 So this meeting is being recorded and go ahead and begin. Thank you, Jennifer. And Dr. Shabazz is also on his way in, but let's get started. I'm gonna call to order the February 13th meeting of the African Heritage Reparation Assembly pursuant to chapter, sorry, 2.04 p.m. Pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021, this meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so via Zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via telephone. Anybody talking? And I am, Dr. Shabazz, can you? You can hear me, but I can't hear you, or does my sound? So I don't know, you can hear us. It says name only, next to your name. I don't know what that means. Sometimes signing out and coming back in can help if that helps. I do want to mention that this meeting is being recorded. So we'll do a sound check while Dr. Shabazz is figuring out his sound situation and I'm gonna start with you, Dr. Rhodes. I've been here and I definitely, I think I can be seen. You can be seen and heard, yes. Ms. Bridges. I can hear you. I'm still trying to figure out my screen, so. Okay. You can be seen right now. Okay. I can't see everybody else, but I can see me and you. Oh, okay. Are you on your iPad? Yes. Okay. It's, I know the iPad has weird functions. I, yeah. Can't find it, even I went through settings, but I'll figure it out. Okay. All right. Hi, Hala. Hello, hello. I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, very well. Thank you. Perfect. And Pamela. I can hear you. Excellent. Hear you too. And Jennifer. I can hear you. Make you do that. You were already, I know we could hear you, but just in case. Okay. How about you, Dr. Shabazz? Any, any better? Okay. So, three, there's four of us. So, do you want to try popping off and then popping back on Dr. Shabazz? No, I'm good now. Oh, you're good. Yes, you are. Okay. Wonderful. Okay. Welcome everyone. And let's see here. I believe that Yvonne will not be available to meet today. And I think Alexis may or may not join us. So, oh, you know what it is? I was looking, I'm looking at, I'm sorry. I'm looking at the agenda here for our upcoming retreat, which let me just see here. All agendas. Just excuse me one second. Okay, wonderful. So, I'd like to just start with a couple announcements. First, I wanted to start by just acknowledging a beautiful event that happened this past week that Ms. Bridges is involved in and would be happy to pass it over to Ms. Bridges if you would like to say anything about it. This was the opening of the Ancestral Bridges exhibit at Amherst College. So this exhibit had already been for the Juneteenth, sort of leading up to Juneteenth. And then through Juneteenth, it was at the Historical Society and now it's been moved to Amherst College through the summer, I think. So Ms. Bridges, do you wanna say anything about it? Sure. We had a great, great turnout. My 96-year-old aunt spoke. I spoke. And with the exhibit and the partnership with Amherst College is phenomenal. And myself, I think maybe at some point we should have Anika here to speak on it at our meeting because it was an amazing event and it's just gonna keep going on and on. I suggest people come and see it who didn't get a chance to see it. It's gonna be at the Robert Frost Library through the summer. And are there particular hours or is it basically open when the library's open? It's open when the library is open. It was an amazing turnout. Very well-received Amherst video, is that what it's called? Amherst media? Amherst media, sorry, Amherst media. I should know that. Tape the whole thing. So it was once they get it together and send my aunt her copy of it. She was an amazing, she was amazing. She got up there and spoke. I had to go after her and I said it was a hard act to follow, but I think that it would be really great if we had Anika come and speak on it when we can do that. That would be wonderful. And we can extend the invite to meet her, scheduling whatever works for her. I think it would be really great to have Anika here and to talk about the exhibit and just everything that surrounds it. It really was beautiful. And I suggest that folks get over there to see it if you haven't. I wonder, will the video of the opening, Ms. Bridges, be available for public viewing once they get it together? I'm pretty sure that would be, but the amazing, which talks about the partnership between Amherst College and ancestral Bridges. It's just phenomenal. It needs to be put out there, but it was like they really did a great job putting it together and partnering with ancestral Bridges. So I'm pretty proud of that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I felt that too. It was really, really beautiful. Okay, well, that's one announcement that I had. And then let's see, Jennifer, could you tell us about or Pamela and or Jennifer, the Black History Month, what's coming up for that? I know we have some events that are coming up that the town is hosting. And I can also pull things up too, unless you have it right there. Oh, do you wanna go ahead, Pamela? Oh, I thought that you would go ahead. So the first event was on February 1st, and Jennifer would have to describe that because I wasn't able to attend that event because of Aaron's health issues. And the final event is happening on the 26th of the month, which is the experience of Black music from, we're trying to be very ambitious, 1619 to present day with examples of song and history under the broader theme of resilience. So. Beautiful. And that will be at the middle school. And that's co-hosted with the Human Rights Commission. Is that right? That's correct. Okay, great. So that is open to all and everyone is welcome. So are there any other announcements that members have before? I'm gonna move us immediately into a first public comment period. And just, I have just a few words that I'll say with that, but would any other members like to? All right. Well, we did have two amazing birthdays happening among this membership this week. So I won't name any names, but I will say happy birthday to the two wonderful members that were celebrating this week. Her pose. Has yours happened yet? Yeah, next year. Irvin and I are both February, February people. I don't know if any other February. Yeah, happy birthday, Melka. Same to you, Irv. Sweet. All right. So we're gonna move into a public comment period. And we, so given the sort of timing of our meetings, we have been basically able to meet about an hour each meeting. So what I would ask is for folks, if you are an Amherst resident, please raise your hand first. And we will take that public comment first. And then we'll just look at the list. We do have several people in the audience today. And then we'll have a second public comment period later in the meeting after we've had discussion and we'll go through that same process. So I'm gonna read the public comment statement quickly. During the public comment period, chair will recognize members of the public. When called on, please identify yourself by stating your name, pronouns and address. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at the discretion of the chair based upon the number of people who wish to speak. No speaker can cede their time to another speaker. The AHRA will not engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter generally. Sometimes we are able to answer a question or clarify something, but generally we'll just be listening and listening closely. So if you would like to make a public comment and let's start with Amherst residents first, if you could raise your hand, okay? Not seeing any. So anyone in the audience who would like to make a public comment, please use the raise hand function and we will bring you in. And again, there will be a second period if you'd prefer to comment toward the end of the meeting. Okay, wonderful. So we have, it looks like MRCC. I'm not sure who's bringing folks over today if Jennifer Pamela, welcome. Can you hear us? Yes. All right. Yes, I can. Thank you. So I know thank you for having me today and for having a meeting in regards towards reparations and the work that you guys and Amherst have been doing. My name is Saskia Van James. I am a Cambridge resident. Before Cambridge, I'm a displaced Bostonian. I grew up in the South Shore. I have family in Central Massachusetts and Western Massachusetts. Outside of Massachusetts, everywhere. I am a descendant of enslaved people from chattel slavery within the United States. And I have been working to support reparations for the past several years. My organization was founded in 2017 and we realized that pushing for social equity was not gonna achieve liberation for our people and address the severe economic disparities that exist. And today I have severe concerns in regards to the way we're approaching repairing harms and acknowledging that there's land trauma that's connected with people who are descendants of chattel slavery here within the U.S. and actually acknowledging that through reparations. Now I know on a city and on a municipal and state level, like the trillions of dollars that's owed to us is not feasible. But I do think that there's really practical ways that we can support transitional justice on a super local level. So some of the recommendations I have for you guys, I just wanted to share I know you guys already doing awesome work and I see the agenda for today. But one of what I wanted to say is that I think it's critical for the city of Amherst to take the necessary steps to support recognizing black Americans by their federal legal name as American freedmen so that they can become a protected class and to dismantle, to directly take steps towards dismantling systemic racism. We must acknowledge that when we're identifying people by the color of their skin, we are upholding systemic racism. There's a quote by Bernice King last year. She said, I do not want to be people of color. That love is not the stripping of culture and heritage. That is not love. So we need to acknowledge that there's tribal harm that has occurred and that the needs of the people here who are indigenous to Turtle Island, which is American freedmen. We are indigenous here as well as under the continent of Africa. We were here before the colonizers. We became enslaved also by Native Americans. So we have mixed ancestry here. We have been over here for over 400 years. We are indigenous here as well too. And we deserve to be acknowledged that and for the anti-blackness attached to indigenous to be removed. For black indigenous people here on Turtle Island exist. And to acknowledge presidents has been set forth by federal law that defines American freedmen as being black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States by decree of the Freedmen's Bureau of 1865. So essentially what we can be pushing for on a local level is just like we have office of immigrants and we have office of Native American affairs. We can also have an office for American freedmen affairs. I would also like for you guys to recognize that there's 12 harm areas that's been produced by the California Task Force. And those 12 areas defined harm areas are enslavement, racial terror, political disenfranchisement, housing segregation, separate and unequal education, racism and environment and infrastructure, pathologizing of black families, control over creative, cultural and intellectual life, stolen labor and hindered opportunity, unjust legal system, mental and physical harm and neglect and then the racial wealth gap. So I asked for the amhars to match what is already being done in other states as far as identifying the 12 areas of harm. Also I asked for you to center the voices of American freedmen, otherwise known as black Americans throughout the entire engagement and consultation campaign as part of transitional justice and recognition of reparations as defined by international law and recognized by the United Nations. Essentially going through a truth and reconciliation process and for that to be guided by the people who have directly experienced harm for we know our communities. We have in-depth outreach to do, this is an intergenerational movement. Our children have to be involved. Our elders have to be involved. All voices matter. All genders, all ages, all sexualities. We are a tribe and we cannot afford to let anybody's voices go unheard in this moment. I wanna thank you for your time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you being here. Okay. Are there any other hands right now for public comment? Any other folks would like to make public comment? All right. I'm not seeing any. Wonderful. So we are going to move into our agenda and we're gonna start with a survey. We