The Power of Stories with Dr. Mariel Novas (Part 1)

So far in Public Hearing Season 1, we’ve talked with people working across different systems including public education, juvenile justice, and child welfare as well as with individuals who have lived some of these experiences. In this episode, Josh talks with Dr. Mariel Novas; educator, innovator, immigrant, and community builder, about the cross-section of these systems and how intersectionality plays a role in the movement of our nation (and whether that movement is backwards or forwards).

More about Mariel!
More on WEC.
More on DYS.
Check out this bit on Teach for America Mass!
MEEP? Yes you heard that correctly.

Transcript for this episode

JOSHUA CROKE:

Yay. Oh my God. So I'm so happy that you're here. You're- for those listening, you're going to get to know our guests throughout this episode, but just to lay the foundation of how we met, it was very recently you know, over the past few months, a truly blessed day, a truly blessed the day. You were the facilitator for the Worcester Education Equity Round Table which has been doing work. We've talked about it on the show a bit before our first guest for this season. And for the introduction to Public Hearing, as a show was Jen Carrey talking about the landscape of public education. Our second episode, we talk with Katie Burne from the Department of Youth Services about reducing the, you know, amount of young people getting in juvenile detention and alternative solutions and community based solutions.

To that episode three, we talked to Frankie Franco about his experience growing up in Worcester and kind of his experience with education and other community and youth work that he does. Episode four, we talked to Dannah McCallum who works for who worked for a long time, the department of children and families and DCF. And now we are talking with you and for those listening systems change and structural change is the kind of focus of the show and also how many intersections across systems and departments and organizations there is. And, you know, I think we're going to get and talk about a lot of those different intersections based on you and your work and your history and who you are. And so I am excited to introduce you, if you want to introduce yourself to everybody, please do.

MARIEL NOVAS:

Hello everybody. So my name is Mariel Novas, and I grew up in Boston. So I feel like Worcester's cousin. But my birthplace is the Dominican Republic. I was born in Santo Domingo, migrated to the US with my family when I was five years old in '93. We landed in New York, I believe the day before one of those like insane blizzards that just like, kind of like come through the Northeast. And so there's actually pictures that are, that I love to share where you can like, literally see like the like old timey cars. I mean, old timey- nineties and like just like massive piles of snow. And then like these three Dominican kids with, like, hand me down coats just like freezing and like smiling from ear to ear. So, we landed in New York city, but promptly came up to Boston.

JOSHUA CROKE:  

So today, we are talking with Mariel Novas. Mariel is an educator and all around rockstar. She launched the Homegrown Program at Teach For America-Massachusetts — a recruitment and leadership development engine that supports aspiring educators from low-income communities in order to increase the number of homegrown leaders in the local education ecosystem. Before that, she served as a middle school ESL math teacher and an instructional coach. Mariel co-founded the Boston Education Action Network (BEAN) and organized hundreds of educators, community members, students, and parents.

Mariel holds a doctorate in Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a master’s in Curriculum & Teaching from Boston University, and a bachelor’s in History & Ethnicity, Race, and Migration from Yale University. Mariel is currently the Assistant Director of Partnerships & Engagement for Massachusetts at the Education Trust and supports the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership (MEEP), where she manages partner recruitment and engagement, drives coalition operations, and helps establish the strategy and vision for impact. 

Mariel and I can talk, literally, forever, so we are just going, going, going here with a two part episode! Let’s jump in. 

This is the Public Hearing Podcast!

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The Public Hearing Podcast is available wherever you listen and on WICN 90.5FM, Worcester’s only NPR affiliate station on Wednesday evenings at 6pm.

MARIEL NOVAS:

My, my dad had a brother up here, and, so, came up to find work while my mom and my little sister, and I stayed in New York with family. while he got an apartment in Jamaica Plain. And so, you know, Boston is home. UI went through the Boston Public Schools for half my life, and then was lucky enough to receive a scholarship, through a program called Stepping Stone, that facilitated through enrichment and sort of,like all kinds of support, to gain access to private school, outside of Boston. So the Noble and Greenough School. That's where I spent the latter half of my K-12 experience. And so, you know, being a kid who half of my life I had spent in a Boston Public School, the other half of my life, in one of the wealthiest, absolutely definitely predominantly white, you sort of prep schools of New England, created a really bifurcated experience for me, where I, I quickly understood if I didn't understand it before then definitely understood after, you know, at the age of 12, what it meant to have and what it meant not to have.

