Soul to Soul

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The following is special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5. The content of Soul2Soul does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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Good morning. Soul to soul. Universal ideas for a brighter tomorrow. This show is a free for all of positive energy that will include book discussions, music, politics, books, food, COVID-19, oral history, books, and Las Vegas history. Today, my show is about the cultural shift. I don't know what that is, but my guests do. I have three guests today. I have SJ, CC, and Aisha. S.J. and CC, I want you to please pronounce your first names, your full names for my audience. Absolutely. Hello, beautiful people. My name is CC, but my government is Larmaya Kilgore.

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Larmaya, what a beautiful name.

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Thank you.

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What is your title?

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I am the Civic Participation and Social Justice Pillar Project Manager at the one and only Nevada Partners. Wow, what a title.

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I love it.

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SJ, same thing. Rich Risens, everybody.

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Hi, my name is Shonjerion Coleman.

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Thank you. And is there a title that we should know about?

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So I am currently the Wildin' Out Wednesdays Youth Advisory Council President, as well as the Civic Participation in Social Justice Pillar Assistant. Wow, I love those titles over

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there. Aisha, I know you hate to follow this, but tell us who you are. Right, good morning everyone. I am Aisha Jackson, an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at UNLV and a proud and grateful volunteer at Nevada Partners. Wonderful. This is going to be amazing. So let me tell you how I heard about Culture Shifts. These people came into our office one day and they said, we want to bring 200 people to your campus on a Saturday and we want you to take them around and do all kinds of things with them. So we were pulled into this in a very interesting way. So I want to know what this is that we've gotten involved in. What happened? How did it begin? How did you get involved?

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Well, the culture shift was a vision of mine since I was young. A young just running around, you know. I was a young one and you know you grow up you have a lot of ideas and a lot of dreams. But one of my main dreams was just to impact people on a positive and great level. So of course I came to Nevada Partners and I brought the culture shift idea to my supervisor, Cece. And ever since she's been a real great help and she's been saying like, you got to do it. And so our first highlighted culture shift event is going to be the 2021 Freedom Riders bus tour. And essentially it's going to be an all day event 15 hour bus tour. It's going to highlight the historical significance that black people had in the state of Nevada with emphasis on the city of Las Vegas.

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Wonderful. See, see, how did you, how did he encourage you to do this? How did he, how, why did you encourage this?

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Um, man, I have so many thoughts running through my mind, but I think really what solidified my decision to assist him in executing such a brilliant plan was the need and the community. This event, it's not even an event, I think that's an understatement, this movement is literally one-of-a-kind in that one, it's something I've never seen in Vegas and I've been here in Vegas since 2010. Two, it is completely youth-led. This movement is completely youth-driven by young people like Sean Jerrion, as well as the Wildin' Out Wednesday Advisory Council program at Nevada Partners. And these are young people who identify some of the social justice issues within our community, who identify some of those racial inequities and disparities that they experience as young black folks in this Las Vegas community. And I think what really inspired me to do something about it was their, their need of urgency and action.

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Right.

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And just like he stated, we all have dreams, but I was just so moved to have a group of young people that were actually ready for execution. And that's a rarity, like really, really ready to pull up their sleeves and do the work to meet with the business stakeholders, to meet with individuals like yourself, to have conversations with community partners like Dr. Jackson, to leverage their resources, to bring this dream to light. That's really what motivated me. And just to kind of put my business out there a tad, I'm 27, and a lot of my WOW members are between that 16 and 24 age bracket. So what really pulled on my heartstrings was the fact that some of those injustices that they identified just through conversations, I've been directly impacted as well. So I felt a sense of moral obligation to assist SJ and making this vision happen. So SJ, talk to us about what's going to happen on the 23rd on Saturday.

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So on the 23rd, on Saturday, it'll be a total of five stops, and the event is kind of mirrored off of the movie and show Dear White People, which will be actually showing at the last stop. And essentially, I've made each stop into chapters. So the first stop is MPI, which is chapter one, the beginning. And if for the people that don't know and are listening, MPI was born out of the Rodney King riots. So, you know, so they locked all the African Americans in the West Side and basically told them don't leave. So when the African-Americans started, you know, protesting what happened to Rodney King, they started burning down the nuclear center that we all know and love. And essentially the other black people, like the people that were fed up with the riots, they were trying to leave. So when they hit around Bonanza, they said that there was armed police officers lined up, basically saying, if y'all take another step, that's it for y'all. So they essentially went back to the Westside and built Nevada Partners just to be a community-based organization that helps the West Las Vegas and North Las Vegas neighborhoods. The second stop is CSN. There we'll be learning about the first black man to own land, which would be, his name is John Howell. And as well as we'll be going, we'll be also touching on African-American enrollment percentages at CSN and also black significance at CSN. And that's going to be led by the amazing Sean Torrey. The third stop will be UNLV, you know, your own campus. And we're going to be visiting the Voices exhibit and the Barrett Museum. And, you know, the amazing Dr. Isa Jackson will be running a working lunch on the different things that people are learning. And then the fourth stop, essentially, I named it school days, because we're going to the historic Westside school, there's going to be a panel on the people that went to the school and also on, you know, the social injustice, if a lot of people didn't know there was a race, racial riots in the education system early in Vegas history. So we're going to be touching on that as well as the 100 plan. And the last the last stop would be Vegas roots, which are called roots. And that's going to be the only and first black owned garden in Las Vegas. And we're going to be having vendors dinner is going to be provided at that stop as well as we're going to be getting rid of Vegas roots. And everyone I've talked to doesn't want that to happen. So hashtag stay rooted. We need Vegas roots to stay.

