The Revolutionary Power of Community Activism with Denise Oliver-Velez

Denise Oliver-Velez, Contributing editor for the Daily Kos blog; Feminist, Activist, former Young Lords Party and Black Panther Party member, is a cultural anthropologist and one of the most active contemporary revolutionaries of the 20th and 21st century. 

Daily Kos, Denise Oliver-Velez

BlueSky: @deniseoliver-velez.bsky.social

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:02

Welcome to Connections and Conversations, an advocacy arena podcast, working to increase civic engagement and strengthen our communities. I'm elated to have with me today Denise Oliver Velez, a powerful voice and role model for community activism and organizing. She's always centered women in her revolutionary movement work. Miss Denise has been involved in public education, broadcasting, and other community media for many years. She's taught anthropology and women's studies at State University of New York at Newplots. And she's also a contributing editor for the Daily Cause blog, where she publishes weekly. Miss Denise's activism started early in the third grade. She refused to get under her desk during those infamous bomb drills. And of course, she was supported by her parents who were both educators, and her father was also a tiskekee airman. She participated in civil rights work as a member of the Queen's branch of the NAACP as a teenager, and while a student at Harvard University, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, and later became a member of both the Young Lords and the Black Panther Party. She is brilliant, down-to-earth, living history. We can learn a lot from her life experience and her wisdom. So now my conversation with Denise Oliver Belez. Take a listen. I am a fangirl. And I can't wait to get into conversation with you. I stayed up late last night actually trying to do a little research and prep for our interview. And I was telling the producer, I just got pulled into this rabbit hole of one interview after another with you and just learning so much more. So there's a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about. But firstly, just get your background kind of bio with your involvement with the young lords. Would you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and that experience? We'll dig into some of the specifics, but just a little overview.