MARIEL NOVAS:

And that was a really extreme experience. So let me illustrate it for you through a couple of just quick anecdotes. So I moved to Jamaica plain when I came up from New York, but really my adolescence was spent in Roxbury, which is a predominantly Black and Brown under resourced, high needs, but brilliant and thriving community that I love to call home. And so I would wait for the bus at the corner of my block, the 23 or the 28 or the 19 those of you listening, who are from Boston will know these routes cause they, they, they criss crossed through Roxbury. And so I'd get on the bus. I would kind of traverse Dudley square now, Nubian Square, kind of the heart of the Black Mecca community in Boston and then get all the way to Ruggles Station on the train.

MARIEL NOVAS:

But before we got to Ruggles, there was a street, a Boulevard we would cross on the bus and that was Malcolm X Boulevard. From the sound of it, you can assume, right, this is one of those kind of like the core areas of Roxbury. And it just so happens to have about four schools. It has the Timilty Middle School, the John D. O'Brian School of Math and Science which is an exam school, Madison Park Vocational High School and Roxbury Community College literally all on one strip. And the reason why I share this is because on the bus ride to get to the train to then get to another train stop to then get to my car pool that would take me to Dedham, Massachusetts. This was the place that I think the part of my trajectory, the commute that was most painful because we would be all up in the bus like sardines, you know, like me and like a bunch of other school kids, you know, going to school and then we'd hit Malcolm X Boulevard and the bus would empty out.

And usually I would be the only kid left on the bus, usually with like a few other, like a handful of adults who are going to work. And I would literally see, like, I can just picture it right now. Like people would run out the bus just like, and running, like hug their friends and like, Oh, Hey girl. And, you know, you could see, you could just see the buzzing of activity and sort of, you know, kids who look like me. And yet I wasn't getting off the bus. And so, you know, that was searing for me. For many reasons, a lot of it just felt like, shoot I'm either like being pulled out of my community or being pushed out of my community regardless. I just felt alone. And I knew I was like, this is, this is just not right.

It's not right cause it doesn't feel right to be the only one being pulled out this way but also at the end of my commute, when I got to school, it was a completely different story. I was the only one often who looked like me in my classes. Most of my peers and friends you know, lived in Wellesley and Weston and Natick and Needham and, you know, and on and on and on and on. And like never had stepped foot, you know, within the bounds of the Boston that I knew. And so I had to live with that dichotomy for those six years from seventh grade through 12th grade. And really that, that has forever lit my fire for educational equity and racial equity, you know, going back and forth and seeing that every day for six years, we'll do that to you.

The last thing I'll kind of share just by way of anecdote to illustrate just like the extreme nature of the world. I was inhabiting. So in seventh grade and the, you know, I'd been in school for two months, very much still an ESL kid. You know, I had been in bilingual classes all through elementary school. I had one year of sort of like immersion, like all in English, I'm in sixth grade. And then all of a sudden I found myself in private school, so it was jarring. My great grandpa passed away that fall right. Actually right around this time October. And so I remember like my family was trying to figure out how to, how to put together $300 for my grandma to be able to fly back to the DR in order to be there for my great grandpa's funeral.

And we were struggling. We were like calling family New York. We were calling family in Florida. And then, you know, one thing I quickly learned about my new school, everyone talks about money all the time, how much this cost and like, where do you, where's your summer home? And, you know, all these things that I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about using summer as a verb. And so I remember the conversation became about the Halloween party that our friend Tyler was throwing. And I remember there being conversation about like, did you know, the party costs $15,000 for three hours for one night? And so this was happening at the exact same time that my family was trying to find 300. And so, and I was 12, right? So my, my sort of awakening to like massive disparity and structural racism came very early in my life. And so when you talk about, you know, systemic change and the intersection across systems, I unfortunately, or fortunately, however you choose to look at it, got a really direct line of sight into the ways a lot of these systems intersect to create opportunity or to block them.

JOSHUA CROKE:

And so when you talk about like- of the things that we talked about with Frankie was all the opportunities that were presented to him for programs that were outside of public education, which he talked about, enabling him to find success, unlike the experience of his younger brother, which he saw as very different, you know, Frankie got the opportunity to get into the Upward Bound program and exactly, exactly. And so we talked about that. And so I'm interested in, like, if you have thoughts on how your opportunity to go to this private school and the, the challenges as to like why that has to exist in our systems, but how important it is that it exists for kids to gain access to opportunity because of the failures of systems that oppress and marginalized communities. And I know we'll talk about kind of place-based action and you know, and how that compares to like people-based approaches to change and reform, you know, addressing like the needs of one child versus the needs of full communities. And I know I just like, placed a lot there.