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volunteer with this effort? I have been in awe, first of all, at the amount of work that has been put into this, the leadership of Sean Jerrion and the youth

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with the Wildin' Out Wednesday Youth Advisory Council at Nevada Partners under the leadership and direction of CC. So it's been a pleasure for me as an educator to be part of this journey and to connect UNLV to the vision of culture shift. One of the things that I learned as the youth were preparing is that a number of them had never come to this campus. And as an educator who started out as a high school English teacher, committed to wanting to see particularly Black and Latinx students see themselves in the light of success that didn't look like playing basketball and football and being on television. all of those are great dreams, but there's more that we can do. I was disheartened that there's a disconnect between UNLV and community organizations like Nevada Partners. And so it's been a dream of mine to be a community resource at a university that is leveraging opportunities to really engage with community work so that students and potential students can have a pathway to the careers and the futures that they imagine for themselves. And so I helped to connect CC and SJ to you, Claytee, and the work that you will be doing to talk about the significance of African Americans in Las Vegas through your oral history project. I also reached out to President Whitfield, and we are super grateful for the generous support for the President's Office to not only allow President Whitfield to do opening remarks as the first Black President of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, but they're also sponsoring lunch. And that will be an opportunity, like SJ said, for us to engage in conversation about political power. We talk often about voting, but our working session will be about what it looks like for us as young adults, for us as black people, for us as marginalized individuals, to engage in political action to shift the culture and make an impact in our communities.

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Wonderful. Amazing. So, SJ, how did you find out about John Howell?

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Actually, CeCe enlightened me to the fact that he actually threw you of course. So yes, and I didn't know that it's just amazing as the journey went on to put in the culture shift together. I learned so much about the black history of Las Vegas. And I just feel like the event is needed because as I always say, one thing I always say is be the change you want to see. And also it's like we have all these young people out there, you know, this is the greatest time ever. We have the alliances of the Hispanic and the Caucasian to this Black Lives Matter movement. But it's like the people that are out here shouting Black Lives Matter don't know the black history of their own city. That's correct. Do you know that we have a dormitory on campus that has a John Howell section? Yes. Wonderful. OK. Nathan Harper actually enlightened us to that to that fact. Fantastic. Okay, good. And you just said something else that piqued my curiosity as well. Tell me about the panels that you are having at the Westside School. Okay. So essentially, Sheena Mitchell from the city of Las Vegas, she, one of the charges was because we were trying to decide what we wanted to do at the Westside School. And so I definitely had wanted to do a panel because I wanted the youth to be able to ask questions and hear from people that actually went to the school or actually, you know, would seen what it used to be like in education system because it's like, I always say things are changing so much, but if you go into the school setting, it's kind of exactly the same as it was back in the day. You know, it's the rows of seats and students. So it's like, I want to see the differences from now and back then. So she actually put the panel together. She hasn't. Well, I maybe I dropped the ball on that, but I actually don't know everyone that's going to be on the panel. But I do believe that you are going to be on the panel or no. Claytea's UNLV stop.

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UNLV stop.

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Yeah, they have three individuals who were actual students of the historic West Side. That's going to be engaging in the panel.

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Wonderful. Yes.

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So do you know that the people who attended that school have produced a book?

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No, I did not.

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So I have, I'm going to share it with you.

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Yes, ma'am.

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Okay, good.

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As a matter of fact, I'll buy you one of those books.

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Okay.

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Brenda Williams is the president of that association that put that book together. So this is amazing. I am just so thrilled that you're doing this. You know that history is my thing. So I'm just so thrilled. You've talked about the purpose. When you get together with all of these other young people who are calling in to make reservations for this activity, this, what did we call it, this movement that's beginning on Saturday? What do they say? What is the conversation like?

