The Don Cornelius Foundation (DCF) is kicking off Suicide Prevention Week themed “I AM THE FACE,” with an afternoon of music and fellowship on Sunday, September 7, 2014 at 3:00 pm at the popular Post & Beam restaurant in Los Angeles, CA.
The DCF is a non-profit organization formed by the family of Donald “Don” C. Cornelius, creator of “Soul Train,” who ended his life by suicide on February 1, 2012. Radio personality Pat Prescott from 94.7 The Wave will host.
Renaissance man Don Cornelius’ entrepreneurial spirit and vast contribution to television, music, the arts and popular culture is unparalleled. The foundation – whose slogan is ‘Life is beautiful, precious and worth living’ – was established to provide awareness, prevention and support for those contemplating suicide and survivors who have lost loved ones to suicide.
Committed to identifying and supporting programs assisting those in transition and in need of healing, DCF has chosen three organizations for initial grants in 2014, namely New Directions for Veterans, National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Urban LA, and The Los Angeles LGBT Center. These organizations are committed to serving underserved, at-risk communities and to increasing their capacities within the African-American community.
Helmed by Restaurateur Brad Johnson and Chef Govind Armstrong, Post & Beam offers California cuisine with a touch of soul to the surrounding Baldwin Hills neighborhood and beyond. “We’re pleased to be associated with Post & Beam” says Don’s son Tony Cornelius who heads up DCF.
Post & Beam is located at 3767 Santa Rosalia Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90008. Tickets can be purchased online at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/i-am-the-face-tickets-12682942021
Information is also available on the website http://thedoncorneliusfoundation.org
Read more at http://www.eurweb.com/2014/08/don-cornelius-foundation-kicks-off-suicide-prevention-week-sept-7/#xSyxe0EbjImfkrOD.99
Posts published in “Community”
Sam “Sonny” Bryant Jr. is a rarity. He is a champion bodybuilder, and at the ripe old age of 71, he is still going strong.
“I just keep competing,” Bryant said at the I’m The Biggest Winner Family Health & Fitness Expo in Austell, Georgia. “I love it. It’s a lifestyle.”
With a body that puts most men half his age to shame, Bryant’s rippling physique is testimony to years-long hard work and dedicated commitment.
He works out twice a day alongside a full time, overnight job. “I’ve got a room full of trophies,” said Bryant, who was invited to the Expo as part of a roster of quality experts and motivational speakers. “I can’t even count them all.”
RELATED:
- 78 Year-Old Vegan Male Bodybuilder, Jim Morris, Will Make You Reconsider Your Diet
- Seventy Five Year-Old Female Bodybuilder Stuns The Internet With Fabulous Photo
He first hit the gym to relive the stress of a failing marriage. Within months, Bryant was hooked. Now, he can deadlift 425lbs. “I’ve been doing this for 27 years,” he said. “I used to do three or four contests a year, and I’d always have at least two trophies when I come home, so I’ve got over 70 or 80 trophies.”
Bryant wants to prove that living a full and active life is possible at any age. All you need is the right approach, he says. “I don’t think about my age,” said the Georgia native. “You’re going to age, that’s inevitable, but you don’t have to get old. I know people younger than me, but they’re older then me.”
“I can’t see giving up; this is my life. People ask me when I’m going to retire. I’m still working a 40 hours a week job. I say, why should I quit? I’ve figured this stuff out. More people die retired than die working.”
He believes it is never too late to improve your health. Bryant, who said he has never ever taken steroids or performance-enhancing drugs, advises fitness newbies to start off slow and keep doing the work.
“There is no age limit on exercising,” he said. “People got life but they’ve not living. Life is getting out and enjoying yourself. You’ve got to be physical. You’ve got to keep your heart strong.”
“You are not going to jump right in and start out wide open. That’s what happens to most people, they jump right in and think they’re going to look for instant results.”
“Once you start pushing your body, then your body is going to get used to it,” he said. “You just keep doing it, keep doing it, take your time and don’t look for that fast-paced stuff, and I’ll come to you.”
article by Kunbi Tinuoye via thegrio.com
Like everyone else in America, Ima Christian has been nervously watching the news unfold in Ferguson, Missouri. The 16-year-old resident of Stone Mountain, Georgia, says that she and her siblings have been in constant conversation with their parents about the recent deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (who died last month in Staten Island) at the hands of police.
“Our parents try to put everything in context for us,” Christian says. “They try to tell us to focus on solutions.”
