Welcome to iron sharpens iron. My name is D'wayne Drummond.
And I'm Leon Robinson.
What is your name? You look familiar.
My name is Accra, che Zuberi.
And when Accra, I'm up announcing it right. Accra, what is equitable the government to you? What does that mean to you?
equitable development means that the same money that's being spent downtown is the same money that's being spent uptown, the same money that's being spent and our communities in our neighborhoods, it means that people are looking at everyone equally. And they are distributing opportunities in the same way.
Okay. Yes, ma'am. Can you say that one more time?
No, not at all, it just came out and that's all you get!
Oh. I'm gonna hit rewind on that one. So why are you at this conference today?
Well, today, I'm here with the university city, RS league. And we are creating art pieces with participants to really think about how we work together as a community, how we are making connections and the things that we're doing, and thinking about ourselves and where our standings are within that. So we've kind of created a conceptual map, thinking about different organizations and how they're, they're the same, the areas they kind of live in together, and the ways that they're very, maybe separate. And today, we're asking people to kind of take that idea with the sun prints and create something that represents themselves and think about, you know, just who they are, and how, what how they want people to see them.
And you're here representing what organization, the University City Arts League,
we're a small nonprofit, that's for at 42nd and spruce tree, we have a whole bunch of stuff going on. We have free programming, we have an after school program, we have adult programming, and I am the partnership and Outreach Manager, which means I go to our schools or community sites, and we make sure that we have free programming for our West Philadelphia community. Okay.
Okay. A picture is worth 1000 words. What does that mean to you?
You know what this is? This is like a whole arguing point for me, actually, because it
was all love. It's all
worth 1000 words. And then the question is when did the word start having more weight than the image? And how can we combine those? How can we, how can we contrast these two things that are on two different levels? So I always asked, you know, what we see is such a different part of what we say, in our brains, it's to different parts of our brains as to different parts of our faces. Can we really combine them? I don't think we can. I don't think I can. I can't base the visuals off of your word of your word. So I can base the words on the visuals.
So you need action? Yes. Time for some action.
Yes. So your program in the community as a healing resource? Yeah. What are some of the success that you had in that can?
I think just thinking about working with the community and having true impact and thinking about how people have really kind of grown after that, there was a little while ago, there was a shooting in front of Mitchell school. This was a couple of years ago, this was during the pandemic. And we want to just go out and say hello to people. And we just asked people to draw something, draw something about what you want people to know about this school, what they want, what you want them to know about this neighborhood? And what do you want your community to hear from you? And so it was a really big, large response. You know, some people were like, you know, I don't feel safe, and I want to feel safe. And some people were like, I want to support each other. And some people were like, Yo, I love my I love my school. I love my neighborhood. You know, this is bad things happen. But I still love it. And I and I felt like that was a moment where the community was able to write these things down and draw these things out and be able to see it together and kind of experience a piece together.
Yeah, I'm loving this conversation. But no everything I come to what end? We do appreciate you for participating and sitting down at the table. Talk with myself. And Leon on iron sharpens iron. Thank you.