have some great news. Tom Manager Backelman has signed the contract with the Dunahue Institute. So we are ready to move into our work there and really, really appreciate Pamela and Jennifer for your support with that as well. So we have tentatively planned to have a kickoff of our survey work during a retreat on the 22nd in the evening. This retreat will take place in the town room. So Jennifer has reserved the town room, which means that those of us who would like to be there in person for the retreat can do so, but it will be a hybrid meeting. Therefore, Dr. Rhodes and any members of the public who are not able to attend in person can attend in that way virtually. We will not be holding a public comment during our retreat. So it's a special meeting, which means we'll just be getting to work as an assembly, but the public is of course welcome to be there to listen on our work. So this will be sort of a combination of what Alexis had suggested at our last meeting where we discuss our values as individual members as well as what values do we want to move forward with as we begin to write our report and recommendations for the town council. And it will really kick off our survey work. So one of the questions that I have since it's going to be in the evening from six to eight is would we like for that meeting to include anyone from the Dunahue Institute or perhaps is it best for us to have that meeting and then invite the Dunahue to a meeting after that where we'll already have had sort of our discussion and be able to then present that to them so that they can move forward with their work and our shared work really. Does anyone have an opinion on that one way or another? I think we should maybe save our time with the Dunahue Institute for when we've, you know more in that analysis phase and giving us, you know, when that comes back then I don't know for this opportunity at the retreat whether there's much to go over at that point. Agreed. Awesome. Okay. Anyone else, I tend to agree with that too. So that, but if others have, and just to keep in mind that our contract it identifies that we have like two to four sessions with them depending on how we do it. So we want to be really strategic in terms of the times that we're actually meeting with them. So it will be great for us to meet in that retreat setting and then we can be really prepared for our first meeting with them. I have gone ahead and sent the Dunahue Institute, sent Kerry the Rhode Island, the Providence Rhode Island Survey. I had captured that survey and the raw data from that survey earlier on. And so I went ahead and forwarded that to her so she might be, she asked actually if that could be forwarded. I think members of the assembly would also really benefit from seeing that. So I will have Jennifer include that in our packet so that it will be available and I'll send it out to members. Are there any other questions right now in terms of the survey? Questions, comments, concerns? The distribution this was quite comprehensive and I really liked that. It gets to all the great moves that we should be getting to. Awesome, I'm so glad to hear that. I'm actually gonna share the screen right now so that we can look at that together. And I would like to, I sent this out to the committee earlier today but because of open meeting law I had asked for folks not to work in the document. So if you would like to add to this distribution list I can go ahead and do that in real time. Or now that I think this has been put into the public you could certainly send any suggestions to Pamela or Jennifer or myself and we will make sure to add. But we'll just briefly go through this. So first here we have the residents of African heritage. These are the ways that we have right now. Our inclusion portal, a BAM list and our for a mailing list and then our social media. There may be other ways here. So please feel free to, we can just popcorn style as we're going through this. We've got elected officials here and town departments. I'd love for Pamela and Jennifer to give feedback on the town department list if there are other departments that this makes sense to make sure that distribution happens. That would be great. Town committees as well if Jennifer and Pamela have any thoughts on that. We have our PACs, our political action committees. We have our economic development organizations. We've got the media. Here we have our anchor institutions including students, staff, faculty and alumni and then our family, community and civic organizations. I did add a couple today to this list. There's a new alliance called the Amherst Climate Justice Alliance. It's made up of a very, it's a very, very powerful alliance of different organizations coming together around climate justice and also the intersectionality with the work that we're doing as I understand it. And then we have our grassroots groups, independent schools. This was one where I thought I might be missing something, but. What I don't see is the, did you have the regular school district particularly the family outreach center? I have the family outreach of Amherst, but you're not within the school district, yeah. Yes, okay. K to 12, okay, PTOs. But I think there is an outreach unit of the school district or of the schools that may also have a list that can be shared beyond the PTOs. Excellent, okay. That's great to know. I will definitely make sure. And Jennifer, you're shaking your head. Do you know something about that? Well, I believe the appropriate person might be Dwayne Chambl to send it to. So it's. Because Martha Guevara moved up from there, didn't she? Well, not 100% sure. She was still at the family center, I thought, but they have their own Amherst family center. And also I would say that Mike Morse's regular newsletter that goes out. So the superintendent has a weekly newsletter. All the principals of the schools have a weekly newsletter. I'll clean this up for us. I'm just getting it in there for now. Okay, great. If to live would send the survey link out with to live Sadiq as a long time, you know, part of the bias family as a part of a long time ancestral bridges family, that would probably go a long way, particularly in stimulating some of the African heritage community. Absolutely. And I had a chance to catch up with him briefly at the ancestral bridges exhibit and