>>Charlottesville has a lot to offer, and there's so many different parts of the community, you know, like, there's not one community, there's so many different communities here.

>>I think we all have a role to play, but finding out what that role is, is an individualized thing.

>>You can't just sit at home and think something's going to change, because it's not, you have to get out, you have to reach out, you have to try.

>>Today on this special episode of "Charlottesville Inside-Out" we're going to introduce you to five people you may or may not know who are striving to make a difference in the community in a variety of ways, often behind the scenes.

Join us as we find out what inspires them to do the work and why they are dedicated to being the change, come on.

>>Production funding for "Charlottesville Inside-Out" is provided by.

(light music) (gentle music) >>Myra Anderson is a poet and a UVA Equity Center Community fellow-in-residence.

She is also the founder of Brave Souls on Fire, a peer run organization focused on emotional wellness, advocacy, and healing justice for African Americans.

As a descendant of enslaved families of Monticello and the University of Virginia, Myra reflects upon her roots to help inform the change she wants to bring about now and for the future.

>>Dear Africa, I was not born in the sacred land, but my blood beats from the heart of the ancestors.

So I am one with thee.

And even though we may not speak the same tongue, I can still move to the beat of your drum, my heart pulses to its rhythm as it becomes the essence of sound.

I am an individual that loves the city that I live in.

I am a person who's committed to doing the work to make my city better.

I just, I love people, and I like seeing people well, and having access to the things that they need in life.

Poetry kinda tells the tale of my own story, I've written many times when I, myself, was struggling with various things and there seems to be no other outlet, I started to write about it.

Sankofa is a mythical bird, African bird, and the meaning behind sankofa is in order to move forward, you have to go back to your roots.

So it's not only about what I'm trying to do with this mental health project, but it's me and my own journey going back and understanding about my roots which happens to be, my ancestors were enslaved at Monticello and were also amongst the enslaved laborers at the University of Virginia.

So when I reflect on that, it's like, one of my ancestors helped build the stone foundation the stairs of the rotunda, and you fast forward, like over 190 years, I'm at that same university, his descendant, and what I'm doing is working on a project that is gonna bring dignity and hope and support to the very people who were denied theirs that many years ago.

My project focuses specifically on black mental health, and it's about creating, not only a space, but a safe liberating space to be able to try to unpack some of the things that is weight, that as a black people and black community, we continue to carry.

And that's so important for so many reasons first of all, because African Americans are more likely to experience mental health problems, and then secondly, there is a whole nother complexity, racism, medical racism, and bias that often makes up individuals, African Americans, reluctant to seek the help.

And then there's a third layer of cultural stigma in the African American community, that it's not okay, you know, you have to be a strong person and it kinda goes against that that cultural norm to seek help.

So the whole idea is understanding that there is an internal component, there is a cultural component, and then there is engaging in a system that has not historically, you know, been conducive to black people getting help, all of those things together, is why I chose to focus on black mental health and naturally my own black skin and having that lived experience myself added on top of that.

It wasn't until more recent years when I started to just feel the weight of a lot of things going on in our community.

And at first, I was looking to other people, like, "Who's gonna fix this, who's gonna step up and help or work on this?"

And I struggled with that question for a while and then I came to the conclusion that maybe I'm the person, maybe it's me, maybe it's for me to step up in whatever capacity that I could and try to see what I could do.

I don't think I just had this one moment where I was like, "Oh, I wanna do this," but it was more of a realization that we all have a role to play and until our community is a great place for everyone, and everyone is thriving, there's always work to be done.

>>Visit Brave Souls on Fire on Facebook to learn more about the mental health support services and resources they provide for African Americans in the community.

Robert Gray is a father, a sports enthusiast, and a member of the community hotline network "Sitdowns Before Shootouts."

He is also the cofounder of the Conscious Capitalist Foundation, an organization that works to interrupt the school to prison pipeline by providing financial literacy training, business skills, and credible messenger mentoring.

Having dropped out of college twice before earning his political science degree, Robert is committed to giving community youth the chances they need to succeed.

>>I always say I'm not a role model, I'm a real model.

I'm a community guy, I'm an activist, I'm an advocate.

When I wake up, you know, I wanna go to work.

