Podcasts about pleasant hope baptist church

In this episode, Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, founder of the Black Food Security Network, describes how experimenting with one small church garden led to connections with other churches and then with farmers and eventually to a transformed ecosystem—in this case, a food shed. This inspiring refugia story weaves through health justice, food security, and climate resilience. Even more, this story celebrates the power of relationships among thousands of gifted, passionate, faithful people. Many thanks to Heber Brown for graciously welcoming us to a church garden at one of the network churches in Baltimore, where we enjoyed chatting together in the greenhouse. To learn more about Rev. Dr. Heber Brown as a pastor, writer, and speaker, take a look at his website. You can also explore the wider work of the Black Church Food Security Network here.Rev. Dr. Heber BrownTRANSCRIPTHeber Brown Our garden has really become like a front door. It's a demonstration site. You're not going to feed an entire city or community with a church garden, but it becomes an activation space for your congregation members and the neighbors to come and reap the personal and individual benefits of just being closer to soil, but then also to practice what collectivism looks like in a garden space. It's a very controlled environment for a laboratory for, “how do we do this together?” And those learnings can roll over into other places as well.Debra Rienstra Welcome to the Refugia Podcast. I'm your host, Professor Debra Rienstra. Refugia are habitats in nature where life endures in times of crisis. We're exploring the concept of refugia as a metaphor, discovering how people of faith can become people of refugia: nurturing life-giving spaces in the earth, in our human cultural systems, and in our spiritual communities, even in this time of severe disturbance. This season, we're paying special attention to churches and Christian communities who have figured out how to address the climate crisis together as an essential aspect of their discipleship. Today, I'm talking with Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, founder of the Black Food Security Network. Beginning with a small congregation, a 1500-square foot garden, and a divine calling, the Black Food Security Network now connects 250 Black churches and 100 Black farmers in the Mid-Atlantic states and beyond. Reverend Brown's story weaves through issues of health justice, food security and climate resilience. And I love how beautifully this story illustrates the power of refugia. One small experiment started to form connections, then spread and eventually transformed a whole ecosystem—in this case, a food shed. I think you'll find Heber's brilliance and humility and joy inspiring, but he would be the first to say that this network is built on relationships among thousands of gifted, passionate, faithful people. People finding and exercising their beauty and agency is the best part of this story. Let's get to it.Debra Rienstra Heber, it's so great to talk to you today. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.Heber Brown Thank you for the opportunity.Debra Rienstra You've told your origin story about the Black Food Security Network a million times. Will you tell it again for our listeners?Heber Brown Absolutely. So, somewhere about five years in to pastoring a beautiful congregation here in Baltimore City called the Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, I began to notice a pattern of members of our congregation who were being hospitalized, and in response to that, like any well trained pastor will do, we do the things that seminary and other places have taught us: to show up by the bedside, give prayer, give encouragement, don't stay too long, and get to the next member who needs that kind of pastoral care. And so I was doing what my family—which was a family full of pastors—and seminary taught me to do: to go and visit. And during those visits, and while extending that encouragement, those prayers and the like, I also got the opportunity to do deep listening and learn some things about the people in my church, that stuff that doesn't necessarily and normally come out on a Sunday morning during all of the activity of a service. And one of the things that would come up, that started to come up in the confidentiality of those sacred circles, was the ways that diet and food was a part of the picture that was leading to the dis-ease and suffering, physical suffering, of those in the church. And I began to hear that over and over again. So I'm going, I'm praying, I'm giving scripture, I'm listening, shaking hands and moving on, and listening and hearing about food being in the picture. Alright, next visit. I'm going, I'm praying, I'm giving scripture, I'm giving encouragement, I'm listening, shaking hands, move to the next person. Food comes up again. It came up so much that eventually I got tired of just hearing about this challenge and walking away. I got unsettled by listening to people who I love and share life with, share with me their challenges, and as much as I believe and know that prayer is powerful, I wondered if there was ways that I could pray in a different way, pray through action.And so I got the idea—well, God gave vision. Well, no, God didn't give the first vision. The first one was just my idea. And my idea was to partner with the local market that was really right across the main intersection from our church. And I wanted some type of pathway so that food from that market could get to our church, get to our members, and it could improve their quality of life and address the health challenges in our church. But I still remember the day I went over to that market. And when I went to that market, and I looked at the prices of the produce, and then I also took note of the—as the young folks would say—the vibe of the space. It failed the vibe test, and it failed the price tag test. I saw barriers that would prevent, or at least slow this idea around nutrient-rich produce coming from that market right across the main intersection to our church within walking distance. And I got frustrated by that. I was frustrated because what we needed was right within reach. It was right at our fingertips, literally, but those barriers there would have made it very difficult for us to acquire and obtain the food that was there. Over the years, and like you said, I've told this story many times, and it's a living story, and so even my reflections on parts of it illuminates different ways, even at this stage of my journey with this. But I thought about like, what stopped me from talking to the market manager anyway? So I made the decision on that day just to walk out and say, “No, I'm not going to pursue partnership.” As I reflect on it, I interrogate myself, like, “Why didn't you at least have a conversation? Because who knows, something could have come out of the conversation, and maybe they would have given you the food for free or the discounted rate...” et cetera, et cetera. And when I sat with that and I thought about it more, I think there was something within me that didn't want free food. I thought, and I still think to this day, in a different, deeper, more conscious way, more aware way—but back then it was just something within where I thought that free food would have been too expensive. And not in a dollars and cents kind of way. That would have cost us too much with respect to our dignity, our sense of somebody-ness, and I did not want to lead my congregation in kind of genuflecting to the benevolence and charity, sense of charity, of the “haves” of the neighborhood. I did not want to reinforce kind of an inferiority complex that comes with staying in a posture of subservience to what you can recognize to be unjust and racist systems that keep food away from people when I believe that food is a God-given right. Healthy, nutritious food is a God-given right. I didn't want to lead my congregation into that, and I didn't want to reinforce even a sense of superiority, which is an equally devastating and damaging thing to the human soul, to think that these poor Black people are coming across the street to get food, and we are in the position to help those poor, at risk, needy people. Whether inferiority or superiority, both, I believe, are corrosive to the human soul. I did not have the articulation of that then, but I had enough in me that was living in that space that stopped me from leading our congregation into a partnership there. And so I left out, I walked back to the church. While I'm walking back to the church, near the front door of our church, there's a plot of land, and that land I'd walked past a thousand times before that day, but on that day, with divine discontent bubbling up inside of me, that's when God gave a vision. God vetoed my idea, gave a real vision, and that vision was rooted in us growing our own food in the front yard of our congregation. And so I go inside the church and I announce this vision to members of the church, and I remember saying to them, “Hey, y'all. God gave me a vision!” And I saw eyes rolling, like, “Oh, here he goes again.” I was at that time, I was in my early thirties. I started pastoring at 28 years old. And, you know, I came in at 28, I had all the ideas in the world. We was gonna fix everything by the weekend. And this patient congregation gave me room to work out all of that energy around changing everything immediately. So they were used to hearing this kind of stuff from me before, and so the rolling of the eyes when I said, “Hey, y'all, let's start a garden,” was quite expected, but I'm grateful for a remnant of the folks who said, “This one actually might work. Let's stick with him. Let's go with him on this.” And that remnant and I, we got together, we started growing food in the front yard of our church, and long story short, that garden helped to transform the spiritual and the physical material conditions of our congregation. 