Transcriber: Irfan Shaji Alamana Reviewer: Yinchun Rui
And
sex workers taught me how to organize my home community.
At twenty four, I moved back home to Memphis, Tennessee.
Very, very excited to change the world.
I knew that single handedly I was the person that could show up.
And fix any issue. My textbook knowledge equipped me to handle social injustices,
to be able to look at social ills with a very,
very thoughtful eye to come up with any solution needed.
And then I was humbled the social ills were way bigger than what
I ever anticipated, the issues that plague my community were things that we
never even talked about in my classes.
So at twenty four with my Ivy League education from
the University of Pennsylvania, I moved back home to Memphis, Tennessee,
to have walls. And I didn't really know what to do,
but I knew at twenty four that the responsibility and really
the opportunity existed for me to be able to serve.
So I went back into my memory banks to an experience actually,
that happened a year prior at twenty three,
when I was able to do research with the Dunbar Institute in Calcutta, India.
And when I got on the plane right before when they were interviewing us
and letting us know about the opportunity,
they told us that we would be working with the sex workers union.
I was like, I'm just going to India. So this is exciting.
We'll figure out what that means when we get there.
And so when I got to Calcutta India, I was really, really, really,
really inspired by the women and their struggles and more importantly,
their solutions. You can imagine going into a bank saying that you are
a sex worker is your profession. You don’t get the loan.
And when your kids go to school, they get teased and at every layer of your life,
there's some type of disenfranchisement.
And so this mass of women decided to form their own union to create their own
schools and to create their own bank, which is actually what I was there to do.
I wasn't there to change their minds about their profession,
to give them any type of advice on anything.
I was there to measure client satisfaction with their bank.
They had had their bank in existence for well over 10 years,
and so we were there as researchers to be able to figure out things that were
working and outcomes that had come over the 10 years of them having
a very unique collection model.
They would take sons and daughters of sex workers and use them
as runners to go from the brothels to the bank so
the women they weren't accustomed to saving,
they hadn't come from generations of fiscal savviness to be able to make any
type of dedication to being wealth builders.
But their belief in small things adding up made all the difference.
Our study showed that over time,
these women were able to progress out of their professions into new ventures
and actually turn into entrepreneurs and become brothel owners.
So over the time of them just trusting the process,
everything trusting the process, sending small nominal amounts to their bank,
they were able to accumulate funds that actually was life altering for them.
So come back to me at twenty four in Historic Orange Mound,
the oldest black community in the city of Memphis,
with the issues that I was facing.
I remember that and I'm like, Hmm, I think we can do something here.
Spare change, everybody has it right.
You've already seen that it adds up, and so we began to collect spare change.
I started the nonprofit Juice Orange Mound in 2016
and we did our very first collection in twenty seventeen with 30 volunteers in
two hours. We went to a third of the community
and we collected asking neighbors for their spare change. And guess what?
They gave it excitingly a little, you know , confused about what was going on,
but still spare change was coming. Spare change came from elder.
Spare change came from high school students.
Spare change came from people who identified in the moment
as being addicted to different substances. Spare change came from prostitute.
Spare change literally in my community came from every corner of the community.
It didn't disenfranchise, and so we collected their spare change
and we were able to accumulate five hundred
and ninety two dollars in spare change nominal gifts to the organization with
the belief that we would be able to do something with it.
Now you're thinking five hundred ninety two dollars doesn't really sound like
a lot, but we have over thirty five hundred parcels in my community,
and if every house gives five dollars, every quarterly collection,
we can raise over fifteen thousand dollars.
Now, if you're a nonprofit leader like me, you know,
the a sixty thousand dollar guarantee in your bank account annually can make
a difference. And if you're a nonprofit like me, then you know how to work it.
That 60 can easily turn to 120 with
a little leverage going to other players to ask them to match
and then asking those players to match. Right.
You can grow this amount into whatever it is that you need it to be to serve
your community. At 23, if I had a closed mind,
I would have missed out on one of
the greatest lessons that I've ever learned.
Undeniably, sex workers taught me how to organize my home community
and are continuing to equip me with a methodology to be able to make change.
So to everyone listening. My hope for you is that you will open your hearts
and open your minds to be able to make change in your lives. Thank you.