I love what I'm doing, I love my community, I love my people, and so that kinda like gives me the energy to, you know, wake up and do this over and over and over.

Social entrepreneurship is essentially identifying a problem that exists in society, your community, and creating a business model or business idea to address that issue.

Our primary focus is on, you know, youth in the juvenile justice system, court-involved youth, you know, most of my family has been incarcerated at some point in their life, and I'm kinda like the exception, but I'm not bigger than my community.

If you can believe in yourself, you can change the world.

And so a lot of these kids, they don't think they can change the world but in reality and actuality they can, they can change the world.

They're very creative, you know, they wanna be able to learn how to create something and, you know, add value to their lives, the lives of their families, and then just the community in general.

We primarily focus on financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and workforce development training, but then we also provide mentoring around better decision making, so essentially teaching them how to make better decisions and ideally, how to become assets to their communities and not liabilities.

We grew up in a very rural community, where at one point, you know, in the '90s, it was ravaged by a lot of drugs and so we just, we saw stuff early growing up.

For me, I felt like I was that kid, you know, in high school, I'd be in the back of the class, like doodling.

It's kinda like, I lost, like total interest in education.

And so like, I was a sports guy, you know, in the sports arena you meet a lot of different people.

And so, I think that's kinda like the community part.

It's not like, I'm going into the community not knowing individuals, like I know a lot of these individuals, and I have, like, real relationships with people.

And then also my uncle, he was my basketball coach growing up.

And I just seen, like, the compassion he had for the neighborhood, like the kids growing up in the neighborhood, he would like literally pick a bunch of us up, take us on AEU trips, gave us kind of like an opportunity to see the world outside of just like our small community, and Charlottesville in general.

So that was kind of like an eye opener for me.

I'm big on practical application, so if someone wants to get involved in anything, not just this line of work, the first thing you gotta do is believe in yourself, right?

You have to convince yourself that you can do whatever it is you're trying to do before you can convince somebody else.

The second step is research.

You gotta be a researched practitioner, that's what I call it, gotta know what you're talking about.

It's a lot easier for the youth to accept the information 'cause the first thing they wanna know is like, kinda like what you've been through.

But then also, you have to have a personal conviction, I call it a purpose, like, I have a purpose for this line of work.

I just wanna make sure kids have the opportunity to, you know, embrace their gifts, but then also, providing them with the resources they need in order to, you know, manifest their gifts, and shine a light on the world.

>>To learn more about the Conscious Capitalist Foundation, visit consciouscapitalistfoundation.o.

With a tremendous amount of support from the community, athlete and former educator, Katie Kishore, founded Kindness Cafe, a nonprofit coffee shop created to employ adults with cognitive disabilities.

Katie's story is proof that even for the strongest, most independent people, sudden life changes can make us reevaluate our priorities and our perceptions, and help us to understand how much we can learn from people with different experiences.

>>One of the lessons I've learned both through my life experiences and working in this world of with adults with disabilities is that it's a gift to be able to lean on others, it's a gift to be able to both provide support for a friend, but it's also a gift to have the strength to ask for support.

So I have two daughters.

Mira is nine years old, and she's typically developing.

She is joyful and fun, and a great big sister.

A lot of positive energy.

My other daughter is Kiran, she's seven years old and she has Down syndrome.

She is also very joyful and fun, they have a lot of things in common in terms of how they interact with the world, and then obviously they have a lot of differences.

Mira is gonna check you out a little longer and where she and I might hesitate, Kiran is all in.

She has that shout it from the rooftops kind of joy and energy and love.

When I was thinking about pursuing this idea of a coffee shop that employed adults with cognitive disabilities, there was a lot of excitement around it, right?

A lot of people were supportive, and it's fun to do something new.

And then there's also some real fear in it for me, and you know, not only what if it doesn't succeed, but what is it gonna be like for me raising a daughter with the cognitive disability to throw myself into this world of adults with cognitive disabilities.

So I think for me, it took me to understand that fear was gonna be a part of the process, and I was gonna uncover things about myself and discover things about the world that were gonna be uncomfortable, but that it was gonna be worth it.

I grew up very committed to being the best at everything I pursued.