SPEAKER_00: 2:37

Okay, but thank you for having me this morning, Dizia. Can I just call you Miss D? Yes, sure. Okay. Because I'm also Miss D, so there'll be two of us. Yes, I love it. Background with the Young Lords. The Young Lords started in Chicago, but the section of the Young Lords that I became a part of ultimately became the Young Lords Party on the East Coast in New York. And the initial introduction to the Young Lords was from the campus at SUNY Old Westbury. It was an experimental state of New York college. And they imported a handpicked group of young people to come out and kind of get the university started. It was really weird. There were no grades. Sounds like my kind of school. Yeah, but they imported activists from SDS and whatever. And they were run, they were running around. They got African American folks, and they decided they needed Puerto Ricans. So they showed up at the agency that I was working at in East Harlem, and they recruited a crew of us, and all of our tuition was to be paid. We were to get like$1,600 a month stipend and whatever. And they took us off, and I called my mother and I said, Mom, I get to go. My mother was angry at me because I had not gotten my BA. I kept taking over things on campuses and getting kicked out of schools. So when I told her that we were going to be out of this and they were going to give us a stipend and pay for everything, I said, but there's a problem. They recruited people to be Puerto Ricans, and I didn't tell them I'm not Puerto Rican. My mother said, shut up. And because I was working in East Harlem, El Barrio, at an agency called the Real Great Society, teaching at East Harlem Prep, which was a school for high school dropouts. So I shut up, went out to the campus, and we were helping plan things there and recruiting more students of color because the first year we couldn't have a black caucus or a Latino caucus. There were 16 students who were out of, I think it was 95, who were of color. At that time, people were not using that term POC. We called ourselves the non-white caucus. We would have never done that now because that's centering whiteness, but we had a woman from Thailand, somebody from Venezuela, a student from Ethiopia. I still remember his name, Gabriel Selasi Mehreta. Oh my. Yeah, that was in Non White Caucus. So two of the people who were in the Nonwai Caucus was a student recruited from Bronx Science High School, Paul E. Guzman, who became Pablo Yoruba Guzman, and another student named Bob Bunkley from a black community on Long Island who became Muntu. And so Muntu and Yeruba used to go into the city and go to the Panther office. And they came back to campus and they had a copy of the Panther paper, and it had an article about the Young Lords in Chicago and Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition that he had pulled together. So they said, that's really cool. And they contacted the head of the Young Lords, Cha Chahe Menez, who had been a gang leader who had run into Fred Hampton and got recruited, and Fred Hampton started the Rainbow Coalition, and it was all a long story. So he came back, they came back to the Now Mai Caucus and said, Let's go to Chicago. So those of us sisters who were in the organization were not going to pile into a raggedy car with these fools, go to Chicago. So we passed on it. You know, because initially they show the young lords and they show all men as if there were no women around. And that's not true. It's just that we were not crazy enough to get in a car with these fools. They went to Chicago, met Chacha, talked with them, held them around, met Fred Hampton. When they came back, they announced, we are now the young lords of New York. So when people ask me, how did you join the young lords of Whether? It wasn't like joining, it was like it joined us. Wave a wand, and you're now a young lord. Because it was modeled on Black Panther Party organization. And when you were a Panther, you were a Panther 24 hours a day. You quit your job, you did whatever. You lived in collective, they called them Panther pads, collective apartments, like communes. Yes. So then it was a decision that pe people in the non-way caucus had to make. Did you join the organization fully and quit school? Or did you sort of be a supporter and stay on campus, but you wouldn't be a young lord? So of course, knowing my track record, I was like, the hell was school. I'm gonna tell you, my mother wanted to kill me. I'm sure. And because she had all these hopes of her daughter finally getting a VA. No way, it wasn't happening. So I moved back into East Harlem, and as did my significant other at that time, that was what we called you were no longer wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, whatever it was, your SO. And we went back into the city and started the work of the young lords. By that time, the brothers had formed a central committee, just like the central committee of the Panther Party and whatever. And those people on the central committee were all male. And they looked at me and they said, Oh, the Panthers have a communications secretary, Kathleen Cleaver. What can make you the commun? I said, I can't type. I can't be a secretary, I can't take notes, and I can't type. So no thanks. Because I had no idea actually what Kathleen did. I felt years later when I traveled in Africa and Europe with Kathleen. But at that time, I just heard the word secretary, and it was like, no, uh-uh. And you we are not going there. I'll pass. So they thought really hard because they had to figure out what to do with me, because I'm one of the original non-white caucus members. So they made me what was called officer of the day, which is like a sergeant, not top-notch, but running the office and whatever. But the interesting part of it was the officer of the day could hand out discipline. So I could literally command the chairman or the minister of defense or whatever, whatever. Get on the floor and give me 20 push-ups because you're late, you know, or whatever. So I became OD for a period of time. We were engaged the same way the Panther Party was with a lot of community work because the way that you organize people is to deal with folks in your community rather than imposing things from the top down on people. Our method of organizing was to work with things that were generated from, I guess what you'd say, the bottom up. We essentially talk to folks in the community, in the neighborhood. This is in East Harlem. And I have to say that it's called Spanish Harlem or a Biofield all the time, and that people have an assumption that that means that everybody in the community is Puerto Rican, but that's not true. It's very mixed. People were African American. There was one segment of the area that was old school Italian American. We had people from Barbados, people from Jamaica, people, you know, it's a mixed area. But it got sort of typecast as being almost all Puerto Ricans, and that's not true. About a third of the members in the Young Boards were African American. Or we had somebody that walked all the way from Mexico to come and join. We had a young brother who was raised in Chinatown by Chinese parents, though he was not Chinese, but he spoke Chinese. I mean, we were a mix. So we asked people in the community what they felt their biggest problems were that they wanted us to address. And we were thinking they were gonna say police brutality, da-da-da-da-da. And what they said was the garbage and la basura, the garbage. And we were like, there's not another problem. They said the garbage. And garbage was piled up. Uh the tenement buildings there had alleyways in the back, and there were piles of garbage. And the sanitation department used to not come and do pickups on frequently enough that they would stop at 96th Street. If you were below 96th Street where luxury apartment buildings were, and white people, there were regular garbage pickups. Ours, maybe they showed up once a week. By that time, the garbage bags were all ripped open. The rats just tore everything to shreds. And there were pools of water in the alleyways with mosquitoes, and people with young babies had to put the baby crib with bowls of water under the legs to drown the roaches that would be crawling into the crib. Oh my goodness. We had to take kids to the hospital who had roaches embedded in their ears, babies, the bedbugs biting little kids. I I can't even tell you how bad it was, and all these rats. So, from a community perspective, this is our problem. This is what we have to live with. And there were no words at that time. You didn't have an environmental justice movement and all of that kind of stuff. But I mean, that's an environmental issue. Right. It also connected us at that time. We would go with some of the community people to the hospital. You got to take your kid, it's got a roach embedded in. Some of the parents didn't speak English. And at that time, the hospitals did not supply interpreters. So that was our first exposure to the issue of a mom having to take her nine-year-old son to the hospital to translate questions about her vagina. Yeah, because they know interpreters. And this is also problematic for the parent and for the kid. And so while we were dealing with these garbage issues, we were also being exposed to health issues. Disparities in that. Yes. I was elderly, like 21. I'd say the average age of Cadre and the young lords at that time was like 16 or 17 years old. Wow. People asked me about our political theory and whatever, whatever. We were making stuff up as we went along. I mean, we were reading some linen, some chairman mouse, some vada, Martin Luther. Just taking a little bit of from here, there, everywhere. But meanwhile, we're dealing with this issue of garbage. So people were coming from the campus into East Harlem, and we went to the sanitation department to try to get them to give us brooms and bags and whatever, and they turned us down. The sanitation department said no, and so what we did was just take them. Our major revolutionary movement was to rip off brooms and start cleaning up. And the old people, the elders, you know, the grown-ups, because they were older than we are, were like watching us. You know, it's kind of like, yeah, okay. You showed up one weekend to pick up garbage and bag it up, but they didn't believe we were gonna come back. Because folks don't listen to it's sort of like what Maya, I guess it was my Angela who talked about. It's not about what you say. It's about people in the community check out what you do. They're scoping you out. So they watched us and we showed up again and again. And after a couple of times showing up, the folks in the community got involved too. And they started helping with the brooms and and we bagged up this garbage and whatever. But the problem was that you can bag it up and clean up the back of the alleyways and whatever, but if it's not picked up, the rats are back at it again, and the dogs and the whatever, and the sh stuff is all over the street.

