 Welcome to today's vital conversations with our community. Transforming communities, transforming lives, featuring the Fifth Ford Redevelopment Corporation and its Center for Urban Transformation. And I'm going to go ahead and share a couple of slides so that you've got a little bit more information and we'll begin right about now. Super, again, with our vital conversations. Again, this today, our event will be recorded and we are grateful to Bridgeway Capital Management for sponsoring our fall 2020 vital conversations with our community series. And I'd like to recognize Kendra Adams from Bridgeway to offer a few words about their sponsorship. Good afternoon and welcome. On behalf of Bridgeway Capital Management, we are honored and so happy to be supporting Interfaith Ministry's Vital Conversation Series. Bridgeway's commitment to community is motivated by our passion for change within the community and global impact. It's also motivated by servant leadership. And this is why we donate 50% of our profits towards non-profit organizations that are bringing about transformative change within the community. We are excited to be a part of this platform because we understand that vital conversations are needed within our community. And so we are very excited to support Interfaith Ministries with their efforts that are aligned with Bridgeway's commitment to making a positive change within the Houston area. So again, thank you for having us and we hope that the vital conversation today is impactful. Thank you. Thank you Kendra, so very, very much. Thank you all for joining us in Zoom. Please keep yourselves muted and please use the chat box to send me any questions along the way. We're also welcome those who are joining us via Facebook Live. Let me offer just a couple of announcements. Here at the front end, so that we have the fullness of our time for the rest of, for the topic of our day. Please register for our final, final conversations of 2020, which will happen on December 1st, which will feature a dialogue with scholars from Rice University's Houston Education Research Collaborative. Education is constantly lauded as one of the absolutely crucial ways for all people to have a chance at a better life. And there's one of the few things in our culture that has a near universal reach. Yet that access and quality and depth and affordability is not equal and that inequality often is along lines of race and economics. COVID has not helped either with now a digital divide in places where remote learning is being so prevalent. So just a reminder to join us on December 1st for our final vital conversation of the year and the registration link will be open later this afternoon. A couple of needs as well here across Interfaith Ministries. We are the home of Texas's largest meals on wheels program. We have a host of virtual volunteer needs through the Thanksgiving and the end of the year holiday season. And you can find more at imgh.org slash events slash Thanksgiving. The dialogue project here with vital conversations emerged from the shooting of George Floyd, a son of Houston's third ward in June of 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We brought our three amigos, Reverend William Lawson, Archbishop Joe Firenza and the late rabbi Samuel Karf to begin this series back in June. You can find their dialogue on our YouTube page. A second summer conversation on allyship followed. And then we began our fall series back in September with a conversation between four outstanding young leaders and how their generation is on the forefront of social change. Today, our theme is transforming communities, transforming lives. And we feature the work of the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation and its Center for Urban Transformation. And we welcome for our conversation from Fifth Ward CRC and the Center for Urban Transformation, Kathy Payton and Jirna Sangani. Kathy is the president and CEO and Jirna is the chief program officer for Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation. And with that, I'm going to stop my share and take care of that. And turn to Kathy and Jirna. Thank you so much for being with us. Maybe we could start with you sharing a little bit about Fifth Ward and your work in Fifth Ward. So great, thanks for having us. And let me start by saying thank you to both Interfaith Ministries for this wonderful opportunity as well as the Bridgeway Capital Management Group for having these critical conversations about things that are impacting our communities. And so certainly Fifth Ward Community to Redevelopment Corporation is excited to share a story. I'm even more excited because as a native of this community, I get to talk about the one place that I truly love and that is Houston's Fifth Ward where we're creating a community of choice. And one of the things that I want to share with you that we've been doing this comprehensively throughout this community for about the last 30 years. And what you will find is that our focus has began to shift and transform as the needs of our community began to diversify. We started this thing as a result of board members, community residents, leaders and pastors in the area frustrated by the lack of investment in our community and all of the increasing crime that we experienced in low education attainment rates and all of those things. And so with that, Fifth Ward CRC's mission is to catalyze resources to build and preserve an inclusive Fifth Ward by developing places and creating opportunities for people to live, work and play. And we also say worship because worship is one of the things that brings people back into our community. We're committed to building the capacity of this underserved community. And we work diligently with organizations like Interfaith Ministries and others, Pleasant Hill to build public private partnership that promote revitalization because there's enough work in Fifth Ward for everybody to do their part, play their role and respond to the needs of this community. We also hope to create economic opportunity and foster inclusion. This is not an opportunity to recreate the Fifth Ward of yesterday, to reestablish it as a ghetto or make programming available only to low and moderate income families. It's about economic integration. It's about social integration and it's about making feel that everybody feels welcome here in the community. And then lastly, we build community assets through home ownership opportunity, small business development and a number of community amenities. A little bit about the organization as we were founded in 1989, we were responding to the urban flight. People were leaving the inner city community and what really disturbed our community most was the introduction of Interstate I-10 and the introduction of 559 that took a whole community and basically diced it into four different quadrants. And with that, you had the residents who were displaced by the introduction of the highway and transportation, but you also had the simultaneous time, you had urban flight and you had people moving out to the suburbs and the lands and all those places. And so it left this community really dying