Translator: hila scherba Reviewer: Denise RQ
I want to talk to you a little bit about social justice.
I'm working in public service and also sustainability,
and it all revolves around pie.
When I first started working in community development work,
I ran a small garden,
and I started to learn about homelessness,
people needing cold food, food they could cook without a kitchen,
and I really started to like the work I was doing, but I had a job.
I had a job where I design clothes,
and I knew from the time I was 4 years old--
I had a little sowing machine, and all my dollies had little outfits,
and I'd be a clothing designer.
So somehow, 20 years later,
I'm designing clothes for my dolls - that are bigger now -
and I spent 20 years doing clothing design for Victoria's Secret,
and just felt like my life wasn't going very far,
like I wasn't really contributing much.
I grew up in a nice neighborhood in California,
and definitely wanted to do more.
I started working with women with cancer.
I had a little studio where I would cast people with terminal cancer,
and they'd really get the experience of seeing what their bodies look like.
Everybody really felt like the cancer lived in their heads
and were really surprised, "There is a body attached to this?
because a lot of this process is really--
The process of exploring ourselves, as we change,
as our image shatters of ourselves,
it becomes really interesting.
Growing up our house burned down, my mom died,
all within this really short period of time,
and I've really wanted to see what else was out there for me;
besides pajamas, which I loved, a lot.
Victoria's Secret was this really amazing opportunity
to travel the world and learn things,
but it wasn't as fulfilling as--
- I shouldn't say that, maybe they'll get mad at me -
it wasn't as fulfilling as I thought it would be,
and I started to see if there are other things I might do.
I joined Auburn University Rural Studio as an outreach fellow,
just after my brother was murdered,
and I was trying to think of a way to refind myself.
It's funny to go to a place spaced community where no one ever leaves,
and, of course, I've been all over the world and never felt at home,
and then, somehow, through that process,
moving to Greensboro, catfish capital of America,
I really started to feel like it was a place where I belonged,
and a place where the work that I did mattered.
One of the first things that I did was start to invite groups to help us.
There was a lot of work to do, I had no idea how to do a lot of it,
and I had to find some partners that would do that work with me.
So, we took a lot of buildings who looked like this and this,
and we turned them into buildings that looked like this.
And we did it as a way to start to create ways for more people to come,
so it became a bunk house where people could stay,
started to create job training for a lot of prisoners
that could come out everyday from a minimum security prison,
and work in our community.
They would help me with a lot of main street buildings
that were vacant and abandoned; there was no hope for these buildings.
They started to look like this.
And it was a really exciting time to explore where my limitations were,
what did I think I could do, what was I able to do.
And with the help of others, what could we all do together?
Then I start to develop a sense
of what the social justice work we needed to do was,
in a community that, you know, to borrow from the local bank,
you're going to borrow at 37.5% interest,
and you're going to not have many resources.
There's no capital for the non-profit.
We're not going to find ways to-- we don't have any money to do anything,
so we have to do everything with free and found materials.
So we kept trying new projects,
we'd find historic schools that were architecturally significant,
we'd renovate them with free and found materials, with found labor,
turning them into spectacular places that really started to represent the community,
and how people felt about the community.
Maybe not what it look like, but start to make it better than it was.
Through one of our partnerships,
we started to create something called "Buy A Meter".
About 25% of our families don't have running water,
and I had work there about 3-4 years before I realized nobody had running water
and I knew what the smell was
sitting next to somebody who didn't have running water,
I just didn't know what it was.
I hadn't allowed myself to see fully what was happening in the community,
so together we did this kind of crazy piece,
and it started out with "Oprah has one".
It went through a series of people that had them,
and eventually, we got to the fact that in Hale County water is not a right,
but the truth is it's not a right for anybody in the U.S.
If you don't have running water,
what are the things that need to change for that to happen?
So we started to raise money.
We raised about 50,000$ to help people
that never had a water meter get a water meter.
I'm thinking, "Yes, this is the coolest job I've ever had,
I love my life, it's way better than pajamas,"
and the next thing that happened was really ugly.
There was almost like a lynching in my office;
people came in spitting and angry
that I had made people in power that were white
seemed like they were keeping water from blacks.
I had no idea, you know, who knew that?
And through that process,
what I realized was that our city, which is primarily white,
the city had the lowest water cost in the nation,
the county had the highest.
And through that process of learning about--
I have been there a few years,
I hadn't allow myself to fully see the level of segregation.
It wasn't just restaurants, it wasn't schools,
it wasn't that it was every church,
it's that everything, everything revolved around race.
I started working with some families
and trying to find ways to help people in need,
empower themselves to do more,
and with this particular family,
they never had running water, they ran a hose from a neighbor’s place
and it was well water, it wasn't really safe to drink,
all the sewage is shallow;
and it was a shallow well, and it was pretty unsafe.
So, one day, it's probably the worst day of my life... I'm standing there,
"Oh look, kids are waiting at the sink with their toothbrushes,
they're so excited."
I'm under the house, and I'm laying in raw sewage,
I'm laying on a sheet of ten, reefing ten,
to get under the house to hook up the pipes.