So they decided to build their own answer to police abuse. On Monday, Ima Christian (pictured, second from left) and her siblings—principally Caleb, 14, and Asha, 15, with the support of Joshua, 10—are launching a beta version of Five-O, an app that will enable users to rate their interactions with police and view aggregate scores for how law-enforcement agencies fare.
“As soon as we decided that we wanted to make an app, we threw the idea on the white board,” she says.
“Our parents try to put everything in context for us,” Christian says. “They try to tell us to focus on solutions.”
So they decided to build their own answer to police abuse. On Monday, Ima Christian (pictured, second from left) and her siblings—principally Caleb, 14, and Asha, 15, with the support of Joshua, 10—are launching a beta version of Five-O, an app that will enable users to rate their interactions with police and view aggregate scores for how law-enforcement agencies fare.
“As soon as we decided that we wanted to make an app, we threw the idea on the white board,” she says.
Ima Christian and her siblings decided to build their own answer to police abuse.
Here’s how Five-O works: Users log in to a dashboard, where they have several options. A Five-O user can create a detailed incident report and rate the professionalism and courtesy of the officer, using an A-F scale. Or they can view police stations by county or state to see how various departments rate. (Those A-F officer interaction scores are averaged out on a 4.0 scale—like a GPA for the fuzz.)
The app also allows people to post messages to a community board. There’s another function called “Know Your Rights,” a Q&A-formatted feature, “so you have your rights at your fingertips at any moment,” Christian says. The family drew the information from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Christian, a senior at Parkview High School, credits her brother Caleb for the idea to create an app for rating police interactions. They decided early on in the project planning stages that Five-O would focus on the good as well as the bad.
“I haven’t really heard of issues happening in Stone Mountain of the scale of what’s in the news,” she says. “I do have relatives who have had negative interactions with police.” She says that friends of the family include police officers, who offer a friendlier model for police interactions. “This is an app to offer up positive experiences. They can be an example.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-Veei0jQM&w=560&h=315]
This is the Christian family’s first app release, but it’s unlikely to be their last. Ima and her siblings are aggressive students of programming, especially for a mobile environment. She and her siblings Asha and Caleb have participated in programs such as MIT’s +K12, Scratch, and App Inventor programs. Ima and Asha Christian are both executive team members in the ProjectCSGirls computer science competition. And they were both 2014 #Include Fellows in the She++ program. Ima is a Codecademy alum as well, and has done coding programs through Stanford.Stanford, incidentally, is Ima’s reach school—she’s also got her sights set onWashington University in St. Louis, Brown, and Columbia—and the graduating senior has also done work at her top in-state choice, the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Ima’s siblings could not be reached for comment, as they were not yet home from school.)
Following Monday’s beta launch for Five-O, the Christian siblings are continuing work on two more projects: Coily, a review app for hair-care products for black girls and women, and Froshly, an app to facilitate meetings for in-bound college pre-freshmen, “so they can greet each other before they meet each other in school.” The Christian siblings started a company, Pine Tart, Inc., to advance their work.
“We don’t have any institutional support right now,” Ima Christian says. “It’s just us. We’re our own team.”
article by Kriston Capps via citylab.com
Alabama State University recently announced that they received $1 million in federal grants for STEM programs, a major accomplishment for the institution.
The university’s Biological Sciences department will receive $770,000 to form a three institution partnership to include Auburn University and Tuskegee University. Through the partnership will come research and employment opportunities for students or color pursuing careers in STEM industries.
According to the principle investigator of the research project, the funding will have a tremendous impact on their doctoral students.
The remaining $330,000 will go to the university’s Center for NanoBiotechnology Research. The funding will be used for chlamydia research. The researches at Alabama State have been charged with using the grant funding to create a nanovaccine for the disease.
To read more visit hbcudigest.com.
On August 22, almost two weeks after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Columbia University professor Fredrick Harris titled “Will Ferguson be a moment or a movement?”
I started working on my piece about the new era of black activism (which you can read here) months ago, and so I read Harris’s op-ed with the same level of irritation that made me want to write that piece in the first place. Not that there isn’t any value in what Harris wrote, because there certainly is. But if you’re asking the question “Where is the movement?” you simply haven’t been paying attention.