we've been in communication. So that's a great, yeah, that's a great. That's a great one for us. And then let's see. We also have the faith organizations. I do need to flesh this out a bit to add all of the various places of worship. We have the interfaith network and the JCA reparations committee. Dr. Shabazz is the interfaith network, the group that you're involved in with the folks from across the river there, Bridge for Unity. That's, is that a, that's different, right? That's different from interfaith network. Yeah. There's a little email list that they can send out to, sure. Excellent. Okay. And then I know of the district one neighborhood association. I'm not aware of other neighborhood associations, but I'll definitely check with my colleagues on the council to see if there are others that we could, but we can definitely ask counselors who represent districts to get it out. So I'll just say, you know, district counselors. Great. And so I would imagine that we will, once the survey questions are completed, we'll also have a memo or some sort of letter that goes with it. I do want to speak with Jennifer and Pamela about translation. I think I did say last time that our contract includes the Donahue will be creating a written version of the contract as well. So we'll be able to, maybe we want to add to the list the physical places where we would like for physical distribution. Are there any thoughts on that? Could you go back and scroll back up? I just want to make sure that the bid and the downtown Amherst Foundation are on there. We have, yep, the chamber and the bid and the downtown Amherst Foundation. And that's DAF, right? Right. And then Amherst Cinema Board of Directors, whoever that group is, there's a whole group there. That's a great, yes. Okay. Oops, sorry, I'm not. All right. And they actually, because they just unionized, right? So we might list them under family, community and civic organizations. Are they not here? No, they're not. The union and the terms of Amherst Cinema, I guess all four of them unionized. Or what do you mean all four? All four of? There wasn't a large group of employees of Amherst Cinema that unionized, but they unionized anyway, so. Oh wow, okay, I didn't realize that. Okay. And Jennifer, what is, you, I remember you had given me this one, Cran. What, I thought you had, was that not you? The C-R-A-N, I don't know where that came from. Okay, I'll look into that one. All right, so for- I'm sorry. Please, no, go ahead. Do you need what that acronym stands for or no? Oh, that would be great, Hala. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's Citizens for Racial Amity now. Oh, that is what it is. Okay, now I know. All right, I'll remember that. And then, all right, let's do physical distribution spots. We had talked about, definitely, Jennifer, what's your experience with other surveys in terms of, I know the, is the town hall generally one place? So, I would say that maybe have a QR code on a flyer, and so the hotspots would be the Bangs, the Jones Library, like the restaurants. Hopefully the bid also, like the bid chamber office. Yeah, you could do the bid in the chamber office. Can I ask? But I know like Crazy Noodles has a really large board where you can place stuff. So there's a space here in town hall. Great. I know, and I'll get a list of other restaurants that I know have posting boards. Like I know Amherst House of Pizza does, but we can add to that. Okay. What about maybe in some of the faith buildings that we have? There might be an opportunity there. So we'll see about that too. All right, so this is our list for right now. And at this point, we can add to it at any time. And I'm gonna send this over to Carrie as well, just so she can get a sense of where, that was one of the kind of questions that came up, was where was this gonna be, how were we gonna distribute? So if there's nothing else, I'm gonna stop the share here and we can move on. Oh, Ms. Bridges, how are you doing? I see you're covering your eye. How are you feeling? Okay. I'm doing okay. All right, good. Okay, so any other questions before we move on about the survey? Yeah, my brown hand is fading into my door, but... Oh, excuse me, yep. Go ahead, Dr. Svaz. Trying to confirm. So the town doesn't have a any disaggregated list from it's either from its voting rolls or from any other sources. I don't think so. I remember asking, I don't believe that they ask about race on the local census. Yep. So I don't know who else would necessarily have that. And then the aggregated list, which would be a list of ground addresses. I know candidates sometimes pull those lists to send out their postcards and whatnot. That's just of every resident in town. Do we know what that global number is just to have a kind of a ballpark against what we're doing by, I guess, electronic mail? What is our ground list of Amherst residents with ground locations? Oh, I don't know off the top of my head. So, but I can find out and then send everyone an email. Yeah, the universal voting, that would be just in terms of, I guess, either the tax list or the voting list, what's the universe of Amherst would be good to know. I have... I'll go transfer the form. I have the voter list from, I think the most recent voter list for the town that I have that I requested in my role as counselor was September 3rd, 2021. But I believe I requested one even more recently that just I'm not seeing in my Google Drive right now. So I can definitely, but like on this one, there are, oh goodness, how does this, it looks like there are about 16,000 entries, 16,089. Would that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Okay. All I have is from dated November 1, 2021. I have the district eight as it was then called. I don't know if precinct eight, I don't know if they still divide the voting list that way anymore or not, but I had pulled precinct eight and was able to identify one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Well, a small number of entries that I've identified my own residents included who are in precinct eight African heritage people. But anyway, that was just part of an effort I was making from that particular list. But okay, it's just good to have what we know as sort of the universe of residents to then be able to cross-reference with whatever we get in at the end of this