SPEAKER_01: 16:10

Just repeats a cycle.

SPEAKER_00: 16:12

Yeah. So that was the situation, and we were fed up with this. You know, it was like there's gotta be a way we make the sanitation department respond to this. So what we did, those people who don't know what Manhattan is like, the way that it's laid out, it's like a grid, and avenues go from the very top all the way down to the bottom straight. You know, you've heard of Fifth Avenue and whatever, and then the side streets go across. So it's like a grid. So if you block the traffic on a major avenue uptown, it's gonna mess with all the shopping on Fifth Avenue and everything all the way down to the bottom. It's just gonna tie up the city. So we took all the garbage and put it out in the middle of the avenue and set it on fire. Well, that screwed up business activities and all. I bet. The New York Times showed up and reporters and whatever, and spokesperson for the mayor and stuff, and we were there talking about the garbage. If you don't come pick it up, this is what we're going to do with it, and we're gonna screw the city. So we got major press coverage and we were sort of on the map, and they started making more regular pickups. I'm not saying that they did a great job of it, but it improved. People now had heard of these crazy young people with the berets, and our berets were purple, not black, like the Panthers or whatever. So that was our first sort of major, we called it offensive, our first venture into dealing with the community. And people in the community were really happy with us. We ended up with very strong support from everybody, from you know, parents and grandparents, little old ladies, and because they saw us one, our commitment, two, that we continue to show up, three, that we listen to them and not like an outside force, like a lot of people on the left tend to think they know best for everybody. And that's one of the things that's problematic. And when you examine movements, you really look at what happened in Montgomery. Their major movement was about buses and transportation and people having to be on segregated buses going to work. You didn't have to sit down and say, No, we were going to come up with an issue for the working class.

SPEAKER_01: 18:51

The issues that existed is what you addressed.

SPEAKER_00: 18:56

Yes. But later, our next thing was because of having been to the hospitals and having met some young progressive doctors and health workers, one of the next things we became aware of was the high levels of lead poisoning in the community. Because again, we're dealing with parents, we're dealing with people with little kids, and we found out that they had done a health study that you had high levels of lead poisoning in children because the paint in these tenement apartments was lead-based paint. The paint on baby's cribs was lead-based paint. The doctors and some of the nurses had given us this information, and we said, Well, you know, what are the well, we're not clear about what the numbers are because the board of health is supposed to be doing lead poisoning detection, but they haven't been doing it. So we went to the Board of Health and we found out that they had, I don't know, thousands. They had these kits, these testing kits. They were sitting there. So here we go again. So we we asked for the kids and they said no. And so we took them, we went around and it's a two-part process. You have to get urine samples from the children. And then they test the urine, and the ones that come back positive for lead, the next phase is you have to draw bloods and do a blood test. So we got pea from every baby in East Harlem. You know, we went and people invite you in and you get the baby's urine, and that's cool. Part two was a lot more difficult because we had doctors with us. Doctors. And part two, we went back to see about, I think it was about a third of the tests came back positive. So we had to go back and draw these bloods. The problem was doctors are not trained phlebogamists, they're terrible.

