The BeLoved Community: Love in Action

Think a bunch of ordinary folks can't change the world? Well, BeLoved Asheville flips that script in five minutes flat. In this month's episode, we're spotlighting what happens when communities rise, organize, and mobilize as BeLoved co-directors Amy Cantrell and Ponkho Bermejo illuminate a path of hope and action that we all can tread.

About Amy: Rev. Amy Cantrell, honored as one of USA TODAY's 2024 Women of the Year, is the co-director of BeLoved Asheville, an impactful community-driven initiative she helped launch in 2009 to address homelessness, poverty, and racism. Amy's dedication to food access, racial equity, deeply affordable housing, and community organizing has earned BeLoved national acclaim. Under her leadership, BeLoved has initiated projects like the Homeless Voice Project, Rise Up Studio, and BeLoved Village, contributing significantly to progress in local housing rights and anti-racism efforts. BeLoved's diverse initiatives underscore Amy's commitment to creating a more equitable society.

About Ponkho: Social change innovator Ponkho Bermejo is the co-director of BeLoved Asheville. His commitment to fostering equity and access for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) is matched by his profound connection to the natural world, which he expresses through unique art and garden designs. A dynamic indigenous/Latinx community organizer, Ponkho excels in innovation and media, utilizing photography, art, and music to amplify cultural pride, ancestral respect, and youth education in cultural roots. His contributions have earned accolades from the Asheville Area Arts Council and Co-Thinnk. Passionate about advancing racial equity and social justice, Ponkho's work has garnered him recognition as the WNC Peacemaker of 2022.

Jump into these heartfelt narratives, as Amy and Ponkho not only dare you to dream, they ask you to roll up your sleeves alongside them. So if you’re ready for a journey through heartache to hope, don't wait; hit play!

We'll see you same time, same place next month. Until then, peace.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

We're profoundly, profoundly interconnected. We don't always live that way, we don't always acknowledge it, but if we're going to heal, we have to live it, experience it and create institutions that celebrate it. Can we create a we where no one's on the outside of it? Welcome to the Uplift with Zedek Real Talk for Real Change. Before we jump in, a quick reminder of why we're here and what we hope to achieve.

Speaker 2 0:24

We're here to build authentic communication with the community. We're here to build authentic community relationships and help fuel social transformation in Asheville, north Carolina. We believe collective liberation is not only possible but probable as we share, listen and learn together. We're here for the process. However, the views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.

Speaker 1 0:49

All right, welcome, welcome. Thank you all for tuning into the Uplift, where we promote Real Talk for Real Change. I'm Libby Kiles, asheville native and executive director of Zedek Social Justice Fund, and joining me today is my colleague Tara.

Speaker 3 1:03

Coffey, the director of community-led grant making with Zedek Social Justice Fund.

Speaker 1 1:09

We are so excited to have an amazing group of people who are delivering hope all over Asheville with the amazing and transformational work that they're doing through Beloved Asheville. So can you guys introduce yourselves?

Speaker 4 1:22

Hey, my name is Poncho Bermejo, I'm one of the co-directors of Beloved Asheville and I guess, if I can define my role and what I do and who I am, I can think then something that my family taught me when I was young. We was walking in the street and somebody said that the car of them was broke and I said I guess we have to call a mechanic. And my brothers used to tell me whatever you need, you're going to find it in the floor. And I remember then this person came and looked and they find a piece of metal and with this piece of metal they fixed the car, at least for a little bit, and now they think they can take the car back home.

Speaker 4 1:58

And I used to think then I guess the big dish for me in this moment was then anything that you need to solve the problem, you have it around you, so you have to have your eyes open all the time because the solution is almost beside you, maybe something that you don't know, only somebody that is beside you know what you need to know, and you don't need to know this thing because the other person knows it.

Speaker 4 2:15

So I think then we believe in the collective power, and this for me sounds like the collective power, like I don't need to know anything.