I played soccer and basketball, and I excelled in both, and I went on to play soccer and basketball at UVA, I was the captain of both teams.

Following graduation, I played professional soccer in New York.

In 2014, a lot happened in my life.

I've grown older, I'm a mom, athletics doesn't have the same role in my life as it once did, my husband had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Kiran was born, and then two weeks later, he passed away.

And the day after Kiran was born, she was diagnosed with Down syndrome.

And you know, Kiran is a star today, right?

She is a joy and a gift.

And I'm glad I've been able to raise her and to be with her.

In that in that moment, though, right, it felt like a challenging diagnosis, it felt like an added weight to an already difficult situation.

And, you know, from life experiences, we grow.

Kris was a wonderful man, he was a long time teacher in the community, he was very kind, right?

And so when we are talking about names, when we stumbled across the name of kindness, well we thought it worked for a lot of people reasons and one of those was that Kris was known to many of his friends as the K Man, and so his name Kris is spelled with a K, last name is Kishore, also spelled with a K. So we thought it was a good fit, you know, I don't think the average customer knows that the K has any significance beyond kindness.

But you know, it's nice within our family to know that it represents Kris in some ways.

I want people to love coming to Kindness, and I want people to experience joy at Kindness, and I also want people to have their perceptions challenged a little bit.

I want our customers to realize what they can learn by interacting with our staff.

If we can all see the gifts in those around us, and we can treat others with with kindness, then that's really the change we need.

Everyone brings gifts and value into this world, and it's important that we have eyes to see it.

>>To learn more about the Cafe and the community partners who came together to make it a reality, visit kindnesscafecville.com.

(fast-paced music) Jimmy Hollins is the co-founder of the Burley Varsity Club, a group of athletes who attended the all-black high school that served the community from 1951 to 1967.

Focused on preserving the history of their beloved school, the club was recently successful in listing the building as a Virginia landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

Additional projects have included honorary road signs, plaques, and a memorial wall to celebrate coaches, faculty, and students.

Almost always quietly working behind the scenes and often with area partners, Jimmy is currently helping with the Burley Restoration Project to repair and modernize the existing athletic field and facility.

>>Have you ever seen that movie "Friday Night Lights"?

Well, Burley was Friday night lights.

If you were a student, you could not wait until school was out, you go home, you ate, you waited.

Of course when you played football, Coach Jones didn't let you go back home.

Or Coach Smith didn't let you go back home.

You would lay out in the hallway and take a nap, and then they'd wake you up at a certain time when you go change, put your uniform on, and when the team came on the field, the team ran in between the band and the cheerleaders.

Nothing like it.

I wouldn't trade it in for nothing in the world, mm-mm.

Only if we lost that's the only time you wanna trade it in.

Yeah, but that was far and few in between.

The Burley Varsity Club is an organization made up of guys that played sports at Burley High School.

It could be football, basketball, or baseball.

Our first goal, when we formed a club, was to have a cookout and reunite the athletes of Burley.

And then our next project was to have a trophy case built, so that's what we did.

We think Burley is really important because it's the second black high school in the city of Charlottesville, and they felt that they were going to eventually have to desegregate schools.

And they wanted to, I guess, try to head that off with a new school.

We had a young lady, she's a friend of ours now, Olivia Ferguson McQueen, she was one of the, if not the first, that was supposed to desegregate Lane High School.

The governor closed the schools up rather than to integrate the schools until the court case was finally decided and won.

The judge here said he feared for her life, and he would not let her go into Lane, and he would not let her go back to Burley.

She went to school in the superintendent's office.

And when she graduated, she never did get a high school diploma.

She got a piece of paper saying that she had completed her work.

In 2013 our club held a graduation exercise for her where she got her official diploma after she was supposed to graduate in 1959, but she got her graduation diploma over in our auditorium at Burley.

Young kids don't realize what she paid the price to do for them to go to school today.

In September of 2018, I started a petition to the school board for making Burley a historical landmark.

It took probably almost two years from start to finish.

We want younger kids to know what Burley was like, we want them to know that Burley was a great place to go to school.

Somebody has to do it, if it doesn't matter to somebody, it just will end up going away, it may end up getting torn down, just pushed to the side.

And I hate to see Burley get pushed to the side.