“A moment of trauma can oftentimes present you with an opportunity to do something about the situation to prevent that trauma from happening again,” Charlene Carruthers, national coordinator for Black Youth Project 100, told me in an interview for that piece, and the millennial generation has been presented with trauma after trauma. The killing of Sean Bell, the over-prosecution of the Jena Six, the killing of Oscar Grant, the killing of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, the killing of Trayvon Martin and so many more moments that may not have captured the national media attention but those events have defined the late adolescence and early adulthood of black folks of the millennial generation. As part of that demographic, let me say: the trauma has been fucking exhausting.
So, too, has been the haranguing from older generations that we have been too apathetic, that we have been too “post-racial,” that we have not done our part in upholding the legacy of the civil-rights movement. And so I wanted to write a corrective to that narrative, as I’ve seen my generation take up the fight and organize and begin along the hard road to movement building. It’s happening at this very moment. It was happening before Michael Brown was killed.
Harris writes: “What may keep Ferguson from becoming a national transformative event is if “justice” is narrowly confined to seeking relief for Brown and his family. If the focus is solely on the need for formal charges against Wilson, a fair trial, a conviction, a wrongful-death lawsuit—rather than seeing those things as part of a broader movement that tackles stand-your-ground laws, the militarization of local police, a requirement that cameras be worn by police on duty and the need for a comprehensive federal racial-profiling law. If justice remains solely personal, rather than universal.”
But that work had already begun before Ferguson erupted. The Dream Defenders traveled to the United Nations to present a case against “stand-your-ground” laws, and BYP100 recently organized an action at the Chicago Police Department headquarters to address discrepancies in marijuana arrests. The movement is here. The pictures are not as arresting as what comes from a moment like Ferguson, and therefore aren’t as compelling to media outlets only interested in the sensational. But the criminalization of black youth has emerged as the central focus of organizing efforts for the millennial generation and the work is being done.
On Twitter, filmmaker/writer/activist dream hampton called millennials the “Movement Generation.” It fits.
article by Mychal Denzel Smith via thenation.com
Tameka Lawson is changing her Chicago neighborhood one yoga pose as at a time. Lawson, a yoga enthusiast for only a year, is the executive director of I Grow Chicago, a non-profit organization in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.
Lawson said she started practicing yoga because she needed to learn how to slow down and relax, and she thought the idea of bringing it to her community would bring people closer together.
From The Huffington Post:
Not long after she took up yoga, the student became a teacher as she began to lead classes for youth in Englewood through her organization.
Initially, the classes took place inside the five area schools her group works with as a means of helping the young students cope with the stresses of their environment. While Lawson does go through basic yoga poses and breathing exercises with her young students, the lessons she hopes they will take away from her work extend far beyond the practice of yoga itself.
Built into each class, she says, are elements of art therapy, motivational speaking, mentoring and job skills. Yoga is simply the gateway to that information.
“There are lots of elements causing these youth to have stress,” Lawson said. “We want to get at the center of these youth and give them a moment to breathe in a way that will change the way they react and process things.”
The classes have been such a hit that Lawson and her group have taken their show on the road — or, more specifically, to the street. They’ve held regular, free community yoga classes on a blocked-off stretch of 64th Street, and are also offering free lessons the first Monday of every month at Kusanya Cafe.
“If we can prevent one 8-year-old from growing up to become a person who could potentially pick up a gun, we’ve succeeded,” she said. “If we can intervene for a 14-year-old who has made bad choices from making another bad choice, we’ve succeeded. If a 28-year-old who says he wants to stop selling drugs and just needs the opportunity, we’ve succeeded. We don’t have the answers, but we’re trying to come up with creative solutions.”
article via clutchmagonline.com
If Estella Pyfrom looks familiar, it’s because she was recognized last year as a CNN Hero, a honor she received for the humanitarian genius behind her Brilliant Bus initiative, which really is quite brilliant.
Pyfrom, a retired 50-year veteran of Florida’s Palm Beach County School District, didn’t have any training in technology before she realized students in her district lacked the digital know-how to meet the demands of the 21st century workforce. “The minute I decided that [in retirement] I wanted to continue what I was doing for 50 years [as a school administrator], I knew I needed to be creative, and I needed to understand it,” Pyfrom said in a phone interview.
So Pyfrom, who is now 76, brushed up on her tech skills in 2009 and emptied her pension to build a non-profit, state-of-the-art mobile learning center called Project Aspiration, which was later renamed Estella’s Brilliant Bus. She’s been offering free tutoring to students since 2011.