MARIEL NOVAS:

Oh no, I am so here for it. I have a lot of thoughts, unsurprisingly. I'm like, let me organize them. So it is one of the most atrocious truths that to create pathways to opportunity, often our kids who grow up in underserved neighborhoods have to leave those neighborhoods in order to be able to grow as people, as citizens in their careers, to just pursue whatever dream you want. We often are pushed to leave and that, Oh my God, like that still to this day makes my stomach just like completely turned on itself. And that's the feeling I had on that bus, right. When I saw all those kids. And I was very aware of the reputation of the Timilty, the reputation of RCC, the reputation of the Madison Park. And yet I knew where I was going on that bus. And I was like, this is just so messed up.

And so, you know, we've created these sort of escape valves, right through Upward Bound or programs like Stepping Stone, or, you know, there's so many, right. And we are lucky in Massachusetts, not all parts of Massachusetts, definitely in Boston to be incredibly resource rich and have this ecosystem of nonprofits that are able to provide these sort of additional supports and enrichment opportunities so that kids have what they often are not able to receive in their public schools. But the problem is the disinvestment in our public schools. Like let's not get it twisted. There has been a very intentional withdrawal of funding resources and attention from this country's public schools. And that correlates simultaneously- I'm trying to like- if you were looking at me, you would see that I'm holding my hands on top of each other, and I'm trying to find the words, but you know, that disinvestment correlates directly with white flight.

And it correlates directly with, you know, the, the, the season of busing in our country throughout the seventies and, you know, landmark Supreme Court legislations in that same time that essentially allowed for this to happen. Right. I allowed for, I wish I had the court case. I used to know this and now it's like escaping me, but a court case in the seventies that essentially prohibited cross-district busing. And so frankly, to speak truth, what a lot of white families did was, Oh, so if I move out and go to the suburbs, I don't have to bus my kid to Roxbury or wherever that neighborhood is across the country. And so that's what happened. A lot of white families left the cities with those families capital left too, because let's not forget that the ways in which racial inequities have shown up includes housing, includes opportunities around advancement income includes the wages that you're able to earn through through your jobs, what jobs are even available to you, what training. So it's again, intersecting systems, right? And so here we are 2020 scratching our heads. Like, how did this happen? How are buildings this way? Oh my gosh. COVID and it really deeply frustrates me that we're having this conversation as if we're not standing on decades of history that have brought us to this moment.

JOSHUA CROKE:

One of the things that infuriates me is how, and if people listening have not checked out the podcast, Nice White Parents, highly encouraged, but one of the things that's so upsetting to me is, you know, from a, from an urban development, vantage point, we're seeing people have a stronger desire to live back in cities, you and close quarter communities where you have your stores and your schools and things very close together. So now a bunch of white people are moving back to cities and saying, why aren't these schools good? Why aren't these buildings standing? And, you know, going back to like the white flight conversation as well, like white flight being enabled by discriminatory banking practices that, you know, did not allow for Black and Brown folks to access how, like loans to be able to, to purchase a property and generate wealth in that way. And so, you know, the kind of overarching premise of Nice White Parents is like change and equity are at the four only when white people are starting to experience the things that they have been responsible for. There it is.

MARIEL NOVAS:

Mhm and we- look no further than COVID. I mean, I, Oh my gosh, I have chills just like thinking about this because I'm a nerd. And also once was a news buff. And I say once because as of like a month and a half ago, I just had to quit. But I used to, like, me and MSNBC were besties, right? So I was all up on the news and constantly engaging, trying to kind of keep track of these conversations. And yet, you know, here was, COVID making its way across the literal globe coming our way the most predictable sort of tragedy ever, right. We could have a million conversations about that. But what I saw was the following the pandemic arrived at our shores, so to speak and it folks were really scared at first it was like, what is happening

What's depending on like, as soon as the data started coming out of who was being most impacted by COVID, all of a sudden public opinion started to shift that is not accidental. That is actually on par with exactly how we have behaved as a country, unless an issue, a problem, an inequity lands on the backs of white people. It gets ignored and we live with it and we have been doing that forever. And I think that's like the really painful, really kinda like, Ooph, truth of like, y'all, it's been forever. Like, let's not let's stop saying, like, this moment, let's stop saying like, since George Floyd was killed, let's come on now, come on. One of the first things I heard about when I came to this country was Rodney King and I had no idea what they were talking about. First of all, I only spoke Spanish, but I remember hearing that name, I arrived in 93. And so how dare we erase history.