on a vine. And I can remember as a little girl being in the community bed because my family was one of those who was displaced coming back into the neighborhood for church on Sunday. I couldn't imagine what was happening to all of the people and all of the businesses in the neighborhood because every time you come into the neighborhood, you saw fewer people and you saw an abandoned building and you fall. So houses began to be empty, vacated and derelict and it was a community just full of life. And so with that, the fifth ward engaged in a partnership with Houston Habitat, which was also fairly new to the community in 1989 to bring the first new wood, new development to this community in more than 40 years. And the community got so excited about this opportunity that they wanted to see it continue. And Habitat for Humanity is a global organization that works all across the city of Houston and all across the continent in terms of making sure that affordable housing opportunities are being needs are being met by this organization. And as a result of that the fifth ward community redevelopment corporation was founded because our goal in our role was to redevelop a community that already had been established. You see fifth ward is 152 plus year old neighborhood in the middle of the last century was a hub for black owned businesses, musicians and culture. And we have a main street here the Lions Avenue quarter. And so when you look at Houston and you look at fifth ward comparatively, I wanna share with you just some very broad demographics. Those are how we measure what we will focus our attention on in Houston's fifth ward. And so when we talk about this being an impoverished community you can see that the household median income from the city of Houston is about 51,000 and the average median income for the fifth ward is 27,000. And so that's almost half of the income. So we represent a community that's largely comprised of 50% of the median income for the city of Houston. Similarly alarming when you look at the home ownership rate throughout the city of Houston is 43% and in fifth ward it lags behind 36%. And if you even narrow that down even further it further lags for the African-American community. Most disturbing was the rate of high school completion in fifth ward compared to Houston. 88% to the city of Houston and 69% for the fifth ward community. That's really troublesome when you're trying to grow a community economically and bring an inclusive opportunity for people to take advantage of opportunities that exist throughout the community with the educational attainment rate of only 69%. So as we look at the demographics of the community and the things that we're trying to have impact on we have divided our work up into what we call lines of businesses. And we have five core lines of businesses. And the first and most prominent has and continue to be real estate development. And when we look at real estate development our role and our goal is to provide affordable housing opportunities through rental programs and home ownership programs. And through these real estate developments we're able to reach a large portion of our families who are at 30% of median income. And so if you take that in comparison to what the city of Houston's median income of 51,000 and you multiply that to down to 30% we're able to serve families making in most cases as little as $17,000 a year through our rental programs. For home ownership, our medium is about 50 to 60% of income in terms of being able to qualify. And we're able to do that through our redevelopment and our development process and in partnership with public and private entities like the city of Houston who provide down payment and closing cost assistance. So on average, our families are able to get upwards of about $40,000 in down payment assistance towards the purchase of a new home. Our second line of business is home ownership promotion and preservation. And we've fostered this by offering home by education castes, financial coaching. We offer counseling services and education, asset building, match savings programs and things of that nature all to encourage and build the capacity of the people that we're serving and ready them for home ownership opportunities as well as preservation, which is equally important. And under our preservation realm includes our repair service and responding to disasters, particularly our natural disasters like we've experienced in recent years, Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Emelda which greatly impacted our community and destroyed a number of units in the fifth ward and created even greater challenges for the community in terms of their ability to either access in or maintain affordable housing opportunities. Community engagement and supportive services. One, we want to make sure that we represent the voice of the community and we're finding ways to empower the community to build their capacity to give them a voice and respond to their needs. The first 15 to 18 years of our work was largely focused on places and spaces. And then we realized that it wasn't enough for us to focus on just the physical development of the community but we had to also figure out ways and strategies which we grow the individuals who occupy these places and spaces. So that's what our community engagement and supportive services is all about. We have just been named in the last month or so, Houston's newest cultural arts district, the Houston's first African-American cultural arts district. And so what we find is that the heritage and the history of this community will not be lost if we're very strategic and intentional about preserving the cultural history of the fifth ward community. And so we do that through a number of opportunities. We have an annual festival. We have arts education programming in our schools. We have artistic installation and work very closely with our creatives and we use historic preservation to help us tell the story. And what we want to encourage in the fifth ward is that this is a place where we want to invite people to celebrate the rich history and to sustain this community so that this community can be seen as a vital contribution to the city of Houston as a whole and figure out ways in which we sustain a quality of life that's comparable to other places in the city of Houston. Particularly in light of the fact that we are so many deserts. We are a retail desert. We are a food desert. We are an entertainment desert. So there are so many deserts within this community. And a lot of it was attributable to the population exodus that we talked about in the early set, early to late 70s and the early 80s when people really began to leave fifth ward. And now that you see that center city living is becoming increasingly more attractive, how do we continue to work that we do, respond to the needs of the indigenous community and not negatively be impacted by the threat of gentrification. And that's critically important for us. And what we don't want to do is displace people as a result of the work that we're doing and create opportunities for those who have an opportunity to live anywhere to be able