 from a small town in Louisiana located between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I grew up surrounded by my grandparents and my great aunts and uncles. I am just inspired to tell their story and then telling their story. I didn't realize how I was preserving history and carrying on that legacy that they left me with. I really began to understand the historic value of African American-owned resources and telling that history. So my sister and I decided to start the descendants project because we came from a heritage tourism background where we saw that the narratives of many of the plantations that tour in our area were not including the experience of our ancestors. There is a story that our community has to tell. We have a history beyond the plantation and you know I realize why aren't our stories being told and our structures tell the story and tell the history. We are a multifaceted art organization and I think we lie at the intersection of environmental, historic, preservation and social and racial justice. We in in Cancer Alley are at the highest level of risk on the 95th percentile of cancer risk in the country. We organized and worked very hard in protecting our neighborhood from industrial encroachment in the form of a grain terminal and we advocated in addition and along with the plantations that are nearby not only for their protection and their value to us as a Black descendant community as you know sacred spaces but we also made sure that we as Black descendant communities deserve just as much protection and we found out that the judge had ruled that the zoning had to be returned back to residential. We're still all fighting and quite honestly we're gonna have to constantly fight to make sure that we are protecting our community from industrial encroachment. I call my community my the great love of my life my family's a great love of my life and I'm just honored to do this work and for the first time in my life feel like this was my purpose to be doing this kind of work.