SPEAKER_01: 21:11

My mom's a nurse, I can speak for that. And she was she started out in pediatric nursing, so yes.

SPEAKER_00: 21:17

Okay, so so so you know what I mean. So here, this lady has invited you in because you've got the urine and you gotta tell her, you know, your kid tested positive. We got to draw blood. And here you have a doctor brutalizing this child. And the mothers are not happy when their kid is screaming, you know, the welcome mat was withdrawn. So we had been reading, I don't remember, I think it was Chairman Mao or something, the barefoot doctor program in China, you know, that utilized regular people to do health stuff. And I remember thinking and saying, you know, we have a lot of former Dauphines who have joined the organization, heroin addicts, you know, they're not doing heroin now, but this is what they used to do, and they're experts at injection. So we made them part of the team, and we got rid of having doctors try to draw the bloods, and instead had the street termist degatos, dophines, who had joined, and they would go in, bam, get the bloods, the baby doesn't even blink, the mothers are happy, offer you coffee and whatever. And the self-esteem for those former addicts also rose up. This gave them something to feel very proud of.

SPEAKER_01: 22:48

Purpose, yes.

SPEAKER_00: 22:49

Yeah. So you ended up with sort of a dual plus on developing and taking this method, drawing the bloods, and then ultimately trying to get treatment for the kids and whatever, and again publicizing what we had done and getting press coverage of here. The Board of Health doesn't go and do this and look at these numbers that are coming back. And we pressured the city council. We had some contacts down there, and they passed, they wound up passing legislation mandating that landlords had to get rid of the lead paste paint. So that was, again, another community-based, again, environmental activism and health activism that we got involved with.

SPEAKER_01: 23:41

Yeah, I know that one of the things that I watched, the New York Times has a great video just kind of highlighting the day you guys took over Lincoln Hospital.

SPEAKER_00: 23:54

Yeah. Again, because of what we were doing, we came into more contact with people who were engaged in the health system. So many of our things ended up, we did stuff with tuberculosis and ripped off a TV truck. Right. You took the TV truck and did X-rays. The TV truck was sitting up in up around Meshula Parkway in an area that was all upper middle class Jewish and nobody had TB. And it was just sitting there. The people working on the truck were bored to death. So they kind of were happy that we kidnapped a truck and brought it to East Harlem. A number of the people that joined the Lords were former health workers, and we came in contact with not only doctors but nurses and other tech people at Lincoln Hospital. And at that time, the hospital was known as the butcher shop in the Bronx. It was horrible. I know. Imagine you're a surgeon and you're doing and you're working in surgery, and you've got somebody open and rats run across the operating table.

SPEAKER_01: 25:01

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00: 25:02

Yeah. You know the carts that uh have pills that they push around and bring to each room to give people their medication that the nurses have to do. Well, those little cups with the pills, there would be roaches in there and running. Yeah. So you go to take your pills and a roach comes jumping in. Those were the conditions. And the interesting thing is that the health workers in the hospital were also people who lived in the community and had to use that hospital for their own health services. So you're split. You have your job there, but do you want to even bring your kid to the place where you work? So there was a community group that was formed. There was a group inside the hospital called Think Lincoln that involved nurses and doctors and whatever. So you had community activists, you had nurses, you had doctors, and then there was us. An organization formed also called Atram, Health Revolutionary Unity Movement. They put out a paper themselves called For the People's Health. There were members of the Panthers and members of the Lords also engaged with Atram. And they put out a list of demands, which to this day is in hospitals in New York. Slightly watered down.

SPEAKER_01: 26:32

But some of these are like federal things. Like I learned that because of your movement, that takeover and the attention you brought to it, like a patient's Bill of Rights.