Speaker 4 2:21

I can be ignorant about something. Only Somebody can know more than me and together we can know to share that and we can change something and we can create solutions for the common good of the community. So I define myself like a creative person, like somebody then look around for the solution and look around for the problem and look around for how we can come together and start walking through the solution together, because we know then the people facing the problem is the people that is going to have the solution easier. Like many times we sit with people and are in the middle of problems and they are the people that tell you I wish I can have this, because I know then this is the solution. So how I can define a be loved too is then we are the connectors, or vision is to help the community then know what is the solution, provide them with the tools that they need for them to solve their own problems.

Speaker 1 3:05

Amazing, absolutely Incredible.

Speaker 3 3:09

What an intro Poncha.

Community Organizing and Empowerment Through Love

Speaker 5 3:10

And I'm Amy Cantrell. I'm one of the co-directors also of Be Loved Asheville, and I love the power of people and what we can do as a collective when we come together. It has amazed me of my whole life and so I love the fact that Zedek is about collective liberation and what happens when we can join together and that power of we that we heard in the introduction. You know, I'll tell a story of sort of how I got here and my late teens. I was in New York City and I was literally beckoned by a man sitting on the steps of a locked church and he was an African elder. He went by that street named Catman, and he introduced himself as a poet and he began to speak this powerful poetry around me and it was all tied together with colors and it was just so profound. I felt like he just looked into my soul and that meeting really sent me on the trajectory that my life path has taken. I've never seen him since. I can't wait for us to meet and some some great life intersection or hereafter intersection, for me to tell him the profound impact that he had on me. He made me look at my life and the world around me.

Speaker 5 4:21

Ironically, I got to hear Belle Hook speak that same week and those two meetings really tied together. You know, belle Hook speaks of the profoundness of what love really looks like when it is put into concrete form and when it's embodied in such a way that that is so transformative and where our souls literally are tied together. Our lives become bound up with each other, and that's what Catman really really showed me. And so I went home and thought, like there are people here that I don't know their connections that I haven't made.

Speaker 5 4:52

My hometown was very segregated, as is Asheville, and it was one of the things that I learned is that I have to cross those lines to meet my people. I went down the soup kitchen and I would sit and talk to people and one of the guys I met was named James Brown and he was so shy but I would see him on the street and I would go oh, james Brown, you know, and he'd just light up, and so these connections began to involve me in things that were changing lives. I'm just profoundly grateful for that chance meeting that wasn't a chance meeting with Catman and Belle Hooks, and how I'm here today. I'm profoundly grateful that they sent me on my journey and what that's done in the world and through me, and in me and around me.

Community Ears and Connectors

Speaker 3 5:41

Thank you so much, both of you, for sharing that. I love that we are kicking this off with an understanding of you as people. I think that leads really beautifully into what we'll be talking about today. Tell us more about what it is specifically that Beloved does. Can you give us a snapshot of your work and also something that maybe you're really excited about that's happening right now?

Speaker 4 6:03

I guess that way that I can define what we do is we are ears. These things that we do help us to be closer to what needs to be here at different spaces. We go to the streets. We hear the problems from the people that even the streets are experiencing. We go to different neighborhoods and everybody tells us the different problems that they are facing. And I was saying before, I think, then, one of the big goals of the victims that we do is try to be the glue between the connection between these different resources for people in the community to be their own savers.

Speaker 4 6:37

In the middle of the pandemic we saw it very clear our role was to look for the resource because the community can organize their own cells. So we saw many of the kids that was not going to the school at the time was the kids that was delivering food directly to the neighbors, to the elders, directly to the people living the highest hill in the trial park. So we are the people that believe the community can save their own cells. So what they need is only the access to the resource. I think that we are organizers. I think that we are only people that believe in other people and this make other people believe in their own cells and from there everybody plays their own role. So for me it's very clear that I have to play my role because I trust and know the community and I know that they are going to play their own role.