JOSHUA CROKE:

And the fact that it's so easy to do so even more like is just, you know, so indicative of the problems. And I have this conversation with conservative family, a lot that I'm still working to break through in the fact that so many people draw their political opinions, their buying decisions, they're the way that they exist in the world based on their own personal experiences. And, you know, I am a privileged white kid from the suburbs of Massachusetts and was never faced with having to look at these so-called numbers and data that we've been that we recognize and understand to the point in which family who have still not had to face that those inequities and the disparities in our country, that they don't believe the data and how this information is circulated and how that might be interpreted. You know, when we, when we talked to Katie from DYS, she was talking about the incredible decline in detention numbers in the juvenile detention system over the past 10 years through the work of JDAI, the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. And while they, in the past 10 years saw 59% decrease in the amount of young people that were being put into juvenile detention, when you break that out racially and ethnically, you know, the amount of white kids that were going into detention decreased 70% and black kids was 39. Right? So like when we look at these, these numbers and the things that we all know are so much more negatively affecting, like people who are not white, like how do you break through some of that ignorance. Yeah,

MARIEL NOVAS:

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it is one of the things that makes me most sad is the utter lack of empathy that is just really obvious right now, although I have felt it always. You know, I walked the world as a black woman. I'm an immigrant to this country. English is not my first language. You know, I could, I could sit here and tell you stories for days about the lack of empathy. But I'm actually gonna like nerd out for a second and share, you know, a bit of, sort of my philosophy of, of why you know, I don't, I personally do not need to live in California to use my eyes and see that California has been on fire in really aggressive, terrifying ways now for many years. I thought after the campfire and entire towns being demolished, that there would be sort of like a cognition around this, you know, like how much more evidence do we need.

We've seen the intensity of hurricanes, for example just increase in the number of hurricanes. I come from an Island y'all we live with hurricanes. This is something that we have never seen. Right. And so, and yet people still deny climate change. Right. And I think that fundamentally, this goes back to an ethos of this country, an individualism, you know, and if you, and if you go back to like U S history and, you know, you talk about like the rugged individual and the sort of like pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Like, I need us to bury that idiom or whatever you want forever cause there's truly no such thing. But what it does, what it has created is sort of this mythology around the individual in this country and sort of like a self centeredness and a self orientation that, unless it happens to you, unless you see it with your own eyes and can verify it unless like you've lived it, then it can't be real.

It hasn't happened to you. Like I haven't had COVID, it's a hoax, what, you know. And so I come from a collectivist society. I come from the Dominican Republic, a, you know, wonderfully beautiful place that has been like many other Latin American countries and other countries around the world, completely exploited by Imperial powers. That's another podcast, but I come from Dominican Republic where, you know, the spectrum of poverty is wide, right. Where a poor person, you know, might have maid service, for example, because that person who coming in to conduct that service lives in a shanty, right. In the outskirts of town. And you would wonder, how does a poor person have like maid service, but, and it's like in that, that is what happens. And so, you know, in places that have such dire need, where you have to contend with nature, right.

I mentioned hurricanes and just like all that, all that comes with that being from an Island nation, right. You learn to depend on each other, you learn that like the hurricane might take my house this time. It might take yours next time. And so when that goes down, I'm going to be right there, right? If like you need sugar for your flan, like I got you just knock on my door. Right. Like there is just there is like nothing worse than coming back from the DR and landing in Logan. And just like the difference in like the warmth of people. I cannot overstate.

JOSHUA CROKE:

And okay, now I'm going to nerd out for a second. So the, the collectivist mindset and how we teach people, empathy is like sits at the forefront of so much of what I think about and talk about. And so I was raised in a conservative Baptist household. I went to church basement school you know, being queer, you know, there's a whole, so many intersections with that. But one of the things that I began to find fascinating was the rise of religion and the rise of nationalism in its way to allow for people to not necessarily empathize, but understand that they are part of a collective group in a way that allowed them to advocate for each other, or at least have a base level of agreement so that they could trade goods and services. Right. And so now when we look at population increasing, and the fact that systems that have been constructed to support the people at the top of the priority spheres, right white people in the US.

Like, we're seeing these disparities start to inhabit the spaces of whiteness, which is now getting to a point where people are looking at this more directly, but still there are so many people holding power who don't have to look at it and they don't have to change it. And we're seeing, or at least so many people are beginning to realize the fact that making active change and like re-imagining systems, dismantling and rebuilding systems is so challenging. And we put ourselves here because of the power we gave away at the top. And I'm reflecting back on something that Jen Carrey said in our first episode conversation where she said, I'm- the older I get the less I'm interested in changing people's like minds and feelings and the more I'm interested in changing behaviors. And I was like, yes, yes. So how do we get to a point of changing behaviors? Like, what's the, what's some of the work, there?

MARIEL NOVAS:

Contact. Like, sorry, I just, I answered that. Like, it was like a one, two, three go! Let me explain what I mean by that. You know, when you think about what the people, the moments, the spaces that have been most sort of impactful in our own lives it's when you come into contact with, with 'other', right? Had I not developed a best friendship with Becky Barbara, who's about to give birth in a couple months. Right. And like one of my best friends from, from private school from Newton, Jewish, like we would have never crossed paths. Right. And yet the two of us have, have grown together. I've seen, you know, I'm able to see her as a full person and not just as like a white girl, she's able to see me as a full person and my family and all the layers that that is.