Students who were among the winners of the #YESWECODE Hackathon at the 2014 ESSENCE Festival for their GlucoReader app rode from Florida to New Orleans on Estella’s Brilliant Bus, and Pyfrom takes great pride in her affiliation with the winners.
And that’s just one of many success stories tied to Pyfrom and her work. She spoke to us about what’s next for her organization.
ESSENCE: Why did you decide to launch your Brilliant Bus?
Estella Pyfrom: I started Brilliant Bus in an effort to expose kids to technology. I became passionate about technology when I realized that it would give kids so much exposure and different ways to connect with the world. I also just looked at what was going on in the community. When I was building my curriculum, I coordinated with area schools so that I could correlate what I was doing on the bus with what students were doing at school. I started working with kids at day care centers, churches, schools and community centers, and I ended up being able to offer a program for kids at all levels to prepare them for standardized tests, readiness tests and GED tests.
ESSENCE: What’s special about this method of teaching?
EP: Not only is it unique and innovative, it’s an idea that works. The Brilliant Bus is customized and I built it from scratch. The bus is a mobile learning lab and it can do whatever a classroom can do. Instead of kids who live in undeserved neighborhoods finding me, I am able to take the learning to the neighborhoods.
ESSENCE: What do your students tell you is their favorite part of the Brilliant Bus?
EP: Kids will do anything to get out of the classroom. They say it’s like going on a field trip. One of the good things they tell me is that the activities [on the bus] are so much in sync with what they are doing in the classroom and that it’s a good supplement. Everything that I do with kids on the bus is grade and age level appropriate.
ESSENCE: What’s next for the bus? How will you expand on it?
EP: Brilliant Bus isn’t just a bus; it’s a movement. We plan on building these clubs in various communities. We’re conducting surveys now so that we can move beyond coding and into Robotics. We are going to get really creative with science and math so we can build robots.
Don’t forget to follow the #YESWECODE conversation on Twitter and keep up with Estella’s Brilliant Bus on Facebook.
article via essence.com
Although the U.S. Supreme Court was “once a leader in the world” in the battle for racial equality, recent decisions by the high court undermine its role in solving a “real racial problem” in America, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in an interview with The National Law Journal last Wednesday.
Citing recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and racially biased stop-and-frisk policies, Ginsburg reflected on the perpetuation of racial segregation in America, comparing the challenges with those of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
“Once [gay] people began to say who they were, you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it could be your child, and we found people we admired,” she said. “That understanding still doesn’t exist with race; you still have separation of neighborhoods, where the races are not mixed. It’s the familiarity with people who are gay that still doesn’t exist for race and will remain that way for a long time as long as where we live remains divided.”
But instead of upholding the court’s history as a powerful stalwart against racial discrimination, the Roberts court’s recent decisions upholding affirmative action bans and restricting voting rights have not “helped” the country advance, Ginsburg explained.
“What’s amazing is how things have changed,” Ginsburg said, recalling the landmark 1971 decision of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that employer policies that look neutral on paper can still constitute discrimination if they disproportionately harm minorities in practice. “It was a very influential decision and it was picked up in England. That’s where the court was heading in the ’70s.”
Singling out the Voting Rights Act as the most powerful law “in terms of making people count in a democracy,” Ginsburg reiterated her opposition to the court’s majority 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key provision that helped safeguard against racial discrimination in voting laws.
The Jackie Robinson West All-Stars are still the pride of Chicago, even after a tough loss to South Korea in the Little League World Series championship game. The Jackie Robinson West team put up a valiant fight, including a late rally in the bottom of the sixth inning, but in the end it was not enough to hold off the mighty bats and dominant pitching performance from the Seoul team, which handed the South Side Chicago sluggers an 8-4 loss.
According to the Associated Press, normal Sunday activities in Chicago were on hold for a few hours while the all-black Jackie Robinson West ballplayers, who “made their first appearance in 31 years in the Little League World Series” and had stolen the nation’s heart on their way to the championship game, took the field.
Several hundred supporters gathered at TV watch stations to root for the team, which, until the final game, had dominated all comers.
AP notes that despite the defeat, several fans gathered at the South Side community center gym and roared and cheered just as if their boys had won. “They showed what heart they have. The city could not be prouder of them,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told AP.
Jackie Robinson West’s run was a nice break for an area that has been ravished by poverty and violence.
“I have never seen the community come together like this,” Eldridge Dockery, 44, told AP. “We’re usually behind our walls or gates—but this team brought us out, talking and celebrating together.”
