 My name is Rasu Jilani. I am the 2015 Freak Change Artists and Residents in Bed-Stuy. This project comes with the intentions to be a parallel narrative to the narrative around gentrification. All the stories, the full spectrum of gentrification from the vampire perspective to the victimized perspective, public policy perspective, they're all valid in their own vacuum. But the personal stories were missing, right? So how do you go to an everyday person and ask them what's happening in your community? Or what's your personal relationship to your community? That's missing. So for me it's really important to have stories come from within, then from without. Rasu is basically my brother. We grew up together in a lot of ways, studied life together. I think it's awesome to see these things up and see that someone's an artist, someone's a healer, someone's a business owner, this person's an ex-cop. I think that that's important because some people don't believe that we exist. So the impact I'm hoping my project will have is allow people to honor their own stories and tell their own truths in different ways. You know, Bed-Stuy is a mecca of artists. Although they live here, they kind of go outside of the community to create work and present work and then come back and lay their heads here. So what I wanted to do was capture that phenomenon of creativity that actually exists in Bed-Stuy. So I just hope people go out and start creating work that comes back home. Having this at my store is very important because I think it shows that we are really community focused and then getting other people in the neighborhood who have small businesses involved as well just creates that family and it shows a good message that we're all supportive of each other and we want to share our stories to inspire. One of the major challenges was to crack that nut, so to speak. A lot of the elders especially would start going into stories and I'm like, hold on, let me just get my mic so I can record this. And they're like, no, I don't want that recorded because there's a sensitivity about misspeaking or trust or people misquoting people or taking things the wrong way or just like, okay, tell me what you want to know. I'll tell you everything. You know, so it's a very interesting dynamic but getting there was very hard. I'm just excited about the conversation it'll create. I think the store on its own is definitely a conversation piece. People don't expect it, so now to see a project like this going on attached to the space will be even better and I'm just happy to be able to share something like this. For the people that have been here for a long time, I think it's good because it's always good to see yourself represented. For the families who are here that are going to be here, I think it's important. Young people and old people can hopefully be inspired and be like, wow, there's people doing that stuff that live in my neighborhood.