or not. If somebody gets a used car loan, what is the multiplier on that economic mobility? Now they have wider access to a job market. How narrow is the job market just based on public transportation? We give someone access to a used car and, holy cow! Now they can get a job and have a life to lead as opposed to spending all their downtime connecting buses. Little things like that make a big difference. So we take the risk to do it where others don’t, and we’re rewarded accordingly.” Patrick Adams, Former St. Louis Community Credit Union CEO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1631140748089-JIUG1JZFJ2BWFWIGVOZA/DSC_8502.jpg St. Louis Community Credit Union - Make it stand out “The whole idea is not to say, ‘Just save $25.’ You can save anything from spare change to five dollars. But just make sure that it’s being put away. Most people think, ‘I can’t save,’ and it’s because they have this idea that saving requires you to save $50 or more. But, no. My boss and I, we were saving dollar bills – just dollar bills that had the first letter of ‘C’ or ‘G’ or ‘H’ or whatever one we chose that’s in the circle on the bill that indicates which Federal Reserve Bank it came from. Like, ‘A’ comes from New York, and ‘H’ is from St. Louis. So every time we would see an ‘H,’ we would tuck that dollar away. I wasn’t using my debit card. I made it an intention to use cash. I just put whatever was left over from the day or week in a little piggy bank and didn’t touch it. When I opened my piggy bank at the end of the year, I had saved close to $400. Like, ‘Oh, wow! That’s a lot.’ It was a little bit past Christmas when I treated myself and went on a trip to visit family. So it’s as simple as saving your extra change every day and putting it away. You can do it! You may need to figure out the sacrifices you need to make, but it’s possible.” Destini Goodwin, Managing Director, Fathers’ Support Center https://www.humansofstl.org/stlouiscommunityfoundationandinveststl daily 0.75 2022-02-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/3f30b805-83ea-4d9e-aff9-4da30ac879ca/DSC_9402.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “I’m just walking Willie and Fez and picking up the recycling. Recycling is something we all should be doing something more of. We have a clean-up day here in Hamilton Place in the spring. We get a few dumpsters, neighbors come out, and students help. We’re hoping to get a regular cleanup day in the fall. My first grandchild was born this year and I want to be able to say to him that I did something. I doubt it’s going to be enough, but if more people do it… I joke that when I get done picking up the recycling, then I’ll get started on the other trash. I don’t think I’m ever going to get there. At least, not at this rate.” - Robert Strikwerda, West End resident, Board member of West End Neighbors, Representative to Saint Louis Association of Community Organizations, & Saint Louis University Women's and Gender Studies Department https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/b361a3a5-5ef2-4934-8874-b601bef50ff2/DSC_9418.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “I’ve been living in this area for more than 17 years. I think of myself as a pioneer. I’ve seen the neighborhood change at least three or four times. When I first moved here, it was rougher than what it is now and most of the houses were vacant, abandoned, or empty. My neighbor bought his house for $1,000. My house also was a stupid steal. I live in a historical home with six fireplaces, and the architect that built it is the same one who built Union Station. It’s made from the same stones too. I saw some of the plans for the trolley 10 years ago and, in that time, I’ve seen a turn in the neighborhood. People care enough that they’re trying to bring this area back. It’s amazing because as time went on I could see housing prices rising. And there are mansions over here, so you know that at some point there had to be people of wealth in this area. I bought my house from a lady who was 104 years old. I think of myself as a pioneer. I’m the third owner in 130 years, and I imagine I’m the first Black person to live here who wasn’t a slave.” - Julin Harrell, West End resident https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/7bfbeb8d-58c7-422d-8314-1fbe49c6dd88/DSC_9426.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “I’m a chef. I’ve worked in four different restaurants on Delmar. I have a catering business, and I rent my house out for parties. We had a masquerade party here, everybody was dressed in costumes. And since Cabanne Place has a history of ghost stories, I had a booklet of the stories that were read as you went up and down the street in carriages. I’ve had so many different incredible parties, from baby reveals to a memorial service. My girlfriend had a memorial service for her ex-husband here. We had live music because he was a musician, and it was a party. I didn’t know they had him on the mantle in the living room until I went in there. They had a picture on an easel and next to the easel was a vase. I said, ‘What is that?’ And my friend said, ‘That’s him.’ I thought we were having a memorial service for him, but I didn’t know he was actually here. It didn’t even register in my mind that it was him until they said, ‘Well, it is HIS party. Shouldn’t he be here?!’” - Julin Harrell, West End resident https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/0a7f56ad-cbc7-47cb-a8c4-0de3af743d4a/DSC_9451.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “When I pull up in my neighborhood and nobody tells me that somebody got shot or robbed or anything like that, it’s a smooth day. When one person gets hurt, it doesn’t just affect one person. It affects everybody — friends, neighbors, their cousins, their brothers, their sisters. We take care of the old people around here. We look out for them. If there are some people that don’t have family, we buy them something to eat, take out their trash. It’s basically like any other neighborhood. It may seem like it’s bad over here, but it’s no different here. We know everybody over here, except for the new people who move over here. They look at us like we’re somewhere we’re not supposed to be. And we’ve been here our whole lives. So instead of them getting to know us, they’re looking at us strange. But we’re somewhere, we’ve always been. This is home.” - Lamarkco Sherrill, West End resident https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/d53b5928-602a-4c7c-8826-424e65c0d71e/DSC_+83007.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “I walked by a lady up the street, and I didn’t know her from a can of paint, but her car broke down and I was trying to act funny. She worked at Dominos, so I was like, ‘I want some Dominos.’ She said, ‘I’m finna be late. I can’t even get there. I can’t even get a jump.’ I had just hopped out of my friend’s car, so I made them come back. She was thinking I was playing, but I was like, ‘No, I’m gonna have them give you a jump, for real.’ So my friend pulls back up to help her, and she was so shocked. She was sitting there talking to us for like 10 more minutes. I was like, ‘You don’t owe me anything. Just get to work.’ She was like, ‘Thank you! God’s going to bless you.’ I said, ‘It ain’t nothing.’ I’m young, but men of respect raised me. I’ve come up under them. You’ve got certain people who want to see you do better in life the right way. When you’ve been around somebody for so long, and you feel the genuine love, you’ll understand. They don’t come up to me like, ‘Nephew, go hit the corner and do this…’ No. Instead, they’re asking, ‘Are you in school? Are you playing sports? What’s up with those grades? What do you have going on, and what do you need?’” - Rashad Buchannon, West End https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/32443a91-c71a-45c6-9d4f-b6159c7bae06/DSC_+83008.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “The park here didn’t use to look like this. Gang members used to hang out there, and it was so vandalized and torn up that you wouldn’t have your kids play there. The people who fixed the park came out and asked us, ‘How do you feel about the park? Would you like to see a new park here? Would you like to see the community come back up?’ And they came back, and they fixed it. Over the years, they put the water fountain in and the soft stuff on the playground so kids wouldn’t hurt themselves. So if people speak up, it does count. It felt good that they cared, that they actually came here and made a difference. They could have just come out here and not asked questions and said, ‘There are dope dealers out here and drug addicts. We need to shut this park down. This isn’t right.’ They didn’t do that. They saw those people sitting out there and doing wrong. I’m pretty sure they walked through here and saw a couple of bad things that they shouldn’t have. But they didn’t judge. They asked what was going on.” - Courtney Buchannon, West End resident https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/bccb0904-f6d7-47e0-8923-871a41691b5c/DSC_+83009.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “When you put a group of minorities together, what do you think is going to happen? You put us all in one small community, and you put a liquor store on every corner and gas stations filled with vandalism, and you want us to live like this. We have to find a way out on our own. It’s not up to statistics for what we’re going to be, but I feel like they’re already planning for us to be at the bottom of a totem pole. Our St. Louis Public Schools don’t get funded with the new books and new computers, but go to Clayton or Eureka schools, and they have Promethium boards. Over here, we don’t have any recreation centers where kids go and play. I would like to see a homeless shelter over here, a newer gym, or a recreation center where all the kids can go after school. I want something where kids can go outside and say, ‘I’m going here, Mom. I’ll be right back,’ or have mentors, and tutors, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and counselors, so there are people who check on you and see if you’re doing all right.” - Shana Buchannon, West End resident https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/e2c10f60-479d-4f60-ac52-9fca7ebe5f5c/DSC_+83010.