process in terms of those who self-identify as Amherst African heritage residents so that we can see vis-a-vis, you know, this population count, here's how many we got in response. So we have some idea of that. That's all. Absolutely. One thing I'm not sure what's on there is the Amherst ending because of their distribution that they have. Yes, they are on. You mean on the list that we had up? Yeah, right. Yeah, they're on there under the media with all the rest of them. You said the Amherst ending, right? Yeah, okay, yeah, we're good with that. There's the recorder. Is that what it, or the reminder? You know, I don't know if the reminder, that's a, let me just see. Here we go. The reminder, that's a good call because that's somewhat new. I have the indie, the Amherst current, which I'm not sure if that's running anymore, the Gazette, Amherst media, Valley Free Radio, WHMP 1063 and 973, The Beat. But the reminder is also good here. Let me add that. Amherst open. Yes, okay, yeah. Excellent. And have a reach that extend beyond our town, but again, we can see what we have. Which one was that, Dr. Schwarz? Think, well, you were just mentioning the reminder and I was just, in some of the others, you listed I think maybe our headquartered outside of the town and maybe have a reach that goes beyond the town, but maybe that's gonna be okay because we do have in there different ways people can identify if they are Amherst residents, that they are of the target population. So we'll hopefully have some number of that identified as such. Yeah, absolutely. And we may capture folks who have moved out of the Amherst community for whatever reasons. And that's really important, I think, to be able to do that. So, and that might be something we wanna talk more about at our retreat because my guess is folks who have moved out, regardless of the reasons that they've moved out would be able to provide us some really, really good feedback. So I do see, oh, there's Hala, okay, wonderful. I thought I saw Hala had fallen off. Hi, Hala. Can you hear us, Hala? I can, I apologize for that. No worries, no worries, okay. All right, great. So moving on, again, is everyone here able to attend the retreat on February 22nd from six to eight? Again, it will be held in the town room for AHRA members who would like to be in person and it will also be available just as we would have a usual meeting via Zoom. So I do see someone's hand is raised in the attendees and just wanted to let you know in case you weren't here earlier. We did have our first public comment period, but we'll be holding another public comment period shortly. So please do leave your hand up if you'd like to speak during that. All right, so the other pieces that I wanted to get to today, I wanted to give you an update on the big payback screening. So I've been working with the Student Senate at Amherst College and they are very, very excited about hosting the big payback and having it be in one of the spaces at Amherst College. We're hoping for that to occur in late March, but more likely early April. So, and that's so that Alderwoman, former Alderwoman Robin Ruth Simmons is going to make a trip here to Amherst and will be part of our panel that we can have either before or after the screening. So once I have some more information, the Senate has identified three possible locations at Amherst College that would work for a large crowd as well as space to have a sort of reception and panel discussion. So as that moves forward, I will keep folks posted, but please let me know if you have any questions about that. And if you haven't seen the big payback, I think I said it's streaming free on PBS right now. So definitely excellent and worth watching. And then in terms of the League of Women Voters event with Dr. Sandy Darity, we, a small group of us, so I think it's Dr. Rhodes and myself are meeting with a small group of the League later this week. And that is a first meeting to discuss how that collaboration might work and how the AHRA may be able to support and collaborate on bringing Dr. Darity here and what that will look like. So I'll also provide more on that. And the Stolen Beam is putting out another series in which they've invited us to be co-sponsors of. And so I will make sure it's, I'll make sure that all of the dates and things like that get to you all. And then there's a press release actually that hasn't gone out yet, but that will go out soon. So that's really exciting. That's again, also in partnership with the library, the Jones Library. Any questions on all of those pieces? Any of those? I wanna thank you for all your work on this, Michelle, and to furthermore, just to suggest that perhaps coming from you on behalf of all of us, if there's agreement, would be to make a special invite to attend the payback, the big payback to the presidents at least of our colleges and our university here in town. So Chancellor Kumbler-Soboswamy, Edward Wingenbach at Hampshire College and Michael Elliott at Amherst College. It would really be important if those three gentlemen would attend. Excellent, yes. I agree, I've noted that. And I know that the student senate president at the college, Cyrus is in close contact with Michael Elliott. And so we'll be able to move those things forward as we sort of put the pieces in place here. And I think it would be really great to think about that for all of the membership, who do we want to, I mean, we want as many folks, right? Like our work is for the entire community and we want as many folks from all different aspects of the community to attend who would like to be there in attendance. And so just thinking about our list that we already have and how all these pieces are gonna come together like is there a way to have an invitation to the big payback also tied in with an invitation to the survey. So just thinking about how we can be efficient and effective in our work as we, because we really are limited on our time at this point. Okay, so Dr. Shabazz, I'm not sure if you have or if Hala has a BAM update. I did want to say that I received an email over the weekend. Let me just see if I can pull it up real quick here. And I will share my screen. Let's see. And I'm curious if anybody has seen this. Let's see, share screen. So somebody sent me this legislation that was filed in January by Senator Liz