SPEAKER_00: 26:42

The patient's Bill of Rights, like I said, it's watered down. We had demands, but they began to institute having interpreters. They instituted people who would be an omsbudsperson for people from the community to negotiate with the heads of the hospital and the heads of departments. But initially, we started this communication with the HRIN people, with the Think Lincoln people, with the people from the community and us and trying to negotiate with the city government who were not listening to us. So ultimately, our decision was again, how do we bring the eyes of the media onto this? Because we saw that it had worked with garbage, we saw that it had worked with the lead poisoning, we saw that it worked with kidnapping a TB truck. And so the ultimate decision was made that we were going to take over the hospital. So in the middle of the night, pile into a big truck, and off we go, and we took over the hospital. There were people inside who were prepared who knew that we were coming in. And what was interesting was our decision to not stay, to sort of disappear and walk right past the police dressed in white coats and whatever, and get out of there. There was a debate about that. Some people wanted to stay and fight it out and be dragged out of there and maybe wound up getting shot or whatever. But we had drawn enough media attention to the issue of Lincoln Hospital and connecting it to the issues of other hospitals in the city because there were other hospitals which were just as negative. But Lincoln was at that time, as far as I'm concerned, the worst. The worst. Again, the folks that wanted to decide that we were gonna leave made their decision. We followed the rulers and we disappeared like a puff of smoke.

SPEAKER_01: 28:52

I know that was so cool. Like they were preparing to come in and confront you guys, and when they got in, you were all gone. I thought these kids were so smart.

SPEAKER_00: 29:02

Well, it was an issue, and we debated it, but I consider that the sensible heads won. We got the focus without having to go through being beaten up, shot, jailed, or whatever. You know, it's expensive being in an organization where you're always getting busted and have to bail people out.

SPEAKER_01: 29:22

That's an aspect of this type of revolutionary movement that, you know, people don't understand. I said I watched and listened to interviews of you and you talk about how it wasn't something that you came, a meeting once a week or whatever. This was your life. You were totally committed to it, and you didn't work, you didn't do any. So I know that one of the things that you did to support yourself was a paper that you used to explain to people and inform people of the things that you were doing and a way to connect to the community. What was the name of it? Palente.

SPEAKER_00: 30:01

Palante.

SPEAKER_01: 30:02

Palante.

SPEAKER_00: 30:03

Pyra, it's a conjunction. P A L A Parra Adelante. Which was our sort of right on. Okay. Which was the Panther paper. Okay. Yeah. It's really difficult when you are not like have a group of people, you go to work and you go to a meeting once a month and decide to do things. We used to say you're younger 25 hours a day. And no days actually we had half a day off on Sundays. The Panthers raised their money selling the Panther paper, and a lot of people have seen pictures of the Black Panther paper. So we started putting out our own paper, and a lot of movement groups across the country have papers. Remember, this is a time there's no cell phones, there's no Twitter, there's no blue sky, there's no Facebook. So the way that you connect in terms of educating folks was with these papers. You had a stack of a hundred papers to sell a day. And we got up in the morning after you took the kids to the free breakfast program. And I have to say that we weren't just people say, Oh, the Panthers and the Lords did free breakfast for children. We weren't just feeding them food, we were also feeding them an education. So the kids got educated while they were at the free breakfast program, and they learned the program and the platform. And they learned to talk about, you know, oppression. And they learned to talk about the police brutality. In fact, I remember walking with a group of kids, we were taking them back home, and a police car went by, and one of the little girls went, off the pig! Oh here we go. You know, yeah, let's get her home. But it was really important. I ultimately, after I was put on the central committee, and that was a huge battle for a woman to be put on the central committee.

SPEAKER_01: 32:11

Right. That was another thing that I noticed how you women, you fought for and demanded like a place in that organization, not just, you know, like in name, but you were active in leadership, and you were one of the first.

SPEAKER_00: 32:27

The Panthers had a 10-point program and platform, and we had a 13-point one, which included independence for Puerto Rico. So we expanded things. But the brothers wrote into the program, machismo must be revolutionary and not oppressive. And us women were like, this is an oxymoron, you know that and say revolutionary racism, you know. I mean, and so that was one of the things that we demanded be changed. One of the things I wanted to mention about newspapers, you'd go out with your stack of papers and go up to 125th Street, and you stand on the corner, and there's a Panther standing next to you selling the Panther paper, and across the street, there's a Muslim brother selling, I think it was called Muhammad's Peaks by that time. Used to be the final hall, which was but we each had our spots, and it wasn't competitive because sometimes people bought all three papers, you know, and then you come back and hand in your money. So that was kind of how you daily sustained the organization, and we ate, we lived collectively, we ate collectively, and my job was to kind of pull all that together. And we also got contributions from celebrities or people who had more money. I remember the day that I thought I was gonna have a stroke, I opened up an envelope and there was a check for$10,000. Now, I have to tell you that if you're talking about back then$10,000, that's not getting a check for a million dollars. Yes. It was from Sammy Davis Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 34:17

Oh my goodness. I've always loved him, but yeah, just to to know that that's the kind of person that he was that he saw these causes and supported them in a real way, a way that really mattered.