1500-square feet. We started growing 1200 pounds of produce every season: tomatoes, broccoli, kale, corn, even watermelon some years. It just transformed our ministry and even attracted people to the ministry who were not Christian, who'd never come to the church. Some people flew in from out of town. Like this little congregation of like 125 people with the 1500-square foot garden became, for some people, a destination, like church. And I was like, “What is this? We don't have bells and whistles and smoke machines and everything else. We're just a regular church on the side of the road with a little piece of land. And this garden is becoming a calling card for our ministry.”Debra Rienstra It was such a wild thing to do, and yet—it's just a garden.Heber Brown It's just a garden!Debra Rienstra So, I want to come back to, now, you know, long fifteen years later, you have this network of 250 Black churches and a hundred Black farmers, mostly up and down the East Coast, but all over the US. And we'll get to that exciting development in a bit, but I want to go back to those early days, because we're really interested in how congregations get excited. So could you talk about Maxine Nicholas?Heber Brown Yes, yes. Maxine Nicholas was the president of the sanctuary choir when I first got to Pleasant Hope. And she also was the one who organized a lot of exciting trips for seniors. They went shopping and went to plays. And you know, that was my introduction to her, when I first got to the church. And really, that was the extent, pretty much, of what I knew about her, how she showed up in the ministry. And when I shared this vision from God for us to start a garden, she was one of the members who said, “I'm gonna help.” And it was critical that she...what she did was critical to even us having this conversation today because she had the agricultural and farming know-how. I didn't.Debra Rienstra You didn't know anything!Heber Brown No, I didn't know anything! I was, I mean, born in Baltimore City. Yes, I spent summers down the country. As we say in my family and community, we say, you know, “We're going down the country for the summer.” And so, when school let out, my parents took us down to our relatives' home in rural Virginia, and my big mama, mama Geraldine, we would stay with her. She had land. She grew, you know, all the things. I wasn't paying attention to any of that when I was a young child, but some seeds were planted. But it really wasn't what I was focused on then, so I didn't know much about growing or, you know, agrarian kind of rhythms of being at all. Sister Maxine, though, grew up with multiple brothers and sisters on a farm in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. She moved to Baltimore from North Carolina around the fifties, joined Pleasant Hope shortly after that, and had really grown with the church over the years. Though she left the farm, the farm never left her. It was still in her. I didn't know it was there. My seminary-trained pastoral eyes were socialized to lock in on the gifts that people had that could be in service to our Sunday service, the production of the corporate worship experience. So if you can sing, I was trained to say, “Hey, I think you should join the choir.” If you could play an instrument, get on the band. Could you stand for two hours or so? The ushers' ministry. But I had some major blind spots about the gifts of God in people that were detached— seemingly detached and devoid—from what corporate worship and liturgy could look like in our space. Sister Maxine stepping forward helped to challenge my blind spots. She's not just a sanctuary choir president. She's not just the planner of trips for the seniors. She was a farmer.Debra Rienstra Isn't that remarkable? I think so many churches are full of such talent and passion, and sort of untilled passion, right? That, as you say, we're so focused on church programs, whatever those might be, for a church, that we often don't realize what people are capable of in the service of the name of Jesus, right? So, now you say, when you go to work with a potential partner church, you look for the Sister Maxine.Heber Brown That's right, she's a profile.Debra Rienstra How do you find the Sister Maxines? Everybody wants them.Heber Brown Yeah. Many times, well, one thing I know for sure, I'll say. Sister Maxine is rarely the pastor. It's not the pastor or anybody with the big highfalutin titles up front on the website, on the camera. It's rare. I'll just say that: it's rare, in my experience, that that's your Sister Maxine. They do play a crucial role in the furthering and establishment of this kind of ministry, “innovation,” innovation in air quotes. But Sister Maxine is, in many times, in my experience, that's the one who is recognized as getting things done in the church. And many times, they're almost allergic to attention. They're the ones who are running from the microphone or the spotlight, but they're the ones who prefer, “I'm in the background.” No, they often say things like that: “No, no, that's not for me. I just want to get stuff done. You know, I don't know what to say.” Oftentimes they talk like that. But everybody in the church knows if it's going to get done, this one's going to do it. Or, you know, maybe it's a group, they're going to get it done. And so that's one of the things that I've just trained myself to look for, like, who really is over—you know, when I shake the hand of a pastor, many times I'm looking over their shoulder. Who is behind you? Because what I know is, “Pastor, and no disrespect, but you're not the one who's gonna be with me in the garden on the land. You'll be getting an introduction to the land most times, just like I will be when I first arrive.” Who's the person who already knows it? And then too, I think you find the Sister Maxine by listening. Hearing Sister Maxine's story, and really listening to the fact that she grew up on a farm in North Carolina. And watching her face light up when she talked about growing up, she talked about her parents, and she's since passed away, but I still remember so many conversations we've had. And she would tell me about how her parents would send all the children out to work the farm before they went to school. And she would chuckle and say, “My daddy sent the boys and the girls out there to work that land,” to kind of challenge notions of this is not a woman or a girl's work. Her parents like, “Nope. Everybody get outside.” And she chuckled and laughed and smiled sharing so many of those kinds of memories. And I think you can find the Sister Maxines oftentimes by doing deep listening. And sometimes it's not a Sister Maxine that's really doing the farming thing, but it might be a Sister Maxine who's into herbalism, or, you know, or who has stories about their elders or parents who could walk in the field and put stuff together and tend to a rash or a wound or a bruise. These things might not show up on a resume, but they're in the lines of the stories of the people who are right under our nose. And so maybe I'll just offer it finally, that maybe it's, you know, you find Sister Maxine by doing deep listening.Debra Rienstra Yeah, yeah. Okay, so now you've got a church garden. And it's transforming the congregation. How? What's changing?Heber Brown Well, one of the things that transformed with the congregation was just like the pride. Members of the church was taking pride in what we were doing. You know, we're not a megachurch in the city. Never have been a megachurch. In fact, our church blended in so much in the background of the neighborhood that when I first got to the church, the trustees—really one of the trustees in particular—was really adamant about us needing to build a steeple on top of our building, because the steeple would then indicate to the community that this is a church. And thank God we never got a steeple, but we didn't need it. The garden became the steeple, and the members started taking pictures of the produce they were receiving from the church garden and posting it on their Facebook page, and putting it, you know, sharing it with their families. They began sharing recipes in the congregation related to what we were growing in our garden, and I saw people start coming to our church for worship and programming that were coming because we had a garden.Debra Rienstra Lured by the cabbages.Heber Brown That's it! Not these sermons I worked so hard to put together.Debra RienstraNope. It was the cabbages.Heber Brown I'm trying to say, “You know, this word in the Greek means...” and all this stuff. And I'm trying to, “Hey, y'all, I have a degree!” And I'm trying to show you I have a degree. Like, “no, we're here for cabbage.”Debra Rienstra You just need carrots. So, from there, we become this big network, and there's a lot going on between those steps. So you've got the garden. You start having markets after services on Sunday. What happens next to begin creating this gigantic network?Heber Brown Yeah, so this network, I mean, this activity with our garden continues to grow and mature. We're testing. We develop an appetite for experimentation and a curiosity, and nurturing kind of a congregational curiosity about what could happen, like, what if? What if, what if? And in that kind of context, my “what ifs” also grew to: “What if other churches could do this too?” And what if we could work together to systematize our efforts? And so I was very clear that I was not interested in a scaling of this experience in such a way that would create additional siloed congregational ministries. Like, that's not going to fix and help us get to the root of why we are hungry or sick in the first place. If we're going to, you know, really get at the root of, or some of the root, of the challenges, we have to create an ecosystem. We have to have churches who do it, but also work with other churches who are doing it. And we compliment—like a choir. You got your sopranos, your altos, your tenors, and you got some churches that will do this part well, other churches will do that part well, but if you sing together, you can create beautiful music together. And so that idea started rolling around in my head, and I started talking to farmers and public health professionals here in the city, and other folks, food justice folks in the city, and just kind of getting their reactions to this idea. I had never seen or heard of anything like that before at that time. And so I was just trying to get a read from others who I respected, to kind of give some insight. And in the course of that, this city, Baltimore, experienced an uprising related to the death of Freddie Gray.Debra Rienstra Yeah, this is so interesting, how this became a catalyst. Describe that.Heber Brown It kicked at the uprising and the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore City police officers. And for those who are not familiar, Baltimore City, like many communities around this country, sadly, had experienced a long line of Black people who've