Miranda. And this is to create, it's not scrolling here. Oh, here we go. This is to create an act establishing a commission to study reparations in Massachusetts. I was surprised I didn't see any news or anything about it. So I'm not, but it did get filed. So I'll send that to everybody so that you all have it. But does anyone know about this? Yeah, so it's been in preparation. And I think they're, I've spoken with Bud Williams in relation to his being listed or supporting similar measure in the general court in the lower chamber. But yes, this is efforts within the, within the state level that I think our one of our speaker in public comment who's based in Boston, Ms. Van James Saskia, Van James mentioned as has been going on, there are efforts to really look at this, some of this even has been in discussed from the, some of the cannabis commission. Relative to some of its efforts or kind of lack of efforts around the justice, reparative justice aspect in regards to cannabis policy and cannabis reform. So yes, this is a major development, I think stimulated in part from California kind of getting ahead of us and being the first out. Now here comes Massachusetts. Yeah, absolutely. And I just as a, from sort of wearing my counselor hat was planning to send an email to Liz Miranda and just thank her for filing it and sort of make a connection with her. So yeah, it'd be interesting to follow that for sure. So was there a BAM update? Hello, Dr. Shabazz that you'd like to share at this point. There is, from my standpoint, there is not, we have been on a bit of a hiatus and need to get back into meeting regularly. So thank you for the encouragement or reminder and accountability. Awesome. And welcome, Alexis. Oh, thank you so much. I'm sorry, I'm like scarfing down food, but thank you. Good. All right, I'm glad you're here. So, and Alexis, I'll catch you up on what you missed in terms of the retreat and just various announcements. I'll catch you up outside of the meeting. Awesome. Okay, so I'm looking at our agenda. If there aren't any other member reports or even if there are, let's do, let's call our second public comment period. And again, I'm gonna ask first that folks who would like to make public comment that our Amherst residents, please raise your hand. And then, or, you know, if you are affiliated with the university or any sort of stakeholder in Amherst, please raise your hand first. Okay, so we have two hands up right now. And I'll just ask that Jennifer will our first speaker in. Yeah, Lauren Mills should be coming in. So I'm letting her in first. Great. And while we're doing that, I wanted to make sure that in our member comment section of the meeting that Dr. Rhodes, if he is willing, will give an update on the CSSJC meeting that we were invited to attend on Friday. I sent you all the meeting recording. It was a really, really rich meeting on many, many levels and recommend that everybody watch it if you get a chance. But Dr. Rhodes will be able to give a little bit of an update, I hope on that. And let's see, I think we have Lauren. Hi, Lauren. I'm gonna try to quickly as I can and hope you can hear me. Yes, just stay close. You were sort of fading in and out. So I think we can hear you. Okay. Yes, I am a resident of Amherst, but I grew up in Boston and I just had a few comments about, you know, my research and, you know, just staying in conversation and in the know-how of, you know, this assembly. I have been looking at the Caribbean Reparations Commission which has a website that has some interesting points that it makes and one of them is the importance of cultural institutions and heritage institutions and also the enhancement of historical knowledge for Black people in this country to further our knowledge of ourselves and to help us to continue our narrative of what reparations means and looks like. I also wanted to comment on, you know, the Caribbean, it has reggae month this month as February. So they see their culture and they infuse their culture in their schools and in their children and their youth and I would encourage this assembly to find a way to get youth involved in the reparations discussion and also want to say happy birthday to Bob Marley and his family, which his birthday was February 6th and also happy birthday to Dr. Shabazz and Dr. Rhodes. I think that's all I wanted to say and just it's really important for Black residents in Amherst to stay abreast and to continue to be part of the narrative of the reparations assembly. Thank you. Thank you, Lauren. And I am going to just take a moment to respond because I want Lauren and I want everybody to know that tonight the Amherst Recreation Committee is meeting and they have on their agenda youth empowerment. So I'm sure maybe Lauren is already aware of that but I'm going to try to attend, I have another meeting to attend but I'm going to try to listen in to that and that might be of interest to others as well. The other thing that I wanted to say is and this is very early, a seed has been planted and Lauren, I'd love to talk with you more about this but the possibility of the AHRA as one of our ways of reaching the community, having an intergenerational dance and this is something that a community member has brought to me and I think is a really neat idea. So I'm meeting with them on Wednesday for lunch to hear more about that idea. So thank you, Lauren. Watch out if you get devil bridges on the dance floor. It's going to be hot. And Carly Tartakov for that matter. That's who we want. All right, wonderful. So thank you again, Lauren and we have Chiara is coming in. Welcome Chiara, can you hear us? There I am, okay, I can hear you. Good afternoon. I just wanted to first of all say thank you for holding these public comment periods. It's definitely a very essential part of the process and hearing from the public on this issue. I do want to just continue to beat the drum that any sort of data collection that you all are doing in terms of gathering information from the public it must have some level of data disaggregation in terms of ethnicity when you're doing your outreach within Amherst. It's very important to actually identify the population who are descendants of slavery in Amherst in general. It's very important. Especially when we're talking about genocide and actually being able to name and recognize