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “I look at our neighborhood like a family. Every family has some dysfunction, but we all have to suit up and boot up and certainly serve and encourage each other. A lot of neighborhoods in the city have that one apartment building where they know people are probably selling drugs, but nobody talks to the people. Nobody connects with them. Nobody says, ‘Hi, what’s up?’ or waves. Instead, when they get to a stop sign, they turn their heads like, ‘I don’t even want them to see me. I don’t want them to look my way.’ So, doing this community engagement plan, it’s important for us to be intentional and engage with everyone. Everybody has a purpose. Even the person we sometimes turn our heads from to not make eye contact. C’mon! They have a purpose. We need their voices at the table so that when we create this community development plan for our neighborhood, it’s encouraging and motivating them. And the only way we can do it is through partnerships, and partnerships only happen through relationships, and relationships only happen through trust.” - Keaira Anderson, West End resident and Executive Director, Cornerstone STL https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/f5d1af52-389d-4f4b-a0a1-692a6c79fe97/DSC_9578.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “She meets kids every day at this park. There are kids who come out and play here every day, and everyone plays with them. They all go to the same school district. I have not yet seen a fight or anyone about to get into a fight. They might play a little rough, get upset and leave, but they come back the next day ready to play. They’re laughing, having fun, and they’re not actually doing anything. These kids are big enough for bikes and scooters and games, and I’m happy that they’re out here just playing. They don’t have a tablet or phone they’re interested in. They’re running around and using their imagination. The promise I see is that this generation is going to make a better neighborhood because of how close they are growing up with each other and, hopefully, stick together longer.” - Carl and Carly Davis, Dutchtown residents https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/a0486ac9-c36d-4405-ad33-49ca8575e362/DSC_+83011.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “My parents are from Bhutan, and they moved to Nepal in 1991 before I was born. But I never had citizenship there because I was born in a refugee camp and lived there for 17 years. When we had to choose the state and city in the U.S. where we wanted to come, we chose this city because our relatives already came here and said good things about St. Louis. They told us, ‘We have an arch and a large river,’ and I had studied about the Arch back in my country. Now, I am naturalized here, and it’s going to be six years since I moved here. It was kind of difficult at first because we were new. But now it’s actually cool. I went to high school here. I’ve learned about the people. I’ve learned about the jobs. I got a better job. And our neighbors are really good. When my mom was sick, because she has asthma and gets shortness of breath if she walks longer than 15 minutes, we called the ambulance. And the neighbors came out and helped us carry her. It made me feel safe because we didn’t even know them, but they helped. So I’m most proud of being in St. Louis, being a citizen, and that I’m with my parents.” - Aite Magar, Dutchtown resident https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/1f183fae-cbc2-42cd-b3ff-994bc7d8f24e/DSC_+83012.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “This used to be a convenience store when I was a kid, but it’s been gone since longer than I was old enough to remember. My dad loves to tell the story about how I wandered over there by myself when I was about three years old. My parents were asleep, and I piled up all the furniture like an escape artist, climbed up, and unlocked the front door. They found me here trying to buy donuts at six o’clock in the morning. It’s been closed for over 20 years now. Just recently they boarded everything up.” - Chase Oberle, Dutchtown resident https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/c529be61-9dce-4794-9dff-88f8a104235f/DSC_+83013.