to live here in Houston's fifth ward. And then lastly, economic development to generate job and entrepreneurial opportunities preserving local businesses and attracting new businesses to the community about two or three years ago, we incubated a small business development chamber that's unique to fifth ward and happened to report that it was so well received. Our membership is in excess of a hundred businesses and entrepreneurs today who really look for ways and believe in this community and find ways to serve this community and enjoy the economic development and economic growth that they bring to this particular city. And so as I alluded to in my presentation, we talked a lot about the need to begin to address the people who are occupying our places and spaces, the people who were operating our businesses. And we found that there were a number of commonalities and things that were really stagnating the growth of the fifth ward. And so we felt like it was really important for us to get our arms around what some of the challenges were. And when you think about the barriers to why people couldn't begin their own business, why they couldn't access home ownership, why they couldn't access affordable housing, a lot of it had to do with their individual capacity. And so unlike, you know, building someone's capacity for home ownership, it's easy to take them through a budgeting class. It's easy to provide some financial coaching and help get them where they are work towards a credit plan and credit restoration and those things. But it's hard when the other issues are deeply rooted as a result of generational curses on families that have been brought upon them from multiple generations of injustices throughout our city. And so one of the things that we focused on was the criminal element. And what we found is that people's capacity was being stymied because they were engaging in criminal mischief at an early age and it played them for the rest of their lives. And for those of you who don't know, those persons with even a criminal mischief background that's a felony or not able to get into multifamily apartments that offer affordable housing, they're often not able to enroll in college, they're often not able to enlist in the military and they certainly are not able to acquire a good job that pays higher wages. And so we felt it important to figure out how we began to take a holistic approach to address those needs. And as a result of that, we came together with five partners, Pleasant Hill Ministries, which is my church home in another community development corporation and church, a 95-year-old institution here in Houston-Speth Ward, along with Legacy Community Health, Habitat for Humanity, and an attorney, Bergen and Dropet, to figure out how can we really get our arms around understanding what the real needs of individuals and families are and what could we do to contribute to their wellbeing? And so as a result of that, we formed what is now known as the Center for Urban Transformation, which is taking a holistic approach to building the capacity and serving families on a regular basis to understand what their needs are and providing programming services and assistance that respond to those needs. And so with that, several programs have been given birth to, one of them being the Juvenile Justice Diversion Program and now a Community Health Program. But these are some of the things that we're doing to respond to the needs. And I'm going to ask my colleague, Jernison Ghani, if she will take what we've talked about in terms of the comprehensive redevelopment of Houston's Fifth Ward, while I presented to you how our strategies have been employed throughout the community to focus on the physical development, she's going to impart on you our strategies that address the human development in our community. So with that, hold on to your questions. We're going to entertain questions after Jernison has had an opportunity to make her presentation and we'll be happy to entertain and address any questions that you may have as it relates to our redeveloping and transforming lives in Houston's Fifth Ward. Thank you. Thank you. Kathy, thank you. So Kathy gave a great introduction to the Center for Urban Transformation. As she mentioned, this was started as a collaboration and what we recognized very quickly is that there are a lot of good organizations that have been our partners in this work in Fifth Ward. And what we expected is that being able to work together collaboratively would allow us to have a greater impact in the neighborhood. The mission of the Center for Urban Transformation is to build resilient families and to increase the capacity of our families to grow in all areas that impact quality of life. And we do this by addressing gaps in services. We do this through building community leadership and this is really important that we do this in partnership with our community and not as kind of imposing services on top of the community. We coordinate services and referrals among partners. We assess community conditions and we've researched our impact and adjust our investments. So we're very data-driven and we make sure that we're training the next generation of leadership. As Kathy mentioned, this happened by the five organizations coming together years ago. Again, recognizing that the work that we do can be amplified and we can address those gaps in services by collaborating. Our work includes the juvenile justice diversion program certainly as the centerpiece and the kind of cornerstone of what we're doing right now. We also do a lot of training and we're sort of justice skills so that beyond our program we're impacting the community and the capacity of the community to be a part of this work. And we've started a new community health initiative and we do a lot of work in community engagement to help folks and access resources to stabilize households. What I wanna talk a little bit more about today is the juvenile justice diversion program and from what Greg has shared with us about the impetus for these conversations, I think this is hopefully gonna be something that's really helpful in the work that you're exploring. The program was launched in August 2019 and kind of shoe to form what the center has been about from the very beginning is that it was a collaborative process. From the beginning, when we first started to identify that there was a lack of support for folks who were impacted by the criminal justice system that this lack of support meant that for generations, sometimes families would feel the impact of a person being involved in the criminal justice system. Bergen and Jofi started providing pro bono legal services and pleasant health ministry started providing social supports and quickly we learned and we wanted to see if there's a systematic way and more systems approach to addressing those needs. And so we sat down with the Harris County district attorney's office and they really helped us understand the system better and what helped us understand where there might be opportunities for reform. And we started to focus on juvenile justice reform, really. That was the starting point. And