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So it's it's really interesting because you know I always throw a little bit of knowledge out there when they call, you know, I kind of like pique their interest and It is just interesting to hear the youth like, you know share the same like it's like they want to know this stuff And it's like man. I've never heard an event like this. That's what I hear a lot. It's like, and I'm so excited, old, old and young. It's both sides of the spectrum are ready for this event. So I just think I've been put in a great position to, to make this event happen. And like I said, with the support of my supervisor, you know, she's been my backbone through it all, you know, even though she gets on my head a lot about it, you know, she's been, she's been everything. And it's just like, I want, with the times changing, you know, always share, always share a little bit of knowledge. So today, the technology world, African Americans only own 1% of all technology. And as you can see, the world is going towards technology, whether it's social media or the self-driving cars, it's like we're going towards the technological age even deeper into it. So it's like for African Americans to only own 1% of it or be responsible for 1% of the technology in the US is just crazy to me.

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What can we do about that to change that?

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So actually Nevada Partners is an amazing place to go. And we're actually just, we got funded a lot of money to be able to put together a beautiful STEM center by and the person running it is Melvin Valentine. And for anybody that's listening that, you know, has been to Mojave High School, you know, he was a Mojave High School teacher. So now he has the chance to put all the young minds into STEM. So, so that we can take back so we could start to take more of the technology world like so we could be a larger scale.

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we could be a larger scale.

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And for those of us who are older, how do we invest in that?

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So I believe the best way to invest in the technology world is to learn a little and also invest in the young minds. Because always say, the older generation is the wood, and the young people have the drive and the tenacity and the determination. We may not have all the wisdom, we may not know everything, we think we know everything even though we don't. And so I feel like, you know, you add wood to fire, you get a bigger fire. So if we learn to work together, and we learn to lend the youth, learn to listen, I believe that we could do anything. You're right, I agree. So I'm just going to skip around

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before we come back to culture shift. CeCe, over the years we've heard about Hattie Canty, Nevada Partners, the Culinary Academy, and all of that. Put all of that together for us and explain what Nevada Partners really is. Tell us all of the different components. Oh, that's a lot. Well, first and foremost, Nevada Partners, it's a community-based agency. And I'm going to try my best to summarize it and create a very clear timeline because there's a lot of things that have transpired since the creation of NPI in 1992, right? So similar to what SJ said, we were created and birthed out of the Rodney King riots. For 27 years, we were the leading workforce development agency. Right? Leading workforce development agency. So we were the go-to place to get employment training, occupational skills training. That's where your culinary academy comes in. We would pay all of those expenses. We'll cover all of your equipment and your supplies to land really great employment opportunities working in hospitality. Right? Because we already know we're in Vegas. Hospitality is the leading workforce industry. However, in 2019, we lost our WIOA funding, right? And WIOA was that federal pool of dollars that allowed us to be the leading workforce development agency and get so many people of color connected to culinary and connected to sustainable employment.

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And where does those dollars go?

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They go towards the workforce, right? They go towards paying all of your occupational skills training. So that's your classes, that's your equipment, those are your uniforms, those are your certificates, those are your certification cards that you need in order to land those positions working in hospitality. And so when that money left, it went where? It went to other agencies. And unfortunately, some agencies that are privately owned and are not non-profit sectors, and agencies that are not pillars in the Las Vegas community, is where that funding went. And we're talking millions of dollars. So in 2019, we had a major hit, right? So for 27 years, Nevada Partners was known as the workforce leading agency. And we kind of went through this identity crisis, if I can be honest, a major identity What's our purpose now? What's our service now? How do we still remain relevant in the community? So in 2019, that happened. The beginning of 2020, we launched the West Las Vegas Promise Neighborhood Initiative. So that's where my title as the Civic Participation and Social Justice Pillar comes about. So in February of 2020, we launched this really great initiative. And the whole focus of this initiative is to end transgenerational poverty in the black community specifically. And we do that by focusing on five zip codes. And those zip codes, we call those high poverty census tracts, right? And we use something called the collective impact model. And we've noticed this model to be effective in communities like Harlem, the Harlem Children's Zone, Oakland, Philly, and so many other communities that are underserved, but through this model have made major collective impact and progress the black community, right? And they do this through the collaboration of nonprofits, through government civility, through other business stakeholders, and through major volunteers like Dr. Jackson, who have the expertise. So we call it site, site and strategy. Nevada Partners is the site and we are the pillar. We have the connection to the community and the people. We rely on individuals like Dr. Jackson to bring the expertise, to educate and to elevate, right? So that's where the Promise Neighborhood comes from. And the reason it's called the Promise Neighborhood is because these five high poverty census tracts, I'm using quotations, these are zip codes that have high numbers of unemployment, chronic homelessness, lack of adequate health care and mental health, low underperforming schools. I mean, the list goes on every negative factor you can think of. That's what constituted as a promise neighborhood. And through the work of just my pillar, or not just my pillar, but through this pillar, and through the affordable housing and wealth creation, through the education and youth development pillar, and through the future of work pillar, and lastly, healthy children, families, and communities. We've kind of changed our image in that now we're not just focused on the one individual in the household getting employment. We're focused on wraparound services for everybody in the household, right? That's what really makes it a collective impact. We're providing services to mom, to dad, providing enrichment and cultural activities for the young people in the home, providing mental health for the family in the home, making sure that people have affordable access to child care. We're doing a lot of pre-K work within our education pillar. So this is the new image of Nevada Partners. And I must say, Claytea, I am so excited. A little heartbroken initially when we lost our funding because no one likes to go through an identity crisis. But thankfully we have phenomenal leadership at Nevada Partners. And you know, although they took those WIOA dollars, they thought they did something, but they didn't.