been killed by Baltimore City police officers with no consequences to those officers or to government officials who supported them. So Freddie Gray in 2015 was the latest name in a long list of names and generations of Black families who've endured the brutality and the horror of those kinds of experiences. When the city goes up in demonstrations and protests against police brutality against Black people in Baltimore, one of the things that happened was those communities nearest the epicenter of the demonstrations and protests that were already what we call “food apartheid zones” and struggling with food access and food security, those neighborhoods...things intensified because the corner stores that they were dependent on also closed during that time. Public transportation did not send buses through the neighborhood, so they were stranded there. Even the public school system closed for a few days, and 80,000 students in Baltimore City, many of them who were dependent on free breakfast and free lunch from school, had to figure out something else. So with all of that support not there anymore, members of the community started to call our church, because by 2015 we were known kind of like as the “food and garden” church. They got food. It was our calling card. So they called the church office. They said, “Hey, Reverend Brown, Pastor Brown, we need food.” I called our garden team. We harvested from our garden. We called farmers that we knew. Other people just made donation to us. We transformed our church into like this food depot. We started processing donations, harvesting, loaded it up on our church van, and I was driving our church van around the city of Baltimore in the midst of the uprising, getting food to people and into the communities that called us to come.Debra Rienstra Wow, you've done a lot of driving vans around, it seems like. We'll get back to that. But it's just so fascinating that that moment catalyzed, it sounds like, an awareness of food insecurity that made it really real for people who are maybe aware of it, but now it's reached a sort of acute moment. And I love the way that you talked in an interview with Reverend Jen Bailey about how Black churches are already a network. And so that moment, it sounds like, activated that network. And in fact, the way that you talked about the legacy of Black churches having a spiritual vocation connected to social change for a long time, and so many people used to doing things with hardly any obvious resources, like not money or power, and depending on God to make a way out of no way. And it sounds like you just leveraged all of those incredible assets born of years of struggle and said, “We can do this. We can move from being consumers at the whim of systems like this to producers that create food security.” So how did you, you know, sort of leverage those assets and help people understand that they had them?Heber Brown Yeah, I think that what was helpful to me early on was to almost look at the church like, assume the posture of a social scientist. And to almost go up on the balcony of the church and look down on it. Like, just back up and try as best as possible to clean your lenses so you can just look at it. What does it do? What does it care about? What does it prioritize? Like, just really take notes. And that's a part of what I was drawn to do early on, was just: what does Pleasant Hope— and not just Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, but all the churches that we're in relationship with, and all the churches that I knew, being a preacher's kid, my dad still pastors in this city. And so I've grown up in the church, the Black churches of Baltimore and beyond, and so just stepping back and watching to see what it does gave me some curiosities, some clues, some tips and hints, like: wow, if it already does that, then if I can just run downfield a little bit and get in the path of where I know it's about to come, then potentially it could make what it's going to do anyway even more impactful. So an example is: pastors' anniversary or church anniversary services always have food in the picture. You're going to eat. And you don't have to be a Black—that's any church. You're going to eat throughout the year. It's a part of the practice of the faith. If you can run downfield and get in front of where you know the congregation is about to come—because church anniversary is the same Sunday every single year. And you can reverse-engineer like, at what point will the church need to buy food? At what point do they need to decide where they get the food from? At what point is the budget decided for the following year so they see how much money they're going to spend on food. If you can get in and kind of almost double dutch into those critical moments, like jump rope, and be like, “If I make this suggestion at this particular moment, then it's going to introduce something into the conversation with the trustees that might increase the amount of money spent on food that we then could use to connect with this particular farmer, which we then can use to connect with the kitchen ministry, who they can then use to create the menu for the meal.” And before you know it, you have a plate with local food right in front of everybody's faces at the church.Debra Rienstra You have said that after the pulpit, the second holiest place in the building is the kitchen.Heber Brown It really...honest to God, is the second, and it's a close second too, because everybody can't walk into that kitchen. And if you can strategize and think about how to leverage the stuff, the assets, but also your knowledge of how this entity operates, it could really be transformative.Here we are, chatting at the greenhouse. Debra RienstraHi, it's me, Debra. If you are enjoying this podcast episode, go ahead and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. If you have a minute, leave a review. Good reviews help more listeners discover this podcast. To keep up with all the Refugia news, I invite you to subscribe to the Refugia newsletter on Substack. This is my fortnightly newsletter for people of faith who care about the climate crisis and want to go deeper. Every two weeks, I feature climate news, deeper dives, refugia sightings and much more. Join our community at refugianewsletter.substack.com. For even more goodies, including transcripts and show notes for this podcast, check out my website at debrarienstra.com. D-E-B-R-A-R-I-E-N-S-T-R-A dot com. Thanks so much for listening. We're glad you're part of this community. And now back to the interview.Debra Rienstra You've really asked people to go back in the system to origins, like the origins of the soil, and think about the provenance of everything they eat—in the church, but also at home and and say, “Well, why can't we help Black farmers find markets for their food by creating this whole network?” Talk a little bit about what the network actually looks like. So you've got farmers, they create produce, and then you go with a truck, and sounds like it's all you! You go with a truck, bring their stuff to a church. So explain how that all works now in the larger network.Heber Brown Yeah, so now, after getting our official start ten years ago, so I started 15 years ago on this journey. The network itself, this is the tenth year. 2025 is our ten year anniversary. And now what our network looks like is helping member churches to start gardens on land that they own. We are very clear about starting on garden-owned—sorry, on church-owned land, just because in this kind of context, gentrification, eminent domain, that's real. You got Black communities who don't know if their land or property will be taken because a highway needs to be built here. And we don't, we've not tapped into, or don't have the sense of agency, collective agency, yet to push back against those kinds of things. And so church-owned land really is important because it creates some political buffers against systems that would be hesitant to snatch church land. Just politically, it's not a good idea. So knowing that about the political environment, that they don't want to mess with—they want votes from congregations. They don't want to, you know—congregations coming after them is like, “Oh, okay, well, let's grow food on the land that is less likely to be taken by politicians or developers.” And so we help churches to start gardens or agricultural projects. It might be composting, it might be rain barrels. It might be, you know, different types of things to either establish it or to expand it. And our gardens really become like a front door. It's a demonstration site. You're not going to feed an entire city or community with a church garden, but it becomes an activation space for your congregation members and the neighbors to come and reap the personal, individual benefits of just being closer to soil, but then also to practice what collectivism looks like in a garden space. It's a very controlled environment for a laboratory, for, “How do we do this together?” And those learners can roll over into other places as well.Heber Brown So gardens is one thing. Markets, Black farmers markets. We do them at churches. We like to do it on Sundays right after worship, when people are hungry anyway. We like putting those farmers right there before people get to their car. We want to make it feel like a family reunion, a cookout in your backyard, a holiday gathering. There's a DJ, we're line dancing, there's prepared food, and there's produce, games for the children. So kind of an event experience. It's really fun. It's an experience, you know? And that's what we really try to do with that program. It's not just transactional, “Here is your squash.” It's: let's give people a nourishing experience that even goes beyond the food that the farmers are bringing. And then we do Black farm tours, where we're driving people around to kind of literally get your feet on soil. And it's become an increasing request of groups and churches that many times they don't even know there are farmers right under their nose, like right around the corner. We're so disconnected from our local food environments. So Black farm tours are helpful. And then what you reference, with respect to driving food around—it's almost like, I've called it the BCSA program. It's kind of a play off of “CSA: Community Supported Agriculture,” like the subscription box program. Black Church Supported Agriculture looks like us helping farmers with the logistics of getting bulk items from their