And so, you know, we've talked about this. So I feel like I can say it. She has said like, you know, from, from, from the get go, you know, that like dispelled a whole bunch of stereotypes and narratives and mythologies that I held about like people of color or Boston or Roxbury or whatever it may be- Again, to speak to the, this, this notion of intersecting systems and sort of like how these inequities and intersect, if we continue to live in a society as deeply segregated as we are now, we are more segregated now than we actually were before, contact is not possible. And the only places where we experienced contact and the absence of having that be in person is through media, whether it be TV or books, or like school or whatever it may be, but who are we portraying? How are we portraying them?

Who is listening, who is watching? And so, and it's distorted beyond belief, right? Like, ask me how many Dominican characters or people I see in like my daily or Latino. Like, let's just like amplify it, like, okay. Maybe not my little Island country, but like, just like Latinos who are not baseball players or, you know, whatever, like gangsters and movies like it. And I know that I'm repeating something that like, it's, it's, you know, we tend to talk about it a lot, but I really want your listeners to like, sit with that. One: what it robs of people to not see themselves, if you cannot imagine it, you can't get there. Right. And so like, for so long in my life, I felt like I was just like floating after this invisible dream. Like, I felt something in my gut. I was like, I want to help my people.

Like, I remember literally being seven years old and visiting Faneuil Hall with my mom and like seeing the portraits of like white men, I promise you, this is a seven year old muddy. And like seeing the porches of white men on the wall and being like, I'm going to be up there one day. But seriously at seven years old. Right. And like, why, or how this little immigrant girl who just like, had no business being like, I'm going to be up there. Right. Like, whatever, like that came from like an inside, I don't know what. But for the vast majority of people, you need to see proof you need to, I mean, that is why, you know, and like people focus on like the election of Obama. I'm like, yeah, that's one person. And yet the symbolism, the power of seeing a black man in high office, man, you can't overstate it.

Right. And so I think about this and I think about, okay how do we- how do we achieve contact? Right. And that is what we have to get into tactics then. Right. So if the, if at the root of like, lack of contact is segregation and sort of those differentials, what has to be broken to break segregation? And this is the question this country has been struggling with since its inception. So again, let's not act like we haven't had this conversation before. We've just chosen to do a band aid fix, call it fixed and moved on. We integrated schools in 1954, y'all allegedly. Right. And so I really wish I could see my face cause I am giving a lot of tude.

JOSHUA CROKE:

I'm witnessing it. And I'm thriving in it.

MARIEL NOVAS:

But yeah.

JOSHUA CROKE:

Well, and, and when you talk about Obama, you know, it's also infuriating on the impact that that has on the other side of the equation as well.

MARIEL NOVAS:

That's why we're living what we're living.

JOSHUA CROKE:

Right. Exactly. It's like, well, yeah, black folks have made it. Oh yeah, racism is done. And I was saying this to my partner the other day, I was ranting about some con like arguments that I was having with family following the first debate. Lovely. And it, so much of these conversations go back to like my piece of the pie and looking at the fact that pie has only so many pieces. Right? And like when you are used to seeing only white people in television and media, but you don't recognize that that's all that you're seeing. And then you start seeing a black character and a Latina character and a queer character.

JOSHUA CROKE:

And you start seeing these additions, you in your mind are telling yourself that they're subtracting me from this equation and not recognizing that, like this isn't pie folks, like we are a collective society and we need to solve our problems or else we will all die. Climate change. And that, that part of it is just like so infuriating to me. And I remember I go back to a college course that I took, where we read like an article called the Tragedy of the Commons and that stuck out so pointedly in my mind, because of the notion that in order to be part of a collective ecosystem, there are personal sacrifices we all must make so that, that can function. Right. And I feel like people forget that all the time. And they placed themselves in, where can I put myself in this social contract that has me above somebody else because we've been sold. The notion that equal is impossible.

 JOSHUA CROKE:  

I’m gonna leave you hanging there and can’t wait for you to hear the rest of Mariel and my conversation in next week’s episode. If you didn’t know, our first podcast was called Experience This Podcast, or XP This Pod. In that show, we talk about the intersection of design, technology, and society. I’m going to play you an episode that really links to a lot of the conversation Mariel and I are having related to space, contact, and supporting people in the places they live. 

MAJORA CARTER: When I think of community it’s the activity. It literally is. it’s an action that you participate in. When you build it carefully in a space, that’s when you start to see the benefits of it.