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How do you get funding now for all of this?

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Through private donors, a lot of private donors, through Clark County, a few other grants within the community. You know, although we lost our federal dollars, the state and the city and the county really stepped up their A game to support us and to continue to allow

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us to carry the vision of Nevada Partners in the mission. That's why I love the city. This is amazing. I really appreciate that explanation because there are so many people who don't understand it. And tell me, Aisha, what else, looking at UNLV, what else can we do? What else should we be doing at Nevada Partners? That's a big question.

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So I volunteer with both the civic engagement pillar and the education pillar as part of the West Las Vegas Promise Neighborhood Initiative. And there have been so many initiatives that we're starting and having conversations about that, like CeCe said, are about wraparound services, but we know that education doesn't happen in a vacuum, and that if we want students to be better educated, we have to attend to the family, we have to attend to the economics, we have to make sure that they have housing. All of those things work in tandem. And I think when I, as an assistant professor of teacher education, think about what UNLV can and might do, there's a need to reimagine teacher education. There's a need to think about how we prepare future educators to see not just asset-based learning, which is popular in education as a way of looking at the individual, but asset-based engagement with the community. So what does it mean to think about preparing to teach by going out in the community and asking the question, where are the resources? And how do I learn from the people who are already there educating, who might not have the title of teacher, but are doing an amazing job educating young people? So that's where I plan to take my own work, thinking about life history work with you, Clay T, and this pathway that Black and Latinx teachers have, the commitment to their communities that we see for young educators who are from Vegas and want to teach in Vegas and want to impact kids and be the teachers that they didn't have, is what excites me about the work and the opportunity. And it's why I stay committed and engaged to young people like SJ who just remind me every day why this work matters and why I am blessed to be part of it. Wow, amazing. So, back to you SJ. What kind of partnerships would you like to see in

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the future for your initiative? Well, I'm going to tell you real quick the mission statement of the Culture Shift. So the Culture Shift is a cultivation of self-education, systematic improvement, and refinement of the mind through civic engagement, advocacy, and creative expression. So I think the biggest thing is, like CeCe said, it's a wraparound. But as you know, we have a lot of youth, like Dr. Jackson said, that want to be these careers that, that are so promoted on the net. But it's like, while we support these youth that are going after these entertaining and sports, we also need to support the youth that's going after the lawyer, the doctor, the congressman, the, you know, all those jobs that we actually do need as well. And so I think with the culture shift, it's just about putting youth in a position to be in the same spaces as people that we wouldn't naturally be. So like with WOW, CC has put me in spaces with Congressman Horsford, with Commissioner McCurdy, with the governor. A lot of my friends hit me up like, hey bro, you be shaking hands and talking and giving advice and they listening to you. They're like, well, I never seen this person in a day of my life in the flesh. And I'm like, and that's just crazy. It's like, I never thought I would ever be able to shake a congressman hands, not alone too. So it's like, now I know that the youth, it's like they would love to have these jobs. They would love to go be in Congress and be assembly man or woman, but it's like they don't know the route to get there. And so they focus their time on their creative assets They focus their time on the football field on the track and on the track and on the baseball field Because they don't know the right correct route to get to these other things

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Well, so, you know, we have a law school. We have a medical school. We have an architectural school. We have all these departments here on campus. So just let us know who they want to meet and we will make sure that they're over there and that they're meeting them. This has been so exciting, we have almost run out of time. I have to,

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we have to sign off. We've got to do this

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again. We've got to come back. This is too

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This show is a free for all of positive energy. We talk about books, we talk about politics, food, COVID-19.

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We talk about everything on this show and today has been a fantastic conversation. Please listen to it on Sunday mornings, the fourth Sunday mornings of every month at 830. So

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I'm not a good liar, I'm not a good liar I'm not a good liar, I'm not a good liar I'm not a good liar, I'm not a good liar I'm not a good liar, I'm not a good liar I'm not a good liar, I'm not a good liar Thanks for watching!

Transcribed with Cockatoo