Speaker 5 7:20

Absolutely. I think your community is this profound gift and we say it's the solution to everything. And YB Loved has become the organization that does lots of different things. We work around systemic racism, we work around housing and equity, we work around food and equity. We bring children together and elders together. All of that because our community is not this monolithic issue. It's flesh and blood, people that have dreams and hopes and celebrate and struggle, and so we want to be in it and so we began to work at the place of sometimes sitting at a table eating a meal together.

Speaker 5 7:57

I remember we were sharing food one day and a woman. She started crying and she said her daughter's birthday was coming up and last year she invited a bunch of people. None of us had known her the year before, but she invited people and nobody came and she was just crushing, she was crying and all the women came around her and they were hugging her and they all were like when is the birthday? We're coming and we're making this dish and we're doing this thing. I'll bring the pinata and I'll bring the balloons.

Speaker 5 8:23

And it was just really profound to see how an awful moment got healed in community and how those relationships began to then organize around issues that they were facing and just how it grows.

Speaker 5 8:35

And so we say the root is the community, is the relationship, is the connection and, as Poncho said, having community believe that it is in itself can be the solution to all of these systemic inequities and that we can push back against oppression and be our full selves.

Speaker 5 8:52

You know, the Hebrew definition of salvation is actually the motion you make when you're yawning, or you can just stretch out as wide as you can, and so you know. I think that's one of the things that we get to do at Be Love is tell people like you can stretch out and be, and as a community you can stretch out and be and hold space and share your gifts and be who you are in this world. That can change things in a very profound way. And so Be Love actually takes this name from Dr King's vision of where we're going in the end. He called it Be Love at the end of it, right, and he called it the beloved community, and we thought that was such a beautiful description of who we are now that we're all, each of us, beloved, although our people say Be Love, so that's our street name, be Love, that's what people call us, but that's what we do. We want to bring home health, equity and opportunity for all through the power of community.

Speaker 4 9:47

I was thinking about this story about us eating with people. So we live a very luxury life, a VIP life, I guess, and one of these days.

Speaker 4 9:57

One of these days so B&B I'm a VIP family then living in a trailer parking by Os Tui Pupusa, since I'm in her house and she was telling us you know, I make this dish and I would like to help people in the street. So I know how it feels to be like the rejector in this community, in this world, so I would like to make some food that made me feel comfortable and made me feel loved and shared it with people in living in the street. So she made like 100 pupusas and we take the pupusas to the street. We was going in the truck that we have then it's called Esperanza. I remember then I opened the door. We went under the bridge of Lexington was in 2020.

Speaker 4 10:32

And I remember then I opened the door of the truck and this person came from. He was living under the bridge and he came and he started oh, it smells like masa, what you have there? And I said oh, we bring pupusas. And I said how do you know about masa? And he told me then he came from, he was born in California and we gave some pupusas to him and I was talking with him and I remember then he said this night it was February, it was very cold, and he told me this day, then if I can find shoes for him because he was wearing 10, he was 12. And I said to him you are around this area tomorrow, I can bring you the shoes. So we make the call to the community somebody bring us shoes, number 12. And next day we went there and we didn't find him. What we find is DOT removing everybody that was living from there and I think was like 15 degrees this night, very cold, very cold.

Speaker 5 11:22

It's not the year of that year.

Speaker 4 11:24

So he remember then we was driving around and we didn't find him and we make a call in the community for him and for everybody that was removed from this area. And I remember you calling too in the night.

Speaker 5 11:38

Yeah. So Ponto and Adrian were just out trying to find people because we were so scared somebody might die. And I was calling was a former city council person here that had become a state senator. And so I was calling very late at night it was almost midnight to say this is what's happened to our people in the middle of a pandemic, and they've been taste away from the only meager shelter that they had. And so we began to organize, and one of the things that you learn when you organize is like where's the problem coming from and where do we aim our outrage and our call for transformation? And so we've got to take it to the secretary of transportation, that's who runs DOT. And so we did, and we put out the call and 10,000 people responded.