we've been talking a lot about where do we grow from there? But one of the crucial things is that we started by bringing lots of stakeholders together. So in addition to the DA, we also talked to the department of juvenile probation to HISD, not just HISD central but also every school and a lot of assistant principals, some teachers in our neighborhood after school service providers, community members and leaders in the neighborhood. And we brought together a group of people and the program design itself was collaborative. We started to map out what the protocols and what the framework for this program would be as a team. And what that really helped us do is make sure there was a sense of ownership, that there was a sense of responsibility of why we were doing this. I think one of the things that we had to work together as a community was to say what are we doing differently we're doing more than providing an after school activity. We are looking for ways to keep kids out of the system altogether. And we searched for ways to do that. And so ultimately what we found was really exciting. Any youth who got arrested on a school campus in the neighborhood instead of a petition being filed against them in court they would be sent to us to receive services. And when they completed services with us diversion would be completed which meant that their file would be sealed and no petition would be filed. Not only that, but the way that we set this up is that they wouldn't have to plead guilty or anything like that. Some of the programs up until then had been first you plead guilty and then maybe have access to this kind of opportunity. The other thing that we were able to do that was really exciting is also create a space so that our school administrators could refer to us directly. So they didn't have to wait until there was an arrest. If they found, if they or their campus police found that there was a kid who was hanging out with the wrong kids, that there was rumors about things that were going on or they just knew there was, there were things going on. They didn't have to wait until there was a behavior that was so egregious that it would lead to arrest. They could refer them directly to us. So that also was truly a way to say how do we work with these issues as a community rather than getting involved with, getting a kid involved with the juvenile justice system. Once they came to us, regardless of how they come to us, the youth will are assessed deeply around their needs as well as their assets. So we very much believe in a kind of positive skills building for youth. So we're thinking both about what they're missing and what they need. We also meet closely with parents and family to understand what their support structure looks like. We work with the youth and sometimes involve their family in co-creating goals and education in sometimes employment, excuse me, and health and mental health and work on those goals bi-weekly through case management sessions, excuse me. And finally, we use the principles and tools and activities of restorative justice to address the incident itself that referred to us. Restorative justice is something you might have heard about in these recent months especially, but it's actually a practice that's been happening for years and it's a way really to have activities where we have dialogue especially between the alleged offender and the potential victim to discuss the issues that led to the particular incident to have an opportunity for the victim to talk about what happened to be heard as well as the offender to potentially either make amends or recognize what needs to be changed and find help to make those changes. And it's been really a useful tool that lots of schools have implemented. This is one of the first times it's being implemented in the community-wide setting. So not just based in the school but based across the community, which has allowed us then to train a lot of community members. So we've trained, we've been, we're looking at training educators as well as some law enforcement officers, but it's also just leaders in the neighborhood, business owners and what we are seeking to do is connect kids to both adult and peer mentors as well as volunteer opportunities because we recognize that part of this work for it to be sustainable is not just addressing that particular incident or your current needs or helping you make sure you stay in school for this year while you're on our caseload but also making sure you have positive relationships in the neighborhood that then you can build on in the future. And then finally we did, we just wanna share with you this is just the first year that completed in June. We have 48 clients enrolled and we were on track to get to about 80 or so clients until COVID. In fact, we continued to have referrals afterwards. I think that we built a really great relationship with schools, we're really grateful for that. Of those 48 clients, more than about half came directly from schools. So again, kids who didn't have to be involved in the juvenile justice system at all. Already 32 have completed their requirements for a diversion or they had. And the remaining, they have to continue their services with us. We've not had folks who've kind of failed out yet. And we have also transitioned very quickly from during COVID to make sure that we are providing support for stabilization. So we've helped a lot of families find rent relief, find access to resources around food security. But also importantly, trying to help parents understand things like how do you apply for SNAP? How do you apply for unemployment? Making sure that they're able to leverage resources that are available. Importantly again, thinking collaboratively we've tried to make sure that we have really strong relationships with dozens of service providers so that we can connect folks to our kids to folks who are experts in healthcare, therapy, legal aid. Not only that, but that because of our relationship with the kid, we can make sure they're successful in tapping those resources. And then finally, we've been doing some interviews. We're starting the process of a program evaluation. Just a few interviews even before that that parents and students have shared that they see that they're better able to manage their family relationships. They feel like they're more focused on school and that they're better able to kind of stay out of trouble. So I'm very excited to share that with you. That is it. Are there any questions? Or Greg, let us know how we wanna... Sure, no, there are some, again, thank you so much. Again, I've been aware of Fifth Ward CRC in the center for probably about a year now and just very, very impressive and wanted to make an opportunity for you all to talk about your work because it's so unique and impactful, but also in the larger scale of what we're trying to accomplish here with vital conversations. I think, let me start with just maybe a couple of the technical questions. There was one question just about, are you just in Fifth Ward or are you in other parts of your area of Houston as well, what's sort of your boundaries, recognizing you always have to make