JOSHUA CROKE: When we say the word "community", many of us start thinking about different groups we're a part of, and the things we feel connected to. We're all part of different communities that intersect with others in the world. Now, when we look at places as community; our cities, neighborhoods, and the streets we live on; what factors contribute to giving a sense of belonging to residents in those spaces so one really feels they are a part of the community? And who in those communities, or outside of them, hold power to influence those factors? On today's episode we're looking into public space and asking questions about resident-powered community development.

This is Experience This Podcast, I’m Joshua Croke. 

MAJORA CARTER: So when you first walk in you enter through the red door, and then if you look to your left, there’s a little 8x10 photo of what this actual spot used to look like back circa 1981. 

JOSHUA CROKE: When we walk into the Boogie Down Grind Cafe in the South Bronx on a Saturday morning, Majora Carter is helping to open the shop. We wanted to meet Majora in her space, so you may hear the sounds of a bustling coffee shop in the background of our conversation with her.

MAJORA CARTER: And this was like the middle of the Bronx is Burning era, and the building itself was totally abandoned, it was burned out, and there was actually a hole on the side of the wall here.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora was born and raised in the South Bronx. 

MAJORA CARTER: On the bar itself, they’re also covered in images of the graffitied subway cars that were really popular during — or that came of age — *door opens* hello there — in the 80s and the New York City subway cars, they were literally just graffitied up.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora is a co-owner of the cafe, one of many activities in her expansive career journey. Majora started her career as an environmental justice advocate, and now works as a real-estate developer, running her own B-Corp called The Majora Carter Group. Majora has committed her life to the South Bronx community and works alongside residents to help develop their community to benefit the people who live there first.

MAJORA CARTER: First looking at, you know, what are the natural assets of a community? Natural meaning, one, the people that are in them. Which is always like the primary asset that you have. And then there’s the physical things that are in it. Can they be emphasized and supported to be better even than they already are? 

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora’s mission in the South Bronx has invigorated and inspired people all over the world. Her TedTalk, called “Greening the Ghetto,” was one of the first videos posted on TED’s website when it launched in 2006. Her talk has over two million views. We asked Majora, what does public space mean to you? What defines good public space?

MAJORA CARTER: It’s those third spaces that are neither work, nor home. The kind of things that you basically don’t have the kind of intimate control over what you do in your own home. Like you can decide what color the walls are, you can decide what you have in the place that makes you feel comfortable. But in the public sphere, that’s where the kind of places where I think it demands of good public space, you know, there’s an expectation that it brings out the best in people. So that they can afford to be generous and gracious and feel as though they can be productive in our society. And that’s what good public space does.

JOSHUA CROKE: When advocating for inclusion and equity in how people develop spaces, Majora refers to areas often overlooked by people who hold power and status in society as "low status" communities.

MAJORA CARTER: Which, you know, in America would be the inner cities, or reservations, or even poor white manufacturing towns. Those are the low status parts of our country. Those are the places where there’s less an emphasis on how those places are designed, and how people are supposed to feel in them, because there’s an expectation that if you are born and raised in one of those communities, and if you’re one of the bright ones, you’re going to leave anyway.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora works to challenge the way non-profits generally view helping these kinds of communities. She says she wants to work to diminish the non-profit industrial complex, which is defined as a system of relationships between the state, local or federal governments, the owning class, foundations like non-profits, and social justice organizations, that result in the surveillance, derailment, and everyday management of political movements. Essentially, It’s the idea that some believe the state uses non-profits to control social movements.

MAJORA CARTER: I’ve noticed that within the non-profit industrial complex there’s almost, you know, this almost repulsion against actually supporting people in those communities to actually prosper. It’s more like, we just need to figure out ways to protect and preserve poor people, the quality of their life as poor people, and not expect for them to thrive. And that’s why you’ll see more emphasis on: “We just have to build more affordable housing. And we need more programs.”

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora says we have to believe people in low status communities can truly prosper, not temporarily, but permanently. Majora’s believes non-profits are looking at “the problem itself rather than the symptom.”

MAJORA CARTER: I find that economically disempowered people, and the ones that are expected to stay that way, they’re the ones that are really easy to push around and it’s really easy for them not to actually evolve. Because there’s always some program there to meet them right where they are and sort of massage them into staying there and feeling okay in their poverty. 

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora says these non-profits that want to help communities should be focusing on the people who live there, and how they might help the community with longer-term solutions.

MAJORA CARTER: Are those same kind of foundations going, you know what we’re going to do, we’re going to give micro-grants to people, specifically to start doing small businesses. Are many folks doing that? No. They’re making it really difficult to actually do that. And I find that those very specific things, like getting access to capital, even if it’s for a small kind of microloans, doing things like that are the kind of things that would actually mean something real to me. Versus just saying things like, “Oh, we’re going to help you figure out a way to get into subsidized housing.” Which I’m not saying is not important, but you can have both, we can do different things.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora asks her South Bronx community, and communities all over the world, how might we support residents in finding a sense of pride in their public space? 