Speaker 5 12:26

At the time the CDC guidance was that if you didn't have a home in the pandemic, that you should be allowed to shelter in place. And so that's what we call the DOT, to respond to the CDC guidance. And so eventually a memo was issued throughout the whole state. So change. You know how people were treated in Durham and Wilmington and Raleigh and small places all over the state, and so it was very profound and eventually those folks were able to be housed here. So we say, from one papusa to this giant change right, you know we're VIP when we eat a papusa under the bridge that one of our people has made because she cares so much and she wants to be a part of the change. And this is an impacted family that's also struggling.

Speaker 4 13:09

And this was brought only by, like I was saying before, by hearing somebody they want to do something good and you think where these take us, you accept the call where this can take you.

Speaker 4 13:18

This takes you to a better place. And it's from normal people, like we can say, then we are the people organizing all these and say, then we are the executive or whatever, or these are the only like the real stuff that happened in our lives is then we see normal people making big change and this is the hope, like because it can be that all doing this thing only the moment that we are gone is gone to everything. Or it's like what we see every day is this kid delivering the boxes of food to the neighbor. Or what I see is this woman saying that I want to make papusas to somebody that I don't know that live in the streets. She's why, see? I see hope everywhere, hoping the community, because, like, taking all the credit is not taking us nowhere on it. Giving the credit to that many people is doing good in the community is what is powerful and is what give us hope every day.

Speaker 1 13:59

I think this one is so inspiring about the work that you all do, the humility with which you do it, and before we even started recording, we were having these conversations about how impacted people have the experience in the struggle. And because they have that experience in the struggle, they're able and willing oftentimes to support other people in other ways. And so, as I'm listening to you talk, chosen family comes to my mind right. So it feels like what Beloved does also chooses family. And by choosing to reach out and be a vehicle, not just saying oh, we are helping people, but providing the space and opportunity for community to help itself and to support each other in ways that sometimes we don't even imagine. That is so inspirational and such a beautiful thing. Let me get back to my questions, but that was just kind of coming into my spirit, so I wanted to share that.

Speaker 3 14:56

You know I have experience. I always consider myself an organizer, but hearing Poncho talk I'm like man.

Speaker 3 15:03

I need to go sit at your feet because I have so much to learn and I love what you said. I think it embodies exactly what I've kind of been getting after, that idea of we collectively do have those answers. And you said, I think Poncho was you believe that they can do it? Yes, that's exactly it. I think that it speaks to exactly what is needed more of, not just oh, let's listen to folks who are impacted by the struggles that are disproportionate to them. Everybody has certain struggles, but these are far more disproportionate. It's no, they actually they got it. They just need their resources or maybe certain supports or just the space to come collectively together and handle it themselves. So don't.

Speaker 5 15:47

You know what I mean.

Speaker 1 15:49

So Velo supports individuals and families to tap into their power and collectively work to create a Western North Carolina where everyone thrives. Could you share some of the challenges, successes, any tough lessons that you've learned along the way in this journey?

Changing the Narrative

Speaker 5 16:04

One of the really profound ways that when we look out, you know there's been so many systems that have conspired to keep people from thriving and watching how all that has unfolded in people's lives, and for people to begin to sort of peep the system and understand, because a lot of times people get the blame and so they eat that and say, oh, this is happening because of me, and so when people really understand how these systems are working against them and how that we could push back on that and really change things, you know we're sitting right outside of where we're building the Velo Village, and so I think about that. When we go back all the way back to 2015, when they first declared a housing crisis here and they were having a big city county summit downtown and there was a guy named Bowen who's a guru of kind of affordable housing. He comes and studies your housing crisis, so he was gonna make his report and we've always said nothing about us. Without us, we're like all right, all of our, anybody that wants to go right, it's having a housing struggle. We wanna go and be in this room, and so I remember there was just all these experts up front and 500 people in suits and here's B-Loves like the only impacted people in the room and then they had a cocktail party afterwards. So I called that our great scratch the record moment.