our people whose history is the basis for this reparations claim to begin with. So that's incredibly important. Also with regard to the media apparatuses that you're going to look into to share the message I noticed WIB is on there. That is my family's radio station. So I'll be happy to help to facilitate that connection if need be. Also I wanted to recommend African American Point of View magazine I'm sorry newspaper as well. Their reach definitely extends to Amherst and will definitely reach people in Amherst as well as those who may have moved out of Amherst and to other areas of the part of the Valley. So definitely I wanted to recommend them as well. So I think that's all I wanted to say but just continuing to put the message out there and beating the drum that the actual specificity of Black Americans descendants of US shadow and slave is a very, very important part of this process. Thank you. Thank you so much Kiara. And I understand that Kiara and Dr. Shabazz participated in a program together recently. Is that something that we can walk? Like is that available for viewing or has it been recorded? It is an audio recording. I'm working on the technical aspect of that getting it produced, but yes, that's available. Probably going to YouTube with it, Kiara, is that right? That's right. Excellent. Well, please let us know when that's available so we can check it out. All right, so I am not seeing any other hands. Dr. Rhodes, can I call on you to give us some, a bit of reporting on the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee meeting that occurred. I do see Alexis's hand is up in the attendees. I'm not sure if perhaps she got moved out accidentally. I'm just gonna say that the name says people talk, move. And so she was next to Kiara. And so their names were moving although Alexis wasn't speaking. And so I think I accidentally gave you Jennifer. I forgive you. Dr. Rhodes, we do have one more hand in public comment. Let me ask you, can you wait through that public comment before giving your report or do you need to run? No, I definitely have a little time. Okay, great. So let's take Cash who is coming in through public comment. And so that public comment period is still open. Welcome, can you hear us? Peace, peace, yes. Great. Thank you for letting me speak. First, I wanted to say reparations is very important as the conversation of modern day. So I applaud you all for having this discussion and the things that come from it. Michelle, I was hoping that you could bring the image back up of the bill for Massachusetts. I think it said 2393. I tried to screenshot it quickly, but I like to research that further. Just to understand these bills, who suggested to be a part of the commissions in San Francisco, which is what I wanted to bring up to this group and to those in the sound of my voice. In the city of San Francisco, they have a reparations task force of which is completely black American based on different socioeconomic statuses from a 14 to 24 year old to someone formerly incarcerated, to someone who's been displaced by gentrification, someone affected by, excuse me, someone who lives in public housing, someone who's been educated in finance equity, so on and so forth. I think we should take a look at that same standard for when creating any of these task force in the respective cities and states as well. I wanted to just amplify the financial demands that San Francisco suggested and hope that we mirror those in these respective cities and states as well. In San Francisco's instance, and it's from a 60 page report on page 33 where they speak about economic empowerment, they mentioned a lump sum payment for reparations of which they set it at $5 million, a one-time lump sum, as well as 250 years of income payments tied to the area median income of which some of us argue that should be for 400 years, as well there's debt forgiveness. I can mention the other things trust fund as well as tax credits and other things, but I really wanted to focus on the debt forgiveness because I see that as a win-win strategy that ties together public and private partnership in a way that I think will expedite our claim. Just as one example, any credit card company, any university that black Americans specifically would owe debts to, those debts would be eradicated or paid for by the American government. So I think that it would be in their best interest to see this claim come to fruition. Thank you guys for letting me speak and peace and reparations. Thank you, Cash. And yeah, I'm just, so I wanna just give you my email address quickly. If you send me an email, I can send you the bill. It's Michelle with 1-L-M-I-C-H-E-L-E, Miller, M-I-L-L-E-R, three, six, eight, oh, at gmail.com. So if you have the time and you just send me a quick email, I can send that over to you. And the bill was Senate docket number 2393. It was filed on January 20th, 2023, presented by Liz Miranda. So if you do a Google search of that, you'll also be able to find it, but please do reach out by email if you'd like. So thank you for being here, Cash. And so we're gonna have Dr. Rhodes. And I see that we have, I think, we have one of our co-chairs here from the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee. And if they would like, and this is, I'm putting them on the spot, Allegra, if you'd like to come in, raise your hand. You keep your camera off if you're not in a place. And if you wanna stay in the audience, that's totally fine too. But I wanna welcome you if you'd like to come in. All right. So we'll bring Allegra in and then Dr. Rhodes, why don't you go ahead and share with us about the meeting? It actually was a very good discussion and interaction with that committee. First up is that the topic of Crest came up and its objectives, its mission and looking at where they are now and how close they are to their mission and objectives. And one of the things I indicated was that, it would be good for the committee, CSSJ, and at the end of the six month period in which Crest has been alive to look at how close they are to their mission and to view that through the lens of the data that will be collected and what have been collected. They indicated that they would be having some kind of forum or listening session in March that would address that. I think that'd be a very, very good thing to