Super excited to get it going, the kids are thrilled,
all that, just the process of seeing that, happened for about seven dollars,
we were able to get running water to this family,
who had never had running water.
And then, through that process, I got to know that family well,
and the community got to know me.
Eventually, I learned that the mom in this family had survived incest,
and she was allowing her abuser to pay for time with her children.
And through, you know-- you get embedded in a community,
- I've been there for 11 years now -
people are just starting to trust me.
I'm also starting to allow myself to see the truth in the work.
Some of those times, it's pretty shocking,
and for those of you in that field of work or will go into that field of work,
I'd encourage you to find ways to let that truth sink in faster than I did,
because you got to be able to see what's happening in your community
to be able to affect change.
You got to be able to see the whole community.
It's for these children that you have to do it,
because if you're not seeing what's happening
in a place where there's extreme poverty
that has been going on for so many generations.
It's not going to change until we see what's happening,
and we acknowledge what's happening,
and we find a way to change it.
This is a woman with cancer who had really been having a hard time healing
because she didn't have hot water in her home.
It's pretty easy to get some volunteers together,
to get to the home, to get that working.
Eventually the home burned down,
because it just was so substandard there was really no way to fix it.
Got a group of people together, we built her a small cottage,
and it was a place where she could live until she passed.
What I realized in working with her
is that she was pimping out her granddaughter to seven men.
It's a tough thing, you're there, you're working,
the kids are working with you.
If I had noticed sooner, could I have done more for the family?
Just those things, through social justice,
through being in those environments,
challenging yourself to see the truth of what's around.
This is not as depressing, sorry about that.
I also started to develop a lot of small businesses in the vacant buildings,
just with the free and found materials.
[He] started a small craft business,
where [he got] orders for 30,000 necklaces at a time,
and a lot of women were making minimum wage,
starting to really change their lives.
They recognize they don't want to be in public housing
with stabbings and murders.
They want their kids to have a home to live in,
and with minimum wage they can get approved for a loan to own a home.
They empower themselves.
In this particular picture, one of the women became a home owner,
her friend with her was so inspired, she tried starting to improve her credit.
One of the things we do is really try to talk to people
about what options you have and try and make things better.
To get the home, we got a whole group of people together,
started building a home, got a lot of people working hard.
One of the workers in the shop, she moved in to her new home,
and it really made a change;
her son did better in school, she was a happier person.
Everybody started moving out of public housing,
they were creating spaces for new people to have decent housing in public housing,
and than those people to also see
that you can get out and move into decent housing.
Through that process,
what we realized was all the women that worked in that necklace line,
making these beautiful handcrafted necklaces,
were also committing fraud.
If they were shipping 1,200 a week, they were charging 4,800 a week.
Through the work, we realized
you have to have really close controls on everything you're doing.
You might think you're doing great work,
but what we realize was we didn't have enough controls in place
to do the real good work that we needed to do.
When everybody is desperate,
it's those that are most vulnerable that are going to be affected.
Through our work, we can add those controls in so that doesn't happen.
I started to work more with vacant, abandoned buildings,
in this particular building, the back of the building had fallen off,
the doors had fallen off, the ceiling started to collapse,
the windows had fallen out.
We started a pop up shop, pie shop.
Really wanted to see what we could create,
and there was a demand for pie, we would sell it by 10 a.m.
We've realized we had to have a permanent spot,
but none of us had never really built a building,
certainly not a building that was in really tough condition.
We had to find free and found materials every night so we could work the next day.
What we did was work together to create
a little pie shop called "Pielab", kind of a social experiment,
where we could have a lot of conversation around pie.
Pie is a place where people linger.
We started through this to do some good design,
we got nominated as one of the best restaurants in the nation
for restaurant design through a James Beard award.
We didn't win, I think we lost to "The Wright" cafe
in the Guggenheim Museum
so it was really kind of a cool experience to try.
We started baking pies, we started doing face painting contest.
It was kind of a neat thing where anybody on welfare
could come in and work in the community:
prisoners could work,
anybody getting out of prison could do good work there.
It was a really exciting time to see how change could happen in the community.
We did realize as in every project we do, there could be some down side,
so some of the women were buying their groceries
on our tab at the grocery store, that kind of thing.
That's easy, you can start to watch for that.
What we didn't expect was that the grandma who baked the pies
was actually having affairs with many of the prisoners,
and was using that on work time,
and she was also selling drugs at the local prison.
She has a felony [charge] now and is in prison.
But one of those things, you're not going to see it
if you're not really looking at what's going on every day around you,
things you would never expect to see in these projects.
So through social justice, sustainability, doing public service
the caution is really to look honestly at what's happening,
and to see if there's a way
that you can make the controls that need to happen so it's successful.
One of the things I think I would challenge you in your work
is we have an obligation to see clearly,
and to get rid of those things that keep you from seeing clearly in your work
is really embedding in the community.
Being honest about the work that you're doing,
and being able to talk about the truth with everyone you work with.
Thank you.
(Applause)