Speaker 5 17:18

It's like, you know, you come out of the room and it's like what was that? You know, we work off this action reflection model. So we're, you know, we go and experience something or do something and then we say, well, what did we see, what did we hear, what did we experience? So we're doing that on the sidewalk right Very informally. People are like wow, like we have all this experience and nobody asked us what's really going on. I mean, our people knew there was a housing crisis many years before. There was a declared quote housing crisis. Out of that conversation we decide we're gonna have this weekly gathering of people living through the housing crisis, people who are housing insecure you know elders on fixed incomes in our neighborhood that were barely making it. People on the streets, people being pushed out, particularly African-American people, latinx people that were not able to access the housing system and mortgage system. So we just started meeting every week. Then we're gonna try to center our voices in this conversation. One of the first things I remember people saying is we can't afford affordable housing.

Speaker 4 18:15

I used to say we can afford affordable housing. And at the time I used to go to AB Tech it's where I learned English and I used to ask my teacher there, like people are saying I'm going to these meetings and people are saying then they can afford affordable housing. And she told me when I started learning like never translate to Spanish because you're gonna be very confused. Only at the time I was not good enough to not translate, so I was translating in my brain and affordable housing mean how the people can afford. And I was saying to her how these people in the community is talking about then they can afford affordable housing. And they can afford affordable housing. Don't make any sense. I remember then we meet next Tuesday and we were thinking we have to create a new world, because the world that we have right now can then is affordable housing means anything, because people in the room can afford it.

Speaker 5 18:59

So what word did we create?

Speaker 4 19:00

So we create a new language, then it's deeply affordable homes, houses, then people really can afford the people, then we know.

Speaker 5 19:06

So fast forward, like now. We sit on panels with elected officials and all sorts of folks talk about deeply affordable housing. We remember where that came from. I always laugh and say I learned the skill in high school. I would say a phrase or a word and try to get it to catch on and see if it would travel through the whole school. And I would get so excited when some random person would come up to me and say that phrase and be like, oh yeah, so now we learn that.

Speaker 5 19:33

Right, we gotta change the language, we gotta change the narrative. So if we can't afford affordable housing, they've corrupted that word. We need to say, like what we need Deeply affordable housing. Now that's traveled, people are saying and it's beginning to shape, reshape the way affordable housing is being talked about and built. So just changing the language can change things and that's profound.

Speaker 5 19:59

So we had about a year after meeting in October of 2016, we had a knock at the door as it was pounding knock and I went to the door to answer the door at our community space for Be Love Downtown and the police were there and they said we need you to identify body for us and we have a picture, but you probably I don't know if you can even stand to see it and we said we need to see that picture. She had been in Jane Doe for five days, but we knew her as our friend Janet Jones, and she froze the death in her sleeping bag down on the river first cold night in October of 2016. It was just such a heartbreaking, heartbreaking moment in our community and folks took her death really to heart, began to plan a funeral. We'd had funerals, you know when your family to people, you know you honor people. We even had a wall where we had pictures of all the community members that we'd lost, sort of an altar.

Speaker 5 20:52

For me, that that altar was always a message of your valuable we care about. Your life matters so deeply to us, and so folks immediately said this funeral needs to be public and needs to be different, like people need to know people are dying from the housing crisis. Ponzi, you made a makeshift coffin that we use symbolically. You remember that?

Speaker 4 21:12

We have a funeral in the middle of downtown to let everybody know that this was going on in the community, and so it is what catalyzed a lot of the work in the houses and we are doing right now.