MAJORA CARTER: We had to think about what can we do in order to get people to think about our own community as a place that was worth staying in.

JOSHUA CROKE: So Majora talked to the people in her community. She asked what they wanted to see. She hosted surveys and focus groups to ask people questions like, “What’s important to you?” and “What are your hopes, dreams and aspirations for your community?” She said the number of people who actually took the time to sit and speak to them surprised her - hundreds and hundreds of people.

MAJORA CARTER: People want to feel pride in place. Like they want to feel like they can walk outside their door and feel like there’s something special there. Which is why people would leave the neighborhood, to go to places that made them feel good about themselves.

JOSHUA CROKE: By asking residents what they wanted to see in their community, Majora was able to take steps to make those changes.

MAJORA CARTER: So our goal was, first we started working on transforming the waterfront into what’s now, you know, a nationally known waterfront destination: The Hunts Point Riverside Park. We’ve also been working more specifically on workforce development to support the people that  are here by doing the kind of economic developments that we know people leave the community in order to experience. Like the coffee shop you’re sitting in right now. This is basically the kind of thing when we did the research and asked people, you know, why they would stay or want to leave the community, it mostly came down to lifestyle infrastructure.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora says she opened the Boogie Down Grind to provide a welcoming third space in the neighborhood, but many people would just walk on by without stopping.

MAJORA CARTER: They just never saw. ‘Cause people were so used to nothing being here that they would just go from here to the subway and not even — it was like they had blinders on. It was really kind of crazy.

MAJORA CARTER: Most of the people in the albums represented on the wall are actually from The Bronx. Most of them, not all of them, but most of them.

JOSHUA CROKE: One of the walls of the Boogie Down Grind is covered with hip hop album art and flyers of various DJ battles and concerts that happened in that neighborhood. The wall was curated by a couple local hip hop legends who know the musical history of the area very well. Majora and her husband pasted the images on the wall themselves.

MAJORA CARTER: But then we also took some license and put in people that we wanted to see ourselves. Like Queen Latifah, who was legendary for young women listening to hip hop to have this like powerful woman who presented herself as a queen. You know, just like spitting rhymes the same way that the guys could, and doing it really well, we had to place her sort of front and center and there she is.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora wants people to advocate and stand up for themselves and their communities, before other people swoop in to capitalize on these spaces.

MAJORA CARTER: People in our own communities need to see more value in our own community. And that’s why we really, I’ve noticed that, you know, gentrification doesn’t start when doggy day cares start moving into a neighborhood, and you start seeing white people in formally people of color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we believe that there’s no real value in our own communities, then it makes it easier for predatory speculators to come in and other policies to be made to make it easier for other folks to benefit from our own communities rather than us.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora opened the cafe in partnership with a local family. She says when people in the community learned that local private citizens had an economic stake in a local business, it opened their eyes to new possibilities.

MAJORA CARTER: It set people like going like, “Is that possible?” And it was like, “Yes! It is possible.” Like, you know, we decide to build something and built a structure so that they could invest into it. And that was like really kind of bizarre to people. And I feel like it really made their wheels turn in ways that nobody had even given them an opportunity to even think was possible. And that was super exciting.

JOSHUA CROKE: Now, the Boogie Down Grind sells locally roasted coffee and buys pastries from local bakeries. They offer a space for community events and allow local artists to sell their work in the shop. When we went, there was a wall of jewelry for sale created by a local jeweler. 

MAJORA CARTER: We can kind of build those community conversations, just informal, sometimes formal, you know, we’re going to be doing things like art exhibitions and, you know, workshops here. There are so many talented people here that just want the space to do that kind of stuff, and we just say, “Yeah, come and do it.”

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora uses the term “self-gentrification,” which she defines as, “development by us and for us.” She’s received some backlash for using this term. Critics once put stickers all over the Bronx subway stations calling her a ‘sell-out.’ Majora responded by hosting a community event called the ‘self-gentrification salon,’ where people could discuss building their space to benefit current residents, instead of displacing them. Majora says she wants to encourage the people in her neighborhood to see the value in their property that buyers or developers from outside the community may see when they offer to buy these people’s homes.