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “The good thing about the neighborhood is that it’s convenient to everywhere. I can hop on the 55, 44, or 270. The older people have been here forever, and they’re great neighbors. But I’ve witnessed a hit-and-run, there are shootings all the time, I’ve seen more prostitution here in the last five years, and the reason for the prostitution is the drugs. I’ve seen people shooting up behind my building and at the gas station, and ladies and gentlemen walk the streets day and night. I haven’t looked into what the community’s doing about it, but I’d like to know. The main thing is getting help for those who need it and getting them off the streets. Just yesterday, I saw a lady walking completely naked on Grand and Meramec — totally naked with her hands covering her up in front. It was unbelievable. Everyone was so shocked that they were just gawking. After a while, the police came. I’ve never seen her before. I’ve never seen that before. And I had my 7-year-old and my 4-year-old boys with me.” “When’s the last time you’ve walked completely naked down the street?” “A few years ago in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. What’s the name of it? Hedonism. You gotta go sometime.” - Aaron Wilson, Dutchtown residents https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/60584a5b-5852-4459-8343-7a4c69dbf30a/DSC_+83014.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “We’ve been here three years, and we are the youngest Mexican restaurant business on the street. At a certain point in my life, I wondered, ‘What am I doing for myself? What can I offer to my family?’ I wanted to build a business, but I never thought I would have a restaurant. I was working for another restaurant for 12 years, nine as a kitchen manager, and when I hit 30, I wanted to give myself a present, move on, and do my own thing. So I decided to open my own business. There are 32 states in Mexico, and every state has different dishes and traditions. Everything we cook is handmade, authentic, and we only serve what we know how to make, like Grandma’s recipes from scratch. Regulars come like three or four times a week, and I love when people traveling from places like Chicago, Colorado, or California say, ‘Oh my god, this reminds me of how my grandma used to do it!’ On Mother’s Day, my first year, it got packed, and I didn’t expect it. We were only three months old, and I thought, ‘Whoa, this is getting real.’ And when you finally pay that last dollar of debt you owe, and you make that first dollar of profit, that’s when you say, ‘Oh my god, I made it!’ And when you get that certificate from Yelp because you’re a five-star restaurant, that’s when I said, ‘Oh my god, this is awesome.’ I’m living the American dream right now. I don’t need anything.” - Rafael Marcelina, Owner, Chaparritos Mexican Restaurant on Cherokee Street https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/5b9ea6b0-2789-4ffd-9b66-b7ab85729b2e/DSC_+83015.jpg St. Louis Community Foundation & Invest STL - Make it stand out “The dean of students at my middle school had a knack for reading people. A lot of people didn’t know I was as smart as I was because I wasn’t interested in school. So I used to act out. If you’re the class clown, people usually associate you with that stupidity. But all kids go through phases. She saw what I was going through and told me a lot about myself that I knew no one else knew. And I kind of took to that. She helped me learn, ‘Even though you’re in this situation now, sometimes you’ve got to play the hand that’s dealt to you. Sometimes people may have a better hand, but take something negative, turn it into inspiration, and try to work harder.’ She was competitive, she didn’t back down from things, she loved to talk. Me and her used to talk for hours. Her knowledge and understanding me and where I was coming from opened up my ears more to help me get a better insight on life. Now, every time I get a chance to talk to her I always tell her, ‘Thank you.’” - Ricky Smith, Cherokee Street resident https://www.humansofstl.org/healthiermo daily 0.75 2022-06-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/cfd896dc-aec5-4026-84a4-d9910740066e/495A6841+webready.jpg #HealthierMO Photo by Ava Mandoli https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/520c49bd-79f6-45c9-ab9b-7cf5d082c2e7/495A6699+webready.jpg #HealthierMO Photo by Ava Mandoli https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/2f45eaea-ae8b-4555-b4bc-17f275c303bd/495A6896-Edit2+webready.jpg #HealthierMO Photo by Ava Mandoli https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/79fbb723-35eb-4cc7-88d1-1f4989fa8df8/495A6603+webready.jpg #HealthierMO - Make it stand out Photo by Ava Mandoli https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/572a3e0fc6fc0898720cd3fb/9fbb1992-f515-426e-8c8a-2ae121d12c1e/495A6296+webready.jpg #HealthierMO - 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