SPEAKER_00: 34:32

He dedicated it to his mother.

SPEAKER_01: 34:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 34:34

His mother was Latina, his mother was Afro-Latina.

SPEAKER_01: 34:38

I did not know that.

SPEAKER_00: 34:40

Most people don't know that.

SPEAKER_01: 34:42

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 34:42

Actually, she was Cuban, but she used to say that she was Puerto Rican, mainly because of the politics between Cuba and the United States. But yes, wow. I'm telling you, it was like I thought I had died and going to heaven when I saw that check and showed it to people. And they were all like, wow, Sammy Davis Jr., you know, that is so cool. Because that picture of him hugging Nixon or whatever, if you remember, there was a huge blow-up about this and Sammy's politics and whatever. But that's not the reality of who he actually was, or the complete reality of who he was.

SPEAKER_01: 35:26

Right. I have learned so many things. Like I said, last night I stayed up late, like just getting to know more about Miss Denise. Oliver Balless. And I enjoyed so much. We have to do this again. But I want to kind of wrap up this session of it and move on to another because you're such a talented, smart woman. And I wanted to talk a little bit about your writing, some of the things that you do in the music Sunday. Thank you. But before we leave this aspect, I do have a question regarding like, do you see a difference between like young activists today and your contemporaries decades ago?

SPEAKER_00: 36:05

I do. I mean, I'm happy to see young people get engaged. I think in some ways they could learn a little bit from listening to some of us older folks who have been through this in the past. I remember learning from my my whole life was turned around from spending one whole day with Fanny Blue Hamer, who was a revered elder in the community. And the thing that I worry about is if people become what I call una-issue folks, they only focus on one aspect of things. And it doesn't necessarily generically grow up out of the community. And I'm not saying to listen to all old folks, because there's some reactionary old people around too. But I think that there needs to be more dialogue between generations, the youngest who are out there, because I mean, like I said, we were 16 and 17 and 18 years old. But we were still willing to listen to the Awelas, uh, that's grandparents, you know, and mothers and fathers. So there needs to be a lot more focus on a community. And one of the other things that's problematic is I saw it during Black Lives Matter. There were folks out in the community and they were gathering the community, and then the quote-unquote anarchists, who essentially it was a bunch of white people, came in and decided let's break windows and whatever. And you don't do that in your you don't shit on your neighborhood. I'm sorry I had to learn to use that word, but this turned the community off rather than engaging people. So we have to be really careful about who we have that come in and overwhelm our movements that grow up from the community base. And I have been very critical of that, and a lot of these people call themselves progressives, and I call them progressive. I say I'm not a progressive, I am a pragmatic radical. I'm a radical, but I'm pragmatic in the sense that I listen to especially to black women. And we are the folks folks need to be listening to, and that's my opinion on that.

SPEAKER_01: 38:34

I really appreciate that because I think you're right and understand that yes, there are things that people can learn from the past, from elders, but things change. Change is a constant, actually. Sometimes you have to find new ways of doing things. I'll share part two of my conversation next week. Thank you for listening to Connections and Conversations. This is one of many wonderful interviews that we bring to you to help connect you to a larger community of advocates and change makers across the country. You'll get a glimpse into the various ways people are making an impact in their communities. My hope is that it will inspire you to get engaged in some small way as well. We can't all do everything, but at this moment in history, we can all do something. What are you doing? One of the things you can do is to continue to listen, subscribe, and share this Advocacy Arena podcast. You can also join and support the growing grassroots Advocacy Arena community. In other ways, join our weekly live chats hosted on Spotable every Monday at 12 p.m. Eastern. Subscribe to our SubStaff to get great articles on important topics and exclusive access to extended interview conversations. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel as well. We've got some exciting programming lined up. And keep listening to our regular podcast episodes wherever you get your podcast. And of course, subscribe and give us that all important five star review.