some choices in order to be effective? So the Fifth Ward community as a whole sub-covers an A square mile radius, Greg. Our boundaries are Buffalo Bayou to the south, 16 Kelly to the north, Hardy to the west and Lathrop to the east. That's kind of our footprint. However, our services are not uniquely tied to just Fifth Ward. We're able to serve and help families across the board. The Center for Urban Transformation and Juvenile Justice footprint is a lot smaller and I'll let Jurna talk about that. Sure, so we take community engagement very seriously. So we worked very closely with the schools that we're working in. So right now it's the schools that have a campus in the area, the general geographic area that Kathy described. We are looking at opportunities to expand beyond that, but we're very careful to say that here's a school that we have a relationship with. We're gonna also learn what's happening around them in the neighborhood. Right now we're focused on Fifth Ward, but we are looking at opportunities to grow. Super. Jurna, do you have any more slides to share? If I can disable your slideshare, we'd be able to see. That'd be great. Thank you. There was another just in kind of FYI question asking and you can either answer this now or offline. What department is your partner within HISD? And the individual who's asked this does some really good work within HISD and communities. We're working with the social emotional learning department or office. We've met with, we've had a chance to meet with the superintendent Layton as well and I've worked with the wraparound service specialists and different departments, but our kind of deeper engagement is with that office because they do a lot of work with kids who are on probation or have other involvement in the legal system. Two questions. And again, I'll mention him by name because we always are grateful for his support. The chair of Interfaith Ministries Board, Mr. J. Harburg is on the call and he has two questions. They're built on your opening comment, Kathy, that Fifth Ward was kind of sliced and diced up by 59 and I-10 and that's again, looking at the history of building of highways, that's not by, sometimes not by accidents. Thinking about 288 as another example, cutting apart another predominantly African-American community with 288. And his question was about if I-45 and the potential major movement of I-45 over onto the east side of town is on your radar screen as being another kind of policy choice and construction choice that will be affecting your work. That's a great question and thank you for that question. And yes, it is on our radar because the 45-59 exchange is already suggesting that families will be displaced as a result of his introduction to the community. There are a couple of things that we're concerned about, the environmental safety, the displacement that we have taken place right now and then lastly, what it will do to the elevation of this community. Right now, fortunately or unfortunately for us, I-10 serves as the detention because the water runs southward. And so Fifth Ward is currently high ground and so there are a lot of talks in the 45-59 interchange where some of the freeway will be underground as opposed to raised and then the number of families who are being displaced and what that will do to the population exodus. We don't wanna be sliced and diced again and we are at a point now where our community is experiencing growth. But many of the displaced families are coming out of the public housing developments that are in our community, which leaves us very vulnerable in terms of losing that population and those families not be relocated within Houston's Fifth Ward, but they'll have an opportunity and an option to purchase anywhere they want to or rent anywhere they want to in the city of Houston, which is not a bad thing, but many people want to continue to reside in the Fifth Ward area because that's the area that they're most familiar with, what they're comfortable with and life for them is affordable in Fifth Ward where they've got access to transit close to our major employment center. And so we're working very diligently with Metro and TextDOT to ensure that the families who are potentially at risk of being displaced that we create opportunities for them to continue to reside in Houston's Fifth Ward. So thank you for that question. Yeah. And maybe a follow-up from me. I'm always, again, amazed and thankful for Fifth Ward CRC's work and your ability to take on these challenges. But I'm just curious, I'm wondering how you take on those larger policy issues that sometimes are deeply impactful, but sometimes happen, it seems, in places far beyond our reach. So as an example, I don't know if anybody really came to Fifth Ward with this I-45 project and talked to you about the impact or it's something that you learned about and have to kind of adapt to the consequences. And so I'm just, my questions are about how do you take on those larger policies that sometimes seem beyond us but have these incredible impacts at times? You know, the highway and housing is another example. Right. Well, I think for us, Greg, one, we've got a 30-year history and a 30-year track record. And so while we may be a best kept secret for consumers, those in the public realm are certainly aware of the work that we're doing and our goal to transform the community. And we enjoy good relationships at all levels of government, both our local government and our state government. And what you will find is that local government pushes these entities to Fifth Ward CRC to say, hey, if you're going to do something that's going to negatively impact that community, you need to reach out to the community. And what we're doing is we're trying to build the capacity and empower the residents to be more proactive as opposed to being reactive. So it's an educational process to teach them to be a strong voice in the neighborhood for the things that they want and speaking with an informed mind about the things that are going to negatively impact them. One of the things that I will say that we do and Reverend Clemens taught me this early on in my career is that we have to Greg balance our passion with our sciences. And so for us, we are very passionate about the work that we do, but a lot of times some of the subject matter is outside of our realm of expertise, which means it forces us to engage with specialists in different areas who can educate us and inform us about the pros and cons of what's about to happen to our community and help us in making recommendations to the community that's an informed decision based on the sciences of whatever it is we're trying to accomplish. When I first started, I spent the first three to four years of my career following Dr. Kleinberg and what he had to say about the demographic and the shift of our community. And one of the things that we were attempting to do is make sure that we were not building and transforming the community for yesterday, but looking at who's likely to come into our community, who's likely to want to live here, what the growth is going to do to our community and how we respond to the community. How