According to news station WGN-TV, a parade is planned for the team on Wednesday.
Read more at the Associated Press and WGN-TV.
ST. LOUIS — They came by the thousands to pay their respects. Among them were the parents and extended family — some 500 strong — of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed more than two weeks ago by a Ferguson police officer.
But the crowd of mourners also included the Rev. Jesse Jackson; film director Spike Lee; T. D. Jakes, the bishop of The Potter’s House, an African-American megachurch; several members of Congress; representatives from the White House; and two children of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
During a deeply religious service here on Monday at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, several speakers exhorted mourners to work for justice, not just for Mr. Brown but for others, long after the funeral was over.
“There is a cry being made from the ground, not just for Michael Brown, but for the Trayvon Martins, for those children in Sandy Hook Elementary School, for the Columbine massacre, for black-on-black crime,” the Rev. Charles Ewing, Mr. Brown’s uncle, said.
Speaking before the overflowing crowd, the Rev. Al Sharpton criticized the militarization of the police and their treatment of Mr. Brown, while calling on African-Americans to push for change instead of “sitting around having ghetto pity parties.”
On Sunday, relatives of Mr. Brown had asked for quiet during the funeral. The fatal shooting had set off weeks of protests and a severe police reaction in Ferguson. Several speakers echoed pleas from Mr. Brown’s family for people to refrain from protesting on Monday.
“Please don’t exacerbate the almost unbearable pain of this family,” said Bishop Edwin Bass of the Church of God in Christ. “It is imperative that we resist the temptation to react by rioting.”
Many mourners, most of whom were black, wore buttons showing Mr. Brown’s picture, and large photos of Mr. Brown stood at the front of the church. Rousing hymns by the Missouri Jurisdictional Choir repeatedly brought the entire crowd to their feet.
Among the family members who spoke, Cal Brown, Mr. Brown’s stepmother, said that just weeks before he was shot, Mr. Brown had described a dream in which he had seen bloody sheets hanging on a clothes line. “He pretty much prophesied his own death and he didn’t even realize it,” she said, calling him “an awesome man” who wanted to have a family and “be a good father.”
In addition to numerous readings from the Bible, there were readings from Dr. King and references to significant court cases in black history. Referring to the original determination in the Constitution that blacks were counted as three-fifths of a man for the purposes of voting, Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who is representing Mr. Brown’s family, said that the teenager “was not three-fifths of a citizen. He was an American citizen and we will not accept three-fifths justice.”
During a deeply religious service here on Monday at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, several speakers exhorted mourners to work for justice, not just for Mr. Brown but for others, long after the funeral was over.
“There is a cry being made from the ground, not just for Michael Brown, but for the Trayvon Martins, for those children in Sandy Hook Elementary School, for the Columbine massacre, for black-on-black crime,” the Rev. Charles Ewing, Mr. Brown’s uncle, said.
Speaking before the overflowing crowd, the Rev. Al Sharpton criticized the militarization of the police and their treatment of Mr. Brown, while calling on African-Americans to push for change instead of “sitting around having ghetto pity parties.”
On Sunday, relatives of Mr. Brown had asked for quiet during the funeral. The fatal shooting had set off weeks of protests and a severe police reaction in Ferguson. Several speakers echoed pleas from Mr. Brown’s family for people to refrain from protesting on Monday.
“Please don’t exacerbate the almost unbearable pain of this family,” said Bishop Edwin Bass of the Church of God in Christ. “It is imperative that we resist the temptation to react by rioting.”
Many mourners, most of whom were black, wore buttons showing Mr. Brown’s picture, and large photos of Mr. Brown stood at the front of the church. Rousing hymns by the Missouri Jurisdictional Choir repeatedly brought the entire crowd to their feet.
Among the family members who spoke, Cal Brown, Mr. Brown’s stepmother, said that just weeks before he was shot, Mr. Brown had described a dream in which he had seen bloody sheets hanging on a clothes line. “He pretty much prophesied his own death and he didn’t even realize it,” she said, calling him “an awesome man” who wanted to have a family and “be a good father.”
In addition to numerous readings from the Bible, there were readings from Dr. King and references to significant court cases in black history. Referring to the original determination in the Constitution that blacks were counted as three-fifths of a man for the purposes of voting, Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who is representing Mr. Brown’s family, said that the teenager “was not three-fifths of a citizen. He was an American citizen and we will not accept three-fifths justice.”