happen. Crest is a very important part of this time at this point in time and their mission as voted upon and stated needs to be examined in terms of whether they're on mission or whether there are other things that throwing them off track or whatever. So that's one. The other thing was, I think Pat mentioned something about black businesses here and Amherst and my response was that when the bid in the downtown Amherst Foundation in the town were distributing money, a lot of the businesses that were on the list that Pat had were either unhadly, did not exist or went out of business or were bankrupt or that they were not registered with the town nor were they registered with the state. And finally, they were not, they did not apply. One of the things that the observations that I shared was that when I looked at that list, it occurred to me that there was a woeful lack of entrepreneurship skills that have been exhibited. And that is one thing that can be rectified. And I certainly at some point in the very near future would like to bring that forward to AHRA, how AHRA and the CSSJ and the town and the big thing come together to create an entrepreneurship program for not only adults, but also for middle school and high schoolers. Now that entrepreneurship program for middle school and high school is something that is very dear to my heart. I've taught entrepreneurship from third grade through adults. And I also wanted the experience that I had was teaching entrepreneurship to various students, groups about a year after Katrina had and spent three months there teaching entrepreneurship and financial literacy. That is something I think is very dear to my heart. I think that it would be very important to have that available on an Amherst. And I think that in certainly a care occurred if we coordinate with each other. And the last thing was that the CSSJ has some priorities that the town has signed off one and that those things need to be moved forward. And I think that there may be a role for AHRA. I also believe that, and I said that it was, when you're dealing with the large list of priorities that you pick three of them to move forward within a period of time, I think that there may be a role for AHRA. Three of them to move forward within a period of time, gather all of the resources necessary to get those done and get those done and then move for another set of three. Anyway, that's about it. Thanks Dr. Rhodes, that's really helpful. And I ran into Ms. Pat over the weekend and she was really looking forward to talking to you about the idea that the two of you sort of hatched during the meeting and the technical and entrepreneurial work. So, and I wanna thank again Allegra, Clark and D. Shabazz, Dr. D. Shabazz for inviting us to the meeting and for wanting and encouraging us to be in collaboration. I think we have a lot of intersecting mission. So I would love if Allegra, if you could especially tell us about the upcoming listening session but please to share anything that you might want. And I did send out the recording to all of the members here. So for folks who want to listen, it was a really, really powerful and really, really great meeting. Welcome Allegra. Well, thank you. It's nice to see all of you. And again, thank you for all the work that you have been doing in this community. It's really important. And I do hope that we can continue to collaborate. I think that the listening session will be March 25th. I believe the plan is to have it from two to four in the afternoon. And I believe that we decided upon the town room so that we could have a hybrid function for people who might not be able to join in person and Cress will be present to kind of give an overview of how the past six months have gone. And also to hear from the community about what the needs are from the community's perspective. So that is the plan so far. We'd love to have as many of you there as possible. Excellent, yes. And please let us know if we can support that. I'll definitely make sure that I get that out to folks in time, date and everything. And Jennifer, I assume it hasn't been posted yet as a meeting is that it's not posted yet. So there's no link or anything. No, and I'm gonna create a fire this week. Awesome, perfect. Okay. So thank you, Allegra. And if so, I see it's 312. I know Ms. Bridges pushed past her time. And I think some of the rest of us did. No, you're good. Okay. Are there any other member comments before we adjourn the meeting today? And just to be clear, we are set to meet again on, I'm sorry, the 20th we can't meet. That's right, right, Jennifer? We are close on the 20th. Okay. So our retreat is on the 22nd. Which means that some of the preparation for that may have to happen between me and Pamela and Jennifer in advance and anything we need will reach out to you all and ask that you only send it to myself or Jennifer and Pamela. And if you have any questions or comments, just give me a call, send me an email and we'll go from there. Yes, Ms. Bridges. Before we adjourn, I just wanna reiterate about the Ancestral Bridges exhibit. I think it's to learn about the partnership with Ancestral and Amherst College. And it's an amazing thing for the Ancestral, Black Ancestors and Indigenous in Amherst. And you'll learn a lot. So I just wanted to say that again. Yes, and that is happening right now through the summer at Amherst College at the library. And it really is fantastic. For those of you, I think like Alexis was not here when we spoke about it earlier. We would like and Ms. Bridges and I will work with Anika hopefully to get her to come to a meeting so that we can talk about the exhibit and all of the sort of pieces around that. So thank you. It really truly is beautiful. If you have not seen it, definitely check it out. And when the, oh, Alexis actually, maybe we could ask Alexis. The Amherst media production from the opening, Alexis, do you know when that might be available? I wonder if she walked away. All right. Well, we'll figure that piece out and... We can find that out and just head over to the Robert Frost Library and you'll learn a lot there. All right. Thank you, Ms. Bridges. And are there any other comments? I think Dr. Shabazz might have, he jumped off. And so if there's no other comments, then we will adjourn at 316 p.m. Thank you everyone. Really great meeting.