do we plan for higher density opportunities? What is it going to take us to really rebuild our population? How do we grow this community economically and create opportunities that will attract retail? Not all of those things have we been able to accomplish yet, but we are on a positive pathway to bringing the density, because again, we're balancing our passion with our sciences. And one thing that I did not take for granted as the leader of this organization that because I'm a native of the Fifth Ward community, Greg, that I knew that everything there was to know about Fifth Ward is a state of constant learning, constant education and working with consultants to keep us informed. Thank you. And I think that's a great reminder as in one of the things that Interfaith Ministries tries to do is connect communities is that there are a lot of people who are longtime residents of Houston that know nothing or very little about areas outside of their areas of comfort or their areas of knowledge and don't know that Fifth Ward is over 100 years old and has organizations like the Fifth Ward CRC. And I think raising a level of awareness about different neighborhoods, different needs and the ways that neighborhoods are meeting those needs is really important. There was a question also from Jay with the gentrification word. And again, I'm not a housing expert and I know that word has a lot of different meanings. Is that a word that resonates with concerns in Fifth Ward and if so, how so? Well, it's certainly a word that resonates with us is not necessarily a negative word and I will put it in the context of what our role and what our goal is to transform this community. Oftentimes we tend to look at opportunities for just low and moderate income families and if you keep and keep these pockets of poverty a community does not grow. Gentrification for us has negative confrontations when it takes the indigenous community this places them and creates opportunity for those who are have more opportunity and are not considered less fortunate or really need affordable housing. When I first started with Fifth Ward there were two things that we were really working to overcome that was the issue of blight and the negative connotation of our community where we had wore the name proudly of the bloody fifth. And I say that because the community had been largely an African-American community with high rates of crime, high rates of poverty and people were at that time looking to escape the Fifth Ward community as fast as they could. So we were able to acquire land for as little as 50 cents a square foot and many times people were donating land for us because they wanted to just be relieved from the burden and exit the community. What you find that gentrification has done to our community now and the increase of market rate housing as it creates a skyrocket of land prices for us. And so where we were once getting donations and paying 50 cents a square foot, now we're paying upwards of $15 to $20 per square foot for land. What that means for us is that it continues to force displacement and lessen the opportunities for those who are less fortunate and harvest because affordable housing cannot absorb land costs at the tune of 60 to $70,000 and then build 110, $120,000 on that and sell that house for $200,000 to a family. And so what it means is that higher income families have the capacity to be able to absorb the high costs of the land, which if you look and compare Fifth Ward to other areas, Midtown, Third Ward, certainly River Oats and the lands, the housing costs in the area are higher than they are in some of those other costs. And so, but it's still very affordable to those who have the capacity and have the opportunity and want to live here. So we're working diligently to ensure that opportunities and programs are continuously designed to be able to meet the needs of those families who are 80% and below of income and those families who live here and who may not have had opportunities to repair their homestead, to protect their investment and want to stay right here in Fifth Ward. Well, you'll find that the economic integration is doing for our community that is positive. It is helping us to attract much needed retail opportunities, much needed professional and business services. So in the last year alone, we've welcomed the new CVS and new Bank of America, a new Pizza Hut. So we have new retail opportunities that are coming to the community and availing themselves because people have to have somewhere to spend their money. What it has not done for us quite yet is generated enough disposable income and rooftops that warrant things like a grocery store, which is a great need for our community. And so we're always puzzled by the fact that we recognize that people have to have a place to shop and we all need food to live, but we don't deem it necessary to bring grocer and retail opportunities to Houston's Fifth Ward. So gentrification for us is one of those things that we want to be strategic in responding to. We want to help those who are newly coming to our community tell their story, but we wanna make sure that the rich history of the Fifth Ward is not lost. And so our projects like the St. Elizabeth Hospital, which is an adaptive reuse of that project to transform it from a hospital, which was the first African-American, which was the first hospital, for example, that allowed African-Americans to give birth to their babies here in Fifth Ward is now being transformed to affordable housing here in the Fifth Ward community. And so it's those type of opportunities where we can preserve the physical development, continue to tell the story of what this asset means to this community and then help those newly coming to the community create new stories. So it's a place and an opportunity for us to integrate our income in our families and our social status, cultural statuses, as opposed to displacing those families who wanna be here in Fifth Ward. Right. And your final comments, thank you, Cathy, remind me of the word that you often use is holistic and you're not just thinking about one or two, but you're thinking about the constellation of elements that makes up a community, a neighborhood and people living those lives. Just a follow-up on that from the chat box. I think one of the things that's so important about Fifth Ward CRC is that you're teaching people how to advocate and it sounds like then that you are being strategic about the kind of development that comes in with, again, with Houston's very interesting zoning or lack thereof laws. I could imagine that developers as Fifth Ward continues this renaissance would feel very, would be, see opportunities and even be opportunistic in ways that may be good for them, but not necessarily good for the community. And so my assumption is that your advocating is for so that with those coming in want to develop that they're doing it for the good of the community as well. Would that be accurate? It is, and it's a double-edged sword. So I can tell you that those we have what we call our pioneers, which are our existing and long-term residents and those what we call our fresh