farm to congregations. And yes, over these past ten years, I have done a lot of the driving of refrigerated trucks and box trucks. It's been my joy, though, to do that. It's been a sanctuary for me, even while pastoring. I mean, so I'm preaching on Sunday, and then I'm delivering sweet potatoes on Monday, and like, behind the wheel of a big box truck. I love that kind of stuff, just because it helps me be feel free to explore my call beyond just more conventional, classic understandings of what it means to be a clergy person. So it's been great for me to experience that, but ten years in, it is increasingly important that I get from behind the wheel and pass the keys to somebody else, so that we might really systematize it, because if it stays with me, this network won't go far at all.Debra Rienstra Yeah. Okay, so I want to read a quote from you, and then I want to ask a question about that very thing. So you put it before that your vision is to move people from being—and this is my summary—your vision is to move people from being disadvantaged consumers to confident producers, and that means, and here's your quote, “co-creating alternative micro food systems, not just because of the racism and the oppression in the current food system, but also because of the impending challenges around climate change, the growing concerns around geopolitics, and, at the time you said this, Covid-19, which showed us how fragile our current food system is.” So the Black Food Security Network is wrapped up in health justice, food security, climate resilience. Do you have ways of communicating all of that to people? Are the folks who are buying the carrots and the kale aware of all that? And if so, how are they aware of all that?Heber Brown Yeah, many. I mean, this food is a very political thing, and so it sets a good table for conversations around all of that and so much more that you just lifted up. And so there are many one-on-one conversations or small group conversations or online, you know, conversations that happen where people do recognize the implications of what we're doing. Yeah, that goes far beyond your next meal. And so that is helpful. I am definitely interested, though, in how we do more in the way of communicating that. I would love to see, for example, Sunday school curricula created that kind of takes—again, if I'm looking at how churches operate today, Christian education programs are one of the things that have been on the church budget and in the air of the programming of the church for a very long time, and I suspect it's going to stay there. How do we inject it with Sunday school curriculum that fits? So climate change, racism, social justice, food justice. How do we have Sunday school curriculum, vacation Bible school and summer camp experiences that speak to that? How might we reimagine our Sunday live streams? Is anybody really watching the full one hour of your live stream on Sunday? Could it be that we could produce programming that perhaps pops in on a piece of the sermon, but then pops out to another segment that touches on these different things, so that people really have a dynamic experience watching? Maybe there's one stream of the Sunday service that stays just on the whole service, but maybe there's an alternative link for those who may be closer to the outer edges or different edges of the ministry, who's really not interested in hearing the church announcements and when the tea is gonna be and when the that...Maybe, if we thought about how to create material, curriculum, streamed experiences that are a little bit more dynamic, it would also create a runway for the sharing of those. And last thing I'll say is: what about our small group and discipleship programs at our churches? And so many congregations have book clubs and small group studies that have done wonderful things over the years. I wonder if there could be, in addition to those kinds of groups, where there's an action component. So we don't read just for the sake of reading. We read to reflect. We read to be activated to go do, and then we come back and reflect, and then we read the next thing, and then we go do, and then come back—a praxis. Could our small group and discipleship programs embrace a different kind of praxis, or for how they are experimenting with the practice of this faith in this day and time?Debra Rienstra “Okay, let's pause and go out to weed a little bit.” There you go. So one of the things I love about your story is the way you began with this—we could call it a “low-resource refugia space,” one congregation. And I'm curious how things feel different now. So ideally, refugia in nature persist and grow, connect and spread through corridors, and eventually you have this renewed ecosystem. So the Black Food Security Network is essentially a successful refugia network. You've created an ecosystem. What feels different now for you and for the whole network? You've been at this a long time.Heber Brown What feels different now? So I was thinking this week about the rhythm of nature, and in my personal embrace of this vocation, I try to mirror and mimic nature in a number of ways. And so like during winter, you won't hear me a lot. I'm doing what nature does, and the energy is in the roots and not in the fruit. And I don't take a lot of interviews. I don't travel a lot. I get real still and real quiet. And during the spring, I start poking my head out a little bit more. During the summer, it's go time. During the fall, it's harvest time. So I look at that personally, but now I'm also beginning to look at that organizationally, and with respect to this network. And I'm saying, I'm intentionally saying “organization” and “network” separate. With respect to the organization, I am clearer today, as we go through the life cycles of what nature does, that I now have the opportunity, and the responsibility even, to till the soil again in the organization. And a part of that tilling of the soil, turning the soil over, means me renegotiating my position in the organization. That out of necessity, I leaned into a role that, for the past decade, I've been organizing and bringing things together, but I recognize, and I always have, my highest and best use is really not in the management of the day to day operations of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. My skills are not as sharp in all of the ways that would continue to cultivate that kind of consistency and efficiencies in an organization. And so currently, I am working as hard as I can and as fast as I can to get out of positions that I've been holding, particularly with the executive director. This is not going to be overnight, but I'm articulating it and saying it out loud to help remind myself, remind my team, and also make it more real. I'm speaking it into—I'm manifesting it through my words that if the organization is to continue to grow and flourish. I can't stay in this role.Debra Rienstra Okay, you want to go back to the soil.Heber Brown Right here. For those who are listening, we're sitting at one of our member gardens, and this is where I belong. I still, I will obviously still have a role with the organization. I'm not leaving. But maybe there's a different configuration. Maybe I become more of a John the Baptist. I'm just going out, and I go out and I'm preaching in the wilderness about, and painting the picture, about the necessity of this stuff. And then after that, after I paint the picture, get folks excited, show them that it's real, help them in the early stages—I love talking about the early stages and my failures and all that kind of stuff. And then pass the baton. Once these congregations are activated and energized and ready, at some point very soon, passing the baton to those in the organization who will continue to work with them to mentor them and grow them. And then with the network as a whole, you know, going around and being like a people pollinator—that's what I really feel called to. I want to grow food, and I want to go around and people-pollinate. I want to introduce people. I want to connect folks. I think that's part of my highest use in the network, which will demand a renegotiation of how I show up in the organization.Debra Rienstra Yeah, yeah, because you've talked all along about how important relationships are in making this. It's always person to person, always about relationships. Yeah. So is the network right now fundamentally built on congregations, still? Like it's a network of congregations plus farmers.Heber Brown It's a network of congregations and it's a network of relationships with farmers. We really, over the years, one of the developments that we had over the past maybe year and a half or so, was that really the sweet spot of what we do well is work with Black congregations. That's what we do well. Black farmers, because of a century of discrimination and so many other systemic injustices against them—they need a high level of advocacy, technical assistance, support, financing, et cetera. And we really came to a place about a year and a half ago where we realized...before that point we were trying to help the churches and the farmers. I was like, no, it's enough getting a church to change one small thing, seemingly small thing. How are you going to do churches and farmers? And so a clarity around—what is the sweet spot of what we do well, and where's the thing that others are not doing as much? There are a lot of organizations now, thankfully, that give a lot of support to farmers in general and Black farmers in particular. We don't need to try to be the experts there. We can just be again in a relationship with those organizations that do that with the farmers, and just make sure that we're dancing well together in how, “If y'all help the farmers and we help the churches, now we bring together what our advocacy, organizing and programming can look like.” And so right now, it's congregations, and we're trying to increase our ability to serve our congregations well.Debra Rienstra Yeah, so that's refugia-like, too, in the sense that refugia are very particular to a species in a place, and when they spread and grow through corridors, the biodiversity increases. So you know, you're building, as you say, this ecosystem, and it naturally, you would have biodiversity increase, but there's still going to be specialized pockets. Okay, lightning round. and then a final question. Lightning round, what's your favorite veg?Heber BrownFirst thing that came up...oh man, that's a lot. Nevermind. I'm