MAJORA CARTER: Many of us are so fearful of it that we immediately hear the word ‘developer’ and go, “Oh, that’s like the devil. That’s the man who’s coming to steal everything we have.” And it’s just like, no, it should be something that we should take on as a path for our own community’s development. Development in the way that we think it should be developed.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora played a huge role in the redevelopment of the Hunts Point Riverside Park. The space used to be an actual dump full of garbage. But now, it’s been cleaned up and turned into a waterfront green space. Majora says four years after the park was built, someone went into the park and tagged it with graffiti. The park was covered. Majora was out of town on business and couldn’t step in to help. So, the community stepped in. They called the parks department to clean up the greenspace, because they loved it and were upset to see it damaged.

MAJORA CARTER: Other than the news report that I saw, showing that it was really horrible, that at one point it was bad, and then all these people being interviewed and going, “Who came into our community doing this to us?” It was just like, “To our park!” And that’s when I knew, this is just not my park, thank god. Folks have taken it as theirs. Like, “How could you do this to my park?” It was so personal.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora says she’s not specifically trying to provide solutions for massive overarching problems like income inequality across the US, but she wants to use her experiences in the South Bronx to help current residents get what they want out of their community.

MAJORA CARTER: What we can do is actually put forth a vision for the type of real estate development that actually creates more opportunities in low status communities that acknowledges, you know, some of the historical inequalities that have happened in places like this, but actually use real world strategies to use real estate development as the kind of tool that can make these communities much more economically diverse and thriving.

JOSHUA CROKE: Majora encourages people to vote with their dollars by supporting locally-owned businesses in their communities. She says she wants folks to participate and to be involved, hands-on, in their community development in years to come.

MAJORA CARTER: Are you patronizing places within your own community that are locally owned? Are you being supported by your own community? Those are really important things that we can work on.

JOSHUA CROKE: Experience This Podcast is created and produced by Action! by Design. We’re a citizen-centered design studio that helps companies and organizations create memorable experiences for programs, places, and products. The show is hosted by me, Joshua Croke, founder of Action! By Design. Our producer is Mariel Cariker. Additional mixing by Giuliano D’Orazio. Music for this episode was created by Rob Flax. Special thanks to James Chase and the Boogie Down Grind Cafe. You can find us on social media at x-p this pod. And to see behind the scenes photos of the Boogie Down Grind Cafe, and to learn more about our organization, visit our website at actionbydesign.co. If you liked this episode, please consider leaving a review and telling your friends. It really helps the show. See you next week.

MAJORA CARTER: So the sign was taken from a strip club, but the image on the sign it says “Dancers Every Night,” the dancer herself kind of looks like she’s kind of tired. [laughs] so there’s nothing like particularly sexual at all about it. She’s just like, “Ugh, I’m done.” But anyway, it cracks me up.

JOSHUA CROKE:

Josh here back in the present. I want to do a little content fusion now. I want to reference two quotes; one from Mariel Novas and one from Majora Carter and reflect at the intersection.

Mariel said early on in our conversation that, “it is one of the most atrocious truths that to create pathways to opportunity, often our kids who grow up in underserved neighborhoods have to leave those neighborhoods in order to be able to grow as people, as citizens in their careers, to just pursue whatever dream you want. We often are pushed to leave.” 

Majora said “People want to feel pride in place. Like they want to feel like they can walk outside their door and feel like there’s something special there. Which is why people would leave the neighborhood, to go to places that made them feel good about themselves.”

So I’d like to ask you. How might we support residents in their spaces to strengthen community pride while also having access to quality education, career opportunities, and economic mobility without leaving their neighborhood? Now, I’m not saying travel or moving to other parts of the world isn’t beneficial for some and I would argue valuable for all even if it’s just a short exploration. What I am saying is that it should not be a requirement that in order to find success and stability one should have to leave their home — to feel that, even if they don’t want to leave, there isn’t a path to creating a more stable life for themselves and their families.

So what are some of your ideas? Send us an audio letter or a note to  publichearing@actionbydesign.co and we may feature your idea on the show.

Thank you for listening to Public Hearing! If you like the show, let us know — ratings and reviews are super helpful to getting our conversations to more ears. Also, use #PublicHearingPodcast on social; we’d love to hear what you’re taking away from these discussions.

Public Hearing is created and produced by Action! by Design. We are a community design and innovation studio helping organizations address complex challenges. From reimagining new youth justice systems to supporting strategies for creating workplace cultures of belonging, we provide design thinking facilitation and project design services that have impact. 

You can find our show wherever you listen to podcasts and on WICN 90.5FM, Worcester’s NPR affiliate station. Thank you to the United Way of Central Massachusetts for supporting community conversations through podcasting and radio.

I’m your host, Joshua Croke. Our Creative Producer is Myka Papetti. Our Audio Producer is Giuliano D’Orazio. Original music by Giuliano D’Orazio. Our intern is Ellie Garfield from Clark University. 

To learn more about us, visit actionbydesign.co // Thanks for listening!