Building Beloved Community through Collective Action

Speaker 5 21:24

And I remember people saying like, if the news media comes, we want we want people to say this is a public health emergency, that people are dying from a lack of housing. That was the first time I'd ever heard that on the news and impacted people did that. They were like we need to change the way people are talking about this issue. We need to put it at the level of systems that we're not providing the kind of homes that people need. So after the funeral, we just kept coming back to Janet's death, one of the things that happened at the funeral. You know real good funerals. People began to share stories and your laugh crying a lot of times. You know you're so profoundly grieving but but you're also so full of that person's life and celebration of them. And so people talked about how Janet took care of the turtles down the river. That was one of those really special stories a lot of people had in memories of her. So not too long after that, people said we need to know what to do in a medical crisis, should that occur. By four months after Janet's death we had people training with EMTs and nurses and doctors to medic folks that were unhoused. So that was incredible. We found out shortly after that that it was the first of its kind in the nation.

Speaker 5 22:34

So talk about people are just like feeling so deeply capable, right Attaining things and doing really big things. I remember people saying all the first people that treated us like we had brains Think about how often, like you know, poor people, people of color, are treated as less or not treated like all of the giftedness that's in them, are dismissed so easily in rooms of power. And so people began to catch on. Like we got power, we got gifts, we can, like come together and do things that are really amazing and transformative. People started dreaming.

Speaker 5 23:12

People said the kind of housing we get put into is not the kind of housing we want. That was one of the really profound stories, and so we said what does that mean to you? And they said you know, some are way out off the bus line and something that's barely habitable way, costly to heat and the wind, when you're still freezing cold and or we're thrown into these warehouse like public housing, complex old hotel conversions and it's chaotic and it feels unsafe. And they were saying, like our hopes and dreams are bigger than the crumbs that we're being given. So we said what is your dream home? What would that look like?

Speaker 4 23:46

When you ask a kid, like, if they can pay in a house, they usually gonna pay in a house similar than the ones that we have here. So what? This is what people dream. People dream a house, and people dream more than a house. People dream a place. Then they can have a garden. They want to have access to the outside. They don't want to be many of them at the time, they wasn't they don't want to be in an apartment. Then it's only concrete. They want a place and they can be connected with the land and they can grow on their own food. So this is what we create.

Speaker 5 24:14

I remember people saying we want a full kitchen and a full bath. What does that tell you about the kind of places people were being given? Right, they weren't. They weren't even like fully equipped to be a home. Part of our villa village vision is that people have homes that are furnished and we've got artists making art for the walls and we've got potters making pottery dishes, because people need beautiful things that profoundly reflect the dignity that is them.

Speaker 5 24:43

So we finally, like we're looking at each other, like we're talking about becoming housing developers. Right, what is this? Like you know, and here's here. We are the small little group of people you know our budget, I think was at the time, maybe I don't know somewhere between 30 and 50 thousand dollars annually, right? So suddenly we're talking about building houses and I remember saying hold up y'all, if we really want to do this, like I'm down, like let's go on this journey, but we're going to have to get real smart, because nobody's going to believe us. Y'all know how often people impacted, people get discounted, and so we were like let's spend a year and get really smart. We didn't tell anybody we were thinking about it. We started studying, learning, and I love that. The people are like we're willing to skill up to our dreams.

Speaker 4 25:30

Yeah, it was amazing. Because I think then one of the bigger roles that we have here is that we find in ourselves and many people are out, most people are not committed enough Then they know then they have to learn something new and then they're not going to give up to make it happen. I remember when I was young, my father bought me a guitar when I was probably around 16. So I used to play my guitar in my room and I used to make my songs. I used to record my songs and I record a CD when I was young and I always think maybe I'm a singer, maybe I'm a guitar player, only doing this work while I learn is then I'm a drummer. I'm a drummer. If it's cool, I'm going to do it. If it's raining, I'm going to do it. If I don't want to do it, I'm going to do it. No matter what, I'm going to do it. And I think then keep. The role here is keeping the rhythm and keep, because I think then when somebody wants to come, we are with the rhythm, so they can start playing, giving a solo or playing the bass or whatever. Only we have to keep the rhythm, because we know then, if we keep the rhythm. When the right moment came, we're going to be able to build these houses. And I think then part of this story that you were saying is then we find many people that was keeping the rhythm at that time, and we think we have to learn. We have to learn enough for, when the right time came, when we have the land, when we have the skid, when we have the money, we're going to start building. Only we have to keep the rhythm enough for be ready for this moment. What you were saying before about what we learn, why learn?