gonna go with kale. Stay with my kale.Debra RienstraKale! Okay. I'd have to say carrots for me, because they're so versatile. And they last a long time.Heber Brown I've had carrot hot dogs. I'm vegetarian, and so I've had carrot hot dogs. They are really good.Debra Rienstra Okay, so I wanted to ask you about being a vegetarian, because this is essentially the South, right? It is so meat centric. I'm vegetarian too. It is hard to find something to eat. How do you do that?Heber Brown Yes, yes.Debra RienstraWhat do you do about like, pork barbecue?Heber BrownYeah. So a lot of things—social functions and fellowships—I know I have to eat beforehand or bring my own food. And so that's what I do to kind of get through. It's like, I'm not going for the plate, I'm going for the people.Debra Rienstra Macaroni and cheese works.Heber Brown Mac and cheese still works a lot. So the sides—all the sides, I'm good on the sides.Debra Rienstra Yeah, me too. Most impressive farm skill?Heber Brown Attracting labor to help.Debra Rienstra That's a huge skill!Heber Brown Huge, huge huge. I'm still learning. I went to beginner farm school, and I'm still learning the farm stuff, and I'm excited about it, but I'm grateful that God has gifted me to get folks to show up to him.Debra Rienstra Unappreciated farm skill. Okay. Elderberry syrup for communion. Talk about that.Heber Brown When we all get to heaven, I think Jesus will be serving elderberry syrup. It's like, no, I'm playing. Yeah, that was one of those experimentations.Debra Rienstra Did it work?Heber Brown It worked! And then the next week, Covid hit and shut down. So we were just beginning. I partnered with an herbalist who was gonna—and she also was a baker, so she was gonna be doing fresh bread and elderberry syrup every communion Sunday. The day we did this, she was in the church kitchen, baking the bread, and the smell of bread is just going through the congregation. And I knew she had the elderberry syrup in this big, beautiful container. And so it was such a beautiful moment. And I was so jazzed about...I was jazzed about that, not only because the bread was good and like children were coming back for seconds for communion bread, but also because I felt like with the elderberry syrup and the bread, that it was in deeper alignment with our ethics and what we preached.Debra Rienstra It's better sacramentalism. Because, you know, as you've been saying all along, it's not consuming an element of unknown provenance. It's producing. It's the fruit of human labor, right? It's the work of God, the gift of the earth, and the fruit of human labor. And it's labor you've had your actual hands on. So it's a lot to ask for churches to do this, but it's, you know, one of these small experiments with radical intent that could be really, really cool.Heber Brown And I think in a time when congregations, well, I'm thinking about trustee ministries, those who are over financial resources of the church, right? So one of the ways that it worked at my church was, I was like, “Listen, I noticed in our financial reports here that we're spending X amount on buying these boxes of these pre-made communion cups. What if we could take some of the money we're already spending and divert it to an herbalist who could grow, who could make us the syrup that we need, and what if we can do it that way?” And so I had to speak to that particular ministry, not from the perspective of like the earth and the soil, but in a language that I thought that they could better appreciate was dollars and cents.Debra Rienstra Yeah, keeping those dollars local. Oh my gosh. Okay. Final question: what is your vision for the Church, capital C, in the next 50 years?Heber Brown That we'd be baptized back into the soil. That Scripture speaks about the ways in which we are brought from the soil, and God breathed into Adam, the breath of life. And I think there's more of the breath of life now back in the soil, if we would but release ourselves into the compost of what is happening socially now that we would be in a position where new life, resurrection, would be experienced in a different kind of way through our ministry.Debra Rienstra Heber, thank you so much. This was such a pleasure. Thank you for your time today. Thank you.Debra Rienstra Thanks for joining us for show notes and full transcripts, please visit debrarienstra.com and click on the Refugia Podcast tab. This season of the Refugia Podcast is produced with generous funding from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Colin Hoogerwerf is our awesome audio producer. Thanks to Ron Rienstra for content consultation as well as technical and travel support. Till next time, be well. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit refugianewsletter.substack.com

Houses of faith are becoming powerful agents and actors of improving food security in their own community in ways that go beyond charity. It is organizing the hungry and not just feeding the needy.The largest institution in the Black community, the Black church, replete with offerings to fill multiple needs., from the physical grounds, to classrooms, kitchens, to church vans and buses, to the land, and the people. Pastor Heber Brown III,  launched the Black Church Food Security Network (BCFSN) in 2014 with a garden at his own church, Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore,  now they have 250 in the network. BCFN was founded  after he noticed a pattern of hospitalizations related to diet and other issues and was determined to change health outcomes for his congregation. What began with encouraging churches to start gardens on church premises, has since grown to include encouraging congregations to make institutional purchases from Black farmers, host farmers markets, preferably on Sundays after church, and arrange tours of Black farms. www.BCFSN.org      

Tune in for Part 2 of our stimulating discussion with Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III, Senior Minister of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, and founder of the Black Church Food Security Network.  We unpacked quite a bit during this episode, including:  - Understanding God stands on the side of the oppressed (through the lens Black liberation theology) and thinkers like  Rev. Dr. James Cone (The Cross and The Lynching Tree) and Howard Thurman, author of Jesus and the Disinherited (among other books).  - The essential work of believers in building bridges across generations and empowering ourselves. Check out his work with the Black Church Food Security Network, a partnership between black churches and black farmers around the country.  - Being unapologetic about the beauty of blackness, and seeing this way of moving through the world as linked deeply to a loving and affirming God.  - Why we must build beloved community (in the tradition of the Maroons, formerly enslaved people who set up their own communities), and understanding the unique finger print of God on not only individuals, but church bodies (each has a different calling).  Announcements: Thank you to all who have donated to the podcast! If you're able to send a donation to further our work (on Venmo). We are working on a Patreon page.  Our podcast store is opening soon. In the meantime, get your The Revolution Needs our Joy, Too mug now!  Stay in community with us on IG and Twitter.  Stay tuned for our NEW Instagram Live pop-up series, "Continually Awakening," starting in Feb. 2021, where we make space to keep the conversation going around social justice and faith in between PWF podcast episodes.  Credits: HUGE thank you to my husband, Kes, our podcast editor!  He is also a talented creative entrepreneur, videographer and photographer! You can work with him and explore his work here. 

Jesus came to extend radical love and compassion to "the least of these," (Matthew 25:40) - people pushed to the margins of society. We chat with Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III, Senior Minister at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, social entrepreneur and activist,  about how he centers social justice in his ministry, the significance of the black church - its origins, roots, pioneering thinkers and theologians - and why we must come to understand Jesus as a community organizer, who came to "preach the good news to the poor." (Luke 4:18)  This is part 1 of our discussion, stay tuned for part 2, released next week, the first Friday of Black History Month.  More on Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, III: He is the Founding Director of Orita’s Cross Freedom School. Based on the Freedom Schools of the 1960's, Dr. Brown works to reconnect Black youth to their African heritage while providing them hands-on learning opportunities to spark their creative genius and build vocational skills.​ Additionally, in 2015 he launched the Black Church Food Security Network a multi-state alliance of congregations working together to inspire health, wealth and power in the Black Community.  The BCFSN accomplishes this by partnering with historically African American churches to establish gardens on church-owned land and cultivates partnerships with African American farmers to create a grassroots, community-led food system. Resources Mentioned During this Episode:  - Black  Baltimore: A New Theory of Community  - Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, author of The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, among other books.  - Rev. Harvey Johnson, Union Baptist Church  Thank you to our Season 2 sponsor:  Earth is an Island Designs makes conscious apparel and household goods  affirming our commitment to a better world, sharing $20 per item purchased for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic to help repair humanity + our beautiful, all-giving  island Earth. Use the code Invest20 for 20% off your purchase. Earth is an Island Designs has donated $10,560 to progressive causes to date!  Announcements: Our podcast store is opening soon. In the meantime, get your The Revolution Needs our Joy, Too mug now!  Stay in community with us on IG and Twitter.  Stay tuned for our NEW Instagram Live pop-up series, "Continually Awakening," starting in Feb. 2021, where we make space to keep the conversation going around social justice and faith in between PWF podcast episodes.  Credits: HUGE thank you to my husband, Kes, our podcast editor!  He is also a talented creative entrepreneur, videographer and photographer! You can work with him and explore his work here. 