perspectives. And ironically, Greg, it's a battle, it's a clash because what you find is that our pioneering community is very well-adapt and looking for opportunities to mainstay their residency here in Fifth Ward and looking for affordable housing opportunities. But what you find for those who are newly coming to the community that they want to advocate against affordable housing, when the only reason that they moved to Fifth Ward is because it was affordable for them. And so we've got what we call those who are agitating our system and our balance because we've got this inner struggle between the haves and the have-nots, those that need and those that need not battling for turf and battling for land. And so what we're seeing now is a lot of land speculation where people are buying and holding and not necessarily developing because they want to see the community transform to a greater degree first. What we're seeing is in many cases, Greg, where we are focused solely on the low and moderate income families that those who are higher income and average income are feeling left out and left behind. And so how do we respond to the needs of both of those audiences? How do we make sure that we don't play this community by overly concentrating on those who are polished but find balance to create this opportunity where everyone feels comfortable in being a part of the community and responding to their needs. And so for a long time, we were struggling with always responding to the people with the greatest needs and passed up opportunity, Greg, for some easy wins and some easy transformative opportunities because we took the most difficult of cases and wanted to help those. And so now we're a little bit more experienced and balanced in our strategy in which we look for opportunities to serve both populations. But I can tell you, it's an ongoing battle. It's a double-edged sword and trying to find and strike that balance between the have and the have nots is a challenge for us. And we want to make sure that we always represent the have nots because they're always underrepresented. Thank you. We've got about 10 minutes left. And I do want to take a moment to hear maybe a story about the juvenile diversion program. That's so important, particularly and the statistics don't lie about, again, the vast inequalities when it comes to juvenile, when it comes to the legal system and incarceration in minority communities. So I'm wondering if it'd be possible maybe to share a success story to give maybe a little more depth to the program of somebody that's gone through your juvenile diversion program. Sure. I think I can share a couple of stories. One, there was a young man that was enrolled and referred to us from a middle school. And I think one of the things that was really exciting is that I think one of the things we try to do in our program is help youth think about their future. And he mentioned to us that he was interested in, he was interested in becoming a pilot. And he himself is a young Latino man. So we actually got him in touch with a Latino pilot through an organization and they met so that there was kind of connection there and a chance for some mentorship. We've had, we had a young man who joined the, wasn't referred to the organization because of a incident that happened. I'm trying really hard to kind of protect folks' privacy as well, but he was referred to our organization because of an incident that happened before the school year started last year, actually. And there was kind of a pending charge against him. And one of the reasons that he was referred to us is that the school wanted to make sure that he had support so that even as he was dealing with that pending charge and he had requirements to fulfill because of his probation that he had support to go through that so that he wouldn't drop out of school. Cause it was likely potentially that if, he felt like that things were too hard. And then on top of that, he had to go to school every day that that would be problematic. And so he joined our program in that process. We helped him get a legal aid to help with that charge and make sure that he had the opportunity for true diversion through us. We also helped him apply for a job and get his very first job. And he continues to be a really strong person in our program. And I think finally, one of the stories that I might also share that kind of gives another aspect of this is that there was some young women who got into our program because of a fight that broke out between them. And I'm not remembering the story perfectly, but we did some restorative justice work among them to try to talk about what was happening, what the conflict was between them and worked on building, not just talking about that incident, but I think we did some work around building their skills so that they could talk about beyond just when they meet with us, how they use these skills to address conflict. One of the positive things that came out of that was that one of the kids who was in role, one of the clients, her friend wanted to join the group so that she could learn this as well. So we saw that there were students outside of our particular client load who were interested in these skills. So I think that kind of gives you a range of the kinds of things that we're working on. I think one of the things we try to commit to is that we don't want a kind of cookie cutter approach to how we're working with the kids and recognizing that they have complex and diverse needs when it comes to this work. That's great. Again, that really helps to kind of give a fuller sense of what the program is capable of doing. Kathy, did you want to add in as well on this topic? Yeah, and Greg, I'll add, we really struggle or at least I did in terms of how do we present this whole juvenile justice diversion and restorative justice to the community because crime was one of the primary things that plagued our community, its ability to grow, its ability to be transformed. But how do you express this to the community without appearing to be light on crime? And we had to figure out what the balance was because we did not want to be so supportive of the juveniles or the person perpetrating the crime that we lost sight of the impact on the victims. And so one of the things that we continue to work to try to find balance around and strike a balance is how do we make sure that we continue to hold those who are perpetrating the crimes accountable for their actions? And so when we look at these opportunities, it's one of the reasons why we engage in an in-depth conversation with not just that individual but also with the family members because everyone has to be a player role in restoring that particular youth into a productive citizen in society. We also don't want to have cases where we create an anger the broader community because we have more victims than we have perpetrators of crime and their interests need to be protected as well. And so the whole model of restorative justice requires us to open up dialogue and have conversation with both the perpetrator of the criminal mischief and the victim so that people are comfortable in making decisions