You can't just sit at home and think something's going to change, because it's not, you have to get out, you have to reach out, you have to try.

That's the only way it's going to work.

>>Visit the Burley Varsity Club Facebook page to keep up with updates on all of their projects.

Karina Monroy describes herself as an artist, a community organizer, a daughter, a friend, a chicken raiser, and her grandmother's legacy.

Drawing on her own life experiences to inform her work as the executive director of Creciendo Juntos, Karina is passionate about providing a platform for the voices and needs of the Latinx youth community through art, education, leadership development, and work groups.

>>I'm first generation Mexican, so I was born in the US, but my parents are both from Mexico.

So I think a lot of the times growing up, I kinda felt this split between my culture and my identity.

You know, I was growing up in a very Mexican traditional household, speaking Spanish fluently, all the times, eating the foods, 100% in this, immersed in this Mexican culture at home, but I was going to school and making friends in the US, right?

And so I was experiencing this whole other life, this whole other world.

And a lot of the times it felt like I couldn't really be fully myself in either or, and I think art making really became the way in which I kind of asked myself these questions or worked through those feelings.

Art became the tool to like, figure out what to embrace and what to, like, throw away.

What did I wanna take away from both of these cultures and kind of make my own path?

A lot of the work that we're even doing within Creciendo Juntos brings in that culture, and that creativity and art making into life for some of these students, and I love exposing them to different artists of different backgrounds and different upbringings to kinda just give that like spark and inspiration, because I know for me, if it wasn't for art, I don't think I would have graduated high school or even gone to college and done so well in college.

I was, you know, a young Latina in a very white school, and there was a time in school when I was failing, like, I was completely failing, I was gonna not graduate high school.

I look back and I think about how, not once did a teacher ever pull me aside and ask, you know, "Hey, what's going on?

Why are you not passing, why are you not succeeding?"

And I think that a large part of that has to do with this expectation or this, you know, or low expectations set for Latinos in our school.

And so I look back, and I think about like, imagine someone actually reaching out and being, you know, there's something going on here, why aren't you succeeding like the rest of your peers?

Our services at Creciendo Juntos are all Latinx, youth-focused programs and it's all about cultivating leadership and cultivating community within the Latinx community here.

The purpose of these programs are really just to provide a space for latinx youth to gather, connect, create together, learn from artists, from teachers, from poets, and kind of give them that space to flourish and grow.

I'm just passionate about our youth and our students having all the options, and then being able to freely choose what they want.

So we're not saying like, you know, "College is the only way and we're here to get you into college whether you like it or not," you know.

We're here to say like, "If this is something that you might wanna do, like, let's figure it out together, and let's give you that option so you can feel empowered to choose that for yourself."

I think that's why I'm so passionate about it, 'cause I feel like, as a young person, I feel like a lot of options were taken away from me without me knowing it.

One of the major gaps that keeps coming up over and over again is the lack of mental health services.

One of the things that we've talked about a lot is how can we get mental health providers within the schools to help teens and students who are struggling with mental health issues.

It all intersects, mental health is gonna affect a student's ability to believe in themselves and their ability to achieve.

And it's really getting these kids together in a cohort and talking about some of these difficult barriers that the Latinx community face, and really breaking it down in a way that's accessible and easy to understand.

For me, success looks like, you know, seeing our youth putting on initiatives beyond our organization, you know, I see them growing up and being the leaders of our community, and really investing their time back into the community.

I think that a lot of the times when we're trying to make change within the community, we have to start from within, start with ourselves and question, you know, our own upbringings, our own privileges, our own faults.

Look in the mirror, you know, in that sense, and kind of start working from there to be a changemaker, because I think that you really can't affect people's lives until you really feel secure and feel that you like radically, really love yourself as a person.

>>To learn more about Creciendo Juntos, visit cj-network.org.

Thank you for joining us for this special episode of "Charlottesville Inside-Out."

We hope you enjoyed hearing from just a few of the people who are working to make a difference in our community.

Thank you to our guests for taking the time to tell us a little about the work they do, and why they do it.

We all have passions and life experiences.

How might we see ourselves being the change?

>>Production funding for "Charlottesville Inside-Out" is provided by.

(light music) (gentle music) (words dinging)