After five years of growing food, The Black Church Food Security Network (BCFSN) found themselves launching a vital mission for the community during the Baltimore Uprising after the death of Freddie Gray. Founded by Pastor Heber Brown, BCFSN started with just a few seeds on the grounds of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church which then morphed into a model that would help black churches utilize their land to grow food, bringing markets and black farmers to the congregation. This episode dives into the relationship between the black church and agriculture, the land being a major asset, along with how churches might need to pivot given the current climate. Pastor Brown also speaks on their latest project: The Black Church Census which will be a gamechanger assess data on black church-owned land! Tune in! *Please note that this episode was pre-recorded.* Powered and distributed by Simplecast. Sponsored by Giant Food.

July 18, 2019 | Black Theology & Leadership Institute: Food Justice Sermon: “Work With Me” Scripture passage: Genesis 2:7, 15-19 Preacher: Rev. Dr. Heber M. Brown, III, community organizer, social entrepreneur, and senior pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland

July 14, 2019 | Black Theology & Leadership Institute: Food Justice Sermon: “The Rules Don’t Work for Us” Scripture passage: Numbers 27:1-8 Preacher: Rev. Dr. Heber M. Brown, III, community organizer, social entrepreneur, and senior pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland

July 15, 2019 | Black Theology & Leadership Institute: Food Justice Sermon: “Redeeming Deserted Places” Scripture passage: Mark 6:30-42 Preacher: Rev. Dr. Heber M. Brown, III, community organizer, social entrepreneur, and senior pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland

July 16, 2019 | Black Theology & Leadership Institute: Food Justice Sermon: “The Other Joseph Story” Scripture passage: Genesis 47:13-25 Preacher: Rev. Dr. Heber M. Brown, III, community organizer, social entrepreneur, and senior pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland

Food insecurity refers to USDA’s measure of lack of access, at times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members and limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate foods. Food-insecure households are not necessarily food insecure all the time. Food insecurity may reflect a household’s need to make trade-offs between important basic needs, such as housing or medical bills, and purchasing nutritionally adequate foods. According to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Map, 22.2% of Baltimore City residents and 12. 4% of Washington DC residents are food insecure. There are programmatic/retail and policy food insecurity solutions. Both programs and policies are needed to address food insecurity but for our ORIGINS discussion tonight, we will focus on a few of the innovative programmatic/retail solutions happening in both DC and Baltimore. Our panelists are: Holly Freishtat, the Baltimore City Food Policy Director, Casey Dunajick-DeKnight, the Chief Operating Officer for Good Food Markets and Reverend Heber Brown, III, the Pastor at the Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Govans (Baltimore neighborhood) and founder of the Black Church Food Security Network. Holly uses a multi-sector perspective and engages with many agencies, nonprofits, community groups and stakeholders to dismantle policy barriers, facilitate new partnerships and leverage funding to implement innovative solutions to address food access issues in Baltimore. Casey joined the Good Food Market team in 2015 and now oversees all the day-to-day operations. Casey will also discuss Oasis Community Partners, the non-profit arm of Good Food Markets that was founded in 2016 with the mission to improve food access and community health in underserved urban food deserts. The inaugural board of directors came together around the opening of Good Food Markets pilot location in early 2015, recognizing the many opportunities to engage Woodridge/Langdon around diet, health and nutrition. Oasis Community Partners strives to improve the health of their community by working with a diverse group of individuals and organizations behind the shared goals of food sovereignty and security. Reverend Heber Brown, III, launched The Black Church Food Security Network in 2015— a grassroots initiative that empowers black churches to establish a sustainable food system to combat the systemic injustices and disparities that plague black Americans, who, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, are sicker and poorer than non-black Americans. The network currently operates at more than 10 congregations in Baltimore, most of which are located in the city’s “food priority areas.” There are also participating churches and farms in D.C., Virginia and North Carolina—and the list is growing. It's HRN's annual summer fund drive, this is when we turn to our listeners and ask that you make a donation to help ensure a bright future for food radio. Help us keep broadcasting the most thought provoking, entertaining, and educational conversations happening in the world of food and beverage. Become a member today! To celebrate our 10th anniversary, we have brand new member gifts available. So snag your favorite new pizza - themed tee shirt or enamel pin today and show the world how much you love HRN, just go to heritageradionetwork.org/donate. ORIGINS is powered by Simplecast.

In the US food system, communities of color suffer disproportionately from lack of access to affordable, nutritious food. But what happens when you connect growers with their communities? Or when communities grow their own food on Church owned land? In Baltimore, Maryland, and along the I-95 corridor in the southeast United States, you can see this happening through the Black Church Food Security Network. Our next guest on The Leading Voices in Food is Reverend Dr. Heber Brown, who founded this network with the goal of helping churches to grow their own food on church-owned land, and to partner black farmers and urban growers with historically African American congregations to create pipelines for fresh produce. About Heber Brown Reverend Dr. Heber Brown, III, calls himself a community organizer and a social entrepreneur. In 2018 Baltimore Magazine named him a Visionary of the City. He is the senior pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church and holds a doctor of ministry from Wesley Theological Seminary. Interview Summary You advocate for systematic changes to systematic problems, is that right? Absolutely, and the Black Church Food Security Network is very much about a community-controlled alternative food system based on self-sufficiency, and black food and land sovereignty. Help our listeners understand this concept even of self-sufficiency, black food, land sovereignty, what do these things mean and why is it so important today? Absolutely. So in the context of my community and my context of ministry and in the city of Baltimore, I have been exposed to many food-related initiatives that have tried to address the issue of food insecurity, particularly in communities of color. The African American community in the context of Baltimore city. And I've seen a lot of great work be done through these organizations. And I've worked for organizations that also had some relationship to providing direct service to communities as well. And so from the inside, I've been able to see not only the high side and the benefits of those kinds of approaches, but also the limitations on shortcomings. And one of the shortcomings I saw was that when there was not an active desire and intent to invest in local communities' agency, then it furthered a dependency on charity. Charity is great for immediate emergency needs. Charity is not a long term sustainable solution. And so that's where I saw the big gaping holes when it comes to food because food access is all the craze right now. Food security is a buzzword in a lot of big important circles. And while food access and food security and nutrition are all wonderful things to be concerned about, how are we staying equally sensitive to investing in communities, their desire to create their own solutions, right? So I know that you know, many people will say those closest to the problem are also closest to the solution. The question is, are we listening to the solutions that bubble up? And are we privileging those solutions over solutions that are kind of lobbed into a community from the outside? So the Black Church Food Security Network seeks to really honor and listen deeply to what local communities are creating for themselves and what they already have in hand. So much of looking at communities that are challenged by food insecurity focuses on deficiencies, right? The community doesn't have this and they don't have that and we become expert and fluent in speaking, articulating those deficiencies--oftentimes based out of a need to get a grant or to get some type of support. You've got to paint the terrible picture. But when we just paint terrible pictures, we can overlook what these communities already have. So in the context of my community, we had the black church. And some of the listeners may not be as familiar with the black church community. Well I'll just say since the late 1700s with the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African American denominations and churches have been around in this country. You're talking about from the late 1700s to present day. You don't get much more sustainable than that in my eyes when it comes to an institution created by a historically marginalized community. And so it was important for us to have our work spring from the base of an institution that black folk created for themselves. And have found a way to sustain in the midst of ridiculous odds, right? From from racism, terrorism, racist violence, from the burning of crosses on our land, to fire, arson and fires being started at black churches, from our pastors like my classmate Clementa Pinckney being murdered in Bible study. All of those types of tragedies--the four little girls who were bombed, killed in Sunday school--the Black Church has shown a deep resiliency. It bounces back, no matter what is thrown at it. That's the kind of place I wanted to anchor myself in terms of creating what we organized as a systemic solution to a systemic problem. So African American church communities provide a base of that kind of support and have been a base of support for black people in this country since the late 1700s. That's such a different narrative than we hear in this food space--that incredible strength of platform and the ability of a community to solve its own problems. And