and knowing that this is an opportunity for growth. It lends itself to true transformation and hopefully it'll reduce recidivism and people are not going back to the same thing that they were going to earlier. The biggest challenge for us now is that we've got our arms pretty much around it in terms of juvenile, what's the next step? How do we begin to really expand this program? How do we take it to a larger audience or a larger age group? And how do we begin to continue to educate the community on what it means for restorative justice and involve our public safety officials? So we talk about in light of what has happened in George Ford's case and things like that and the social injustice and the unrest that we have in our city of Houston. It's important for us to think about how we move and expand programs like this to areas like Third War where we have similar challenges within our school systems and then begin to look at how we take this program that's serving you up until 16, age of 16. How do we grow that to 19 and then eventually 24 and things like that so that we can really have an impact on our community and reduce the criminal element that we have experiencing in Fifth Ward and incidents like you saw with the 16 year old are not happening. And just so that everybody understands there are a whole list of crimes and mischiefs that are not eligible for participation in this program. So anytime a kid is involved with any type of weaponry or anything like that, they're not able to participate in this program. So we wanna make sure people don't leave here with an understanding that we're being light on crime. We're not being light on crime. What we're doing is not being punitive for criminal mischief. Thank you for that clarification. We have just a couple of minutes left. So this question's been asked a couple of times. I don't live in Fifth Ward. How do I support your work? Well, that's easy. We have a number of ways. You can certainly support us financially. We have a website, fifthwardcrc.org that you can support our work. We're always looking for opportunities for to get the community involved and help us being an advocate. So you have volunteer opportunities where you can engage in being a mentor to one of our youth. You can be a volunteer in helping us serve the needs of our senior population. We do food distributions. In fact, today at three o'clock we'll be distributing about 5,600 meals to families. And so there's opportunity for you to get involved in volunteer services here with the community. There are ways in which you can support our work in terms of being an advocate for the work that we're doing. Helping tell the story. Come take a look, tour our community, see what's going on, understand the work that we do. So as people talk ill about undisturbed and impoverished community, you can help us tell a different story. That that's not what that means. That's not how that community is perceived. And it's certainly not how they view themselves. And then lastly, I'll say again, if there are ways in which you can be an advocate to help us gain the financial support to support our programs, feel free to give. There's a donate button very prominent on our website, www.fifthwardcrc.org, or you can simply mail us a check to 5th Ward Community Development Corporation. Feel free to reach out to me. I will put my email in the chat box. If you'd just like to learn more about the work that we're doing and would like to schedule a tour and see some of the projects that we're engaged in so that you can really understand what our strategies are to transform this community, eliminate the blight that you see, build the capacity of the individuals, attract new investments to our community, and really make this a wonderful and beautiful place for people to live, work, play, and worship. Thank you, Kathy. I've got, let me, I just, we're gonna go just a minute over, but I'd like both of you to maybe respond to this question to tie it back to the theme, transforming communities, transforming lives. In your mind, what does transforming a community in lives look like? I know this question. Well, I'll start. Transforming community to me means that we're better positioned to take advantage of all the amenities and the qualities of life that people are able to enjoy throughout the city of Houston that we're not looked upon as an impoverished community that has been long neglected. We have a community that is thriving. Economic opportunities are prominent. The affordable housing and housing are prominent and we eliminate the indicators of blight and poverty. So you don't drive through a community and see mountains of trash. You're not played with a community that is struggling to overcome criminal elements. You're not in a community that doesn't have access to quality food and groceries. You're not in a community where you can't invest your dollars back into the community because there's nowhere for you to shop. But this is really a holistic community that offers all the quality of life, public safety, quality education, quality living, quality lifestyle, good transit, good mobility throughout the community. And it's somewhere that you would be proud to call home. Today, depending on where I'm going in the neighborhood, I have to be strategic about the pathway that I take to that destination because not everything that you see in the community today is pretty or beautiful or sparkling or new. But we wanna be a community that is growing together and we're able to live together harmoniously, both with the newcomers as well as the indigenous community and our pioneers. That's what it means for me. It's more than just having a Starbucks being introduced to the community and people use Starbucks as an economic metric. It's more than the physical element and the retail. It's about the people that we serve. Super, thank you. Jerna, would you like to also have a moment to answer that question too? That was a very thoughtful answer from Kathy. But, and I think I see it also as we're looking for, we're looking for a community where the members feel that they have the tools and the space to have the neighborhood the way that they want it. And so we look forward to a time when, you know, if you're struggling with childcare, you can talk to your neighbor about it and together find a solution for that together. I think that our community often wants to find new ways to feel unified and work on problems together. And there's a real sense of pride in the neighborhood that we'd love to see be a part, be a kind of foundation for the community to also be able to see their own vision come forward in the neighborhood. Thank you. Kathy Payton, Jerna Sangani, Fifth Ward Community Development Corporation, Center for Urban Transformation. Thank you for being with us with this vital conversation so very much. Thank you all also for joining us either on Zoom or on Facebook Live. Please remember to join us for our final vital conversation of 2020, December 1st from noon until one. We will be with the Houston Education Research Collaborative out of Rice University talking about education. Thank you so much and have a wonderful day.