Speaker 4 26:52

Doing this, all this work, not only with the houses, is then is more good news than bad news. Only the bad news have too much attention. Only when I see the news, when I see different things, I see bad stories. The majority of these one are bad stories. Only when I walk in the community, when I walk in these houses, I see good stories. I see people in the 80s. I remember both 80 years old and he was working in the houses. I was thinking I dream to be him. This is my dream. I want to be 80 and still thinking straight to thinking what is the right thing to do in life in the 80s. This is what give us hope, and I think this is what is powerful and this is what is inspiring and, like I said, finding these many people and keep the rhythm is what makes all happen.

Speaker 1 27:34

I love that. So I don't know where the time has gone, but it is leading back. So I want to ask two more things to kind of think about as we wrap up our time together. Looking ahead, what is on your wish list for Western North Carolina? What is Beloved's North Star? And then after that, for those people who are so inspired by the work that you do, what are some of the ways that they can get involved? North Star.

Speaker 5 28:00

I mean. To me it's like, you know, I see all the way to the end, like when everybody's thriving. We have equity to dare to dream. Yeah, that's something that Beloved has taught me so much and it's been. And when I say Beloved is this family, that is Beloved has really taught me to don't be afraid to just be audacious in your dreams. Dare to be audacious. And so many people here have dared to be audacious. And I said it has been so engaged in reparations and calling for transformation. It's been so powerful to raise our collective voices and not sitting outside now a fully built village. You know we're about to go on the inside and finish these homes.

Speaker 5 28:40

We have 12 homes here of people who dared to be audacious in their dreams and say we want better and we want homes, and we want homes with equity, because we know that's what you know systemic racism has stolen, particularly from people of color as the ability to build wealth and pass it on to their children. Can we undo it through the same line? Can you know if they took racism to the line of housing that vein? Can we use that same vein and transform it? Be audacious in our dreams and that's what I think Beloved taught me that we can do that and literally see those things become a reality.

Speaker 4 29:17

Yeah, and the way that people can find us is, I guess, in the website BelovedAzraelcom, facebook, instagram and all the other social medias, and also how people find us is by word of mouth. And what we're really looking in the long run in this world and we are doing is to create. I remember that I used to see these old books, the yellow books, where you need a mechanic. You can look there, you're looking at the pages in the M and then you find your mechanic and you can call. So we are looking for this. We are looking for people that care. That can be in this book, like when somebody needed and we know. Then we can call this person and we know that these people care.

Speaker 4 29:57

Then these people are going to answer the phone at 12 o'clock, the same way that we do, like when a family calls us. Then they say they are in the middle of the night and they have a kid in their house. We call. We answer the call the same way that we was answered for my mother or for my brother or for whoever. Then it was my family because, like you were saying before, we see this community, like many people in this community, are our family too, and it's the only way that we can do the many things that we do is because we care, and besides us there's many other people, and this is what I'm saying then it's by word of mouth, because people in care is going to know other people in care and this is why we have this many people working, more than 1000 people working in these houses and more than 1000 people working in the other things that we are doing, because it's many people in care and I hope the neighbors they hear this podcast know that there's many people and it's doing amazing work.

Speaker 4 30:45

In our community it's many people, that people. It's many people that don't have even recognition. They never have even able to have a microphone in there in front of their face. I can tell you there's many, many of us working to make a better place to live for everybody.

Speaker 1 31:00

Thank you, guys, so much. You know, the late Congressman John Lewis, who was a disciple of Dr King, said these sentiments. He said when you see something that is not right, you must say something, you must do something. Each of us must do our part to help build the beloved community and I just want to express my deep appreciation for all that beloved does to build the beloved community. Thank you, guys, so much for joining us today and we will see you all again, same time, same place, for the uplift.