so what does it look like for community to have that agency? It looks like heaven! I've never been there, but it's got to look something like that because it's beautiful and intergenerational. I mean, in my church at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, I had people in my congregation born in every decade from 1920 to the present time. And we all are together every weekend for a few hours together, eating together, laughing, crying together, praying, praising and dancing. The full gamut of the human experience finds a home in the sanctuary is a black church spaces. And so it's powerful to see that kind of connectedness, especially in a time when we are accessable to one another, but not necessarily connected to one another. Right? You want to text me, you want to facebook me, inbox me, DM me, IM me, you can get at me. But it doesn't mean we're connected. I think church spaces where the black church or non-black church spaces and faith communities more broadly concerned, are sacred spaces that still nurtured that connectiveness between communities. And so that's one thing. The other thing that makes it special in the context of the Black Church Food Security Network is you're talking about local institutions and a macro level kind of network and community that owns material assets, right? So you're talking about churches that own commercial or close to commercial kitchens, 15 passenger vans, big spacious parking lots that can be used as staging grounds for farmer's markets and the like, classrooms. And a lot of this goes under used or underutilized from Monday through Saturday. And so it is a part of my great joy to go travel the country, meet with bishops and Pastors and African American church spaces and to tabulate, you know, what are we really talking about? Like if we were to talk about all the land in the country owned by black churches, what is that number? Because that number will change our narratives around how we engage food insecurity and black communities. A lot of that land is sitting there and a lot of churches, all they do is cut the grass every week, make it look pretty and holy. But I talked to bishops and religious leaders and say, listen, that land looks nice, but what if you can see that land as a partner in ministry in your community? To meet a very real need and also serve as a launching pad for the entrepreneurs in your church? For those who are social innovators in your community? This is raw material that if we just organize a little bit better and aligned it, it can be a transformative factor in our neighborhoods. That's so exciting that you've seen the asset in those communities, but then also the greater asset of amplifying that into a network. Could you tell us about the genesis of that network. How did you get started and what does it mean to have a network? Yeah, so this is--the genesis of it for us really sprung from our churches experience at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore. I wanted to do something to positively impact the health of my congregants. I was tired of going to visit with them in the hospital and they had diet-related issues. And seminary just taught me to give a prayer and scripture and leave. I was like, nah, there's something I got to do. Something more than that. I mean I love prayer and I love scripture, but what else can we do? And that's where the idea came for us to develop a connection with controlling our food sources. Initially I was going to partner with this fresh food market across the street from our church. But the prices were crazy. And I did not want to lead my congregation in another partnership that saw us subservient to another community' desire or lack of desire to help like that is dehumanizing and toxic. That's a toxic charity that I didn't want to lead my church into. So instead of doing that, I said, listen, I came back to the church, God gave me this epiphany. And I was walking at the front door of my congregation, this little piece of our front yard--I have walked past it hundreds of times. But that one time I saw a vision for a garden on that land. And so we started growing eight years ago. It is a 1,500 square-foot plot of land and because of the leadership of some beautiful people in our church, we grow about 11 or 1,200 pounds of produce on a 1,500 square foot garden in the front yard. So I saw that. And I saw, and this is the first time I'm sharing an interview forum since the passing of sister Maxine Nicholas, who was the patron saint of our garden, the mother of our garden. God gave me this vision for a garden, but I was born in Baltimore city. My roots are here in North Carolina, but I was born in West Baltimore. I don't have a green thumb. I spoke to a vision and a woman, a dynamic woman by the name of Maxine Nicholas, stepped forward, said pastor, let me help you with that. You all don't know what you're doing. She grew up in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina on a farm with 11 brothers and sisters and moved up north during the great migration. But that knowledge and that history and that background experience stayed with her. She transformed that garden. And just last Friday, just last week, we celebrated her life. She passed away at 87 years old. She was a member of Pleasant Hope for 64 years and she is a major part as to why and how I dreamed of something bigger. So I saw what she was able to do without one church. And then I realized all these African Americans that moved north during the great migration. Grew up on farms or grew up in an agrarian society. And while they may have come to Baltimore and came up north to work in factories, that knowledge was still in them. And they were sitting in our pews and our churches--being good ushers, being good choir members, good musicians, you know, all that kinda good stuff. But there was something more in them that the church wasn't seeing. So I am again excited about ways to take our one church's experience and replicate it, scale it, scale it up and scale it deep. But other churches, knowing that many of the people who fit the profile of a Ms. Maxine, they are also there at many of these other churches, looking for and hungry for opportunities to show that they still got something to contribute to all of this. So we come to these nice conferences around food security and the light, and you see a lot of younger people and young professionals and advocates and that's cool. But the people that I see on the front lines of changing the material conditions of their community around food at these local black churches are older, African American women in particular. African American women ages 55 and older are the ones who are on the front lines of these churches. Growing food, leading the food initiatives and the like. What was Ms. Maxine able to accomplish? It's important for people to know there's a garden, but it sounds like it's so much more. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to cry. I miss my friend. I never knew that, you know, when God called me to pastor at church, I had this idea you go in and you preach and you're teaching and go home. But no, I've learned you really fall in love with people and I never knew that I would have close friends who are in the AARP Club, right? Seventy-five, 80 years old. And they're my buddies. Maxine was my buddy. She was the one who had the strength. I would say she had the strength of 10 teenagers. She'd be in our church garden early 6:00 AM. She's in the garden already. And by the time I pull up to start my day at the church, she's leaving out. All right, pastor have a good day! She had that work ethic, that tenacity around the garden. She had a no nonsense way of like, she knew what you wanted in that garden and you are going to do it the way Sister Maxine said you should do it. And we learned to follow and trust her leadership and it's yielded so many benefits for us, but she brought that real tenacity to really grow our garden. Her life experience. And just the work ethic to really move it forward. And here's the thing. She is not unique, at least in that she's not unique in that in that. There's a profile of these kinds of people and particularly these women, black women who were at all these churches. And I know the nation is just mesmerized by charismatic black male leaders, right? Dr. King and the Rev. Jesse Jackson much respect--just in case they're listening. Much respect to you, Reverend Jackson. And all the rest. But there's another part of that story that without an Ella Baker, without a Fannie Lou Hamer, without a Maxine Nicholas, these historic moments in our history where the black church communities were concerned or connected would not have happened. Charismatic male leaders and personalities and programmatic ideas just don't do it alone. And so I really think that, you know, a lot of people talking about black women when it comes to the body politic. Well, it comes to politics right now, right? And so look into the way black women vote and how that makes a difference in different elections. Watching and studying and seeing and honoring black women, how they move in black church spaces. So it might be a majority men at the mic, but be clear without the women that don't work. And so that holds across different churches. And I'm just so honored to go and sit at the feet of many of these dynamic women and hear their stories because just like I could tell you about Maxine Nicholas at our church. I can tell you about Patsy Appleberry in Ohio. At her church I can tell you about sister Murray Edwards at her church in Richmond, Virginia. These are dynamic women who I think we need to do much more in the way of listening to and hearing. And hearing while they're here because they have some ingredients and insight to the topic of food equality and food equity that we need to be sensitive to. You talk about food apartheid and I think that might be a pretty new term for a lot of folks. So could you define that for our audience and how that manifests in Baltimore? Yeah. Really it is just the challenge to the term food deserts, food deserts, you know, a desert for the most part is a naturally occurring phenomena. It's something that's a part of our lived, you know, experience. Right? And if you're not careful, you can conclude that "food deserts," just happen. Like all of a sudden it just happened out of the blue and that's really just not the case. Food apartheid points to the policies, points to the specific behavior of local municipalities to create neighborhoods that don't have access to resources, or control over their resources. It didn't just happen. So what I see with the word food apartheid is one--an attempt to rightly name and target the dynamics that created the outcome, and then two, to really give it the weightiness that it needs, right? The word apartheid strikes. It hits a certain lands a certain way in our hearing. And apartheid has that weightiness and that heaviness that really describes for me the severity and urgency of this issue. It has not only health ramifications, but economic, environmental--going down the line. There's something we need to figure out and we need to honor the weightiness of the issue and a food apartheid for me does more right now and to honor that. Is that a conversation that you have within your own congregation? Well, we speak to this. It's a term that I use. I've actually had a sermon Redeeming the Deserts--where I talk about a challenge to the term food desert and using scripture. And Jesus performed a miracle one time in the desert and life was there. It just was not recognized easily and in these "food desert" communities--we run the risk of labeling them and saying there's nothing of value there and it's just not true. And so it is a term that we utilize. It's one that I preach about and teach about in my congregation as well. There's such momentum here and it seems like you've been able to do so much in growing the network, but what's next? What are you most excited about and what are some next steps? Oh, well, what's next is I'm working with my congregation to help groom up young adults in our church to really grab this and see this black food and land sovereignty as an aspect and dimension of their spirituality and faith formation. Not just as an aside, or just something that's purely about my professional career. I'm really working with them to see the ministry applications of all of this and at least put it on their radar that they can be a different kind of minister. So they're going to see me preaching every Sunday and say, well, no, I have not been called to that. And I said, listen, every minister doesn't preach on Sunday. We need ministers of information. Ministers of research. Ministers of public policy. Ministers who have, I don't know if I created this term or not, but we need more congregational organizers as opposed to just community organizers. Those who are sensitive to the nuances of congregational life and can bring community organizing principles and a congregational mobilization principals together, and move congregations toward grabbing hold of and securing different objectives and aims. And so I'm really investing in our young adults. I'm going big next year with our church budget to invest in and to create employment opportunities for our young adults. Our Church owns a house as well. We want to get into intentional community and give the young adults a house. We want to put all the supports in place so that they don't have to worry about, so they can bend their genius in the direction--and their creativity in the direction--of figuring out the problem of food inequity and have a church support that. So this is a gamble. I'm not seeing churches create cold storage units on their land and giving young adults houses and steering the budget towards employing them. But I'm trying to do everything I can to inspire young adults to really grab hold of this while we have the elders still with us. I need the elders and these young adults to be together and I see that the investment financially that we're making, the young adults can help that, make that more possible. And so we'll see how it goes. But that's the big thing I'm excited about. If it doesn't go well, I come back next time and tell you it failed. Don't do this. We often hear of the youth engagement, but it's never tied to try and engage them with the elders. I think as far as the dialogues I'm familiar with. What is the difference between community organizing principles and congregational organizing? It's a sensitivity to just the mores and the characteristics of congregational life. So if you work in corporate America, if you work at a university even, there's a certain way that the university or the corporation moves. A certain, you know--behave this certain way. All of that is a part of it. The church has that too. And so, you know, while I have a lot of friends of mine who will come to church and call me Heber and I'm cool. That's my, that's my name. I'm Heber. But that will rile the nerves of the mothers of my church because you do not call the pastor by the pastor's first name. At least in a lot of black church tradition. You don't do that. Somebody sensitive to that kind of stuff. And it might seem small, but that might be the difference between whether or not a mother works with you on your project or not. Or whether they return your call. Or they do your survey. And so I see there's some work to be done there to grow up congregational organizers who know about that kind of stuff. Know where the land mines in churches are, where you want to stay away from. What language do you want to use. Even if you prefer to use a different language, how do you bend your tongue to speak the language that's most familiar to the people in front of you so that you can get to where you're trying to go. Right? As opposed to trying to make 70 year old Maxine do it your way or make them line up with your understanding. Good luck with that. You know, it's better in my view, to be more sensitive to where that community is. And it's those kinds of sensitivities that I love to help inspire in our young people today. Produced by Duke World Food Policy Center

Can you make sustainable changes in community or neighborhood health without tackling the issue of food and diet? Why is such work so difficult? What is the role of churches and other faith organizations? Our next guest on The Leading Voices in Food is Reverend Darriel Harris and he works on this problem in a variety of ways. About Darriel Harris Darriel Harris is on the cusp of earning his doctorate at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the Department of Health, behavior and society, and he has a deep history of engagement with education. He holds a bachelor in electrical engineering from Oregon State, an MBA in organizational management from George Washington University, a graduate certificate in financial management from the University of Maryland, and a master's degree of divinity at Duke University. He looks at issues from a broad range of perspectives. Right now, he is focused on faith-based health communications, neighborhood-related health factors, social determinants of health and community based participatory research. He previously worked as a missionary in South Sudan, is also a pastor at a church in Baltimore, Maryland, and is a founding member of the Black Church Food Security Network. Interview Summary A lot of our listeners might not be familiar with terms like faith-based health communications or social determinants of health. Can you explain? Okay. So those two things are very different. Faith-based health communication means that you're trying to do some type of health behavior change, or some type of health education, so that people can become aware of an issue. And you do that in a religious institution. Usually we call that faith-based. It's done in good ways and in bad ways. Usually when you just use the institution as the gathering place we call that faith-placed. When you institute some aspect of the religion into the messaging itself, then we call that really faith-based--because faith is playing a role and not just as a node where people gather. Let's hone in on that before we get to the social determinants of health because there's some great stuff right there. So you said some people do it well, some people do not so well. Could you give an example from your work and one you've seen that you feel is not executed as well? Sure. So I'm a critic. I'm a critic of the status quo. Essentially the status quo is that some scientists, well meaning, some medical doctor or a public health professional, wants to convey some sort of health messaging to an audience. And so therefore they go to churches or religious bodies because these are natural gathering spaces. But usually once they get there, the language that they use--it's really scientific language which is probably not most appropriate in that setting. Within a religious setting, there's a religious language that is used most often within those religious settings. The surrounding environment puts you in a certain mindset and that community has a language. We need to really, really start honing in on language. Anytime you do education that's meaningful and that's not oppressive, it does require some type of dialogue so people are on equal footing. And the way that science has engaged with faith-based institutions historically has been that they come to the faith based institution and they speak science. They lead with science. And then they leave and they are expecting people within the organization to adjust and to embrace their messaging. So I'm a critic of that. I think that there has to be more of an equal footing. And what I'm proposing is more or less a dialogue where the faith institution and the scientific institution are equal partners on equal footing. So instead of the scientists coming into the body and speaking scientific language, the scientist is going to the faith body and saying, faith body, teach me how to speak in your way. And then someone who's educated and trained to articulate the faith language within that body is going to work with the scientist to come up with the proper messaging. Could you give us an example of how you've been able to do that? So I got this idea while I was working with Professors Ellen Davis from the Duke Divinity School and Peter Morris. They sent me to South Sudan when I graduated from Divinity school. Ellen Davis is like the premier Old Testament scholar living today. Dr. Peter Morris is used to be a student of Ellen Davis. He was the leading health professional for Wake County and now he runs a nonprofit in Raleigh. Ellen Davis has been working in South Sudan for years. She invited Peter Morris to come join her. Peter Morris decided to do that and they've been going to South Sudan year after year after year. I come along and they invited me to join them as well. I went but they pushed this agenda that said go to South Sudan and try to teach people about health. And when I went to South Sudan everyone wants to hear about the Bible. They didn't care about health. I mean, it's not that they didn't care about it, but that wasn't what they were most interested in. So I was there trying to teach them about health and they wanted to hear about the Bible. Professor Ellen Davis with her biblical interpretation kind of lens and mindset--she was really pushing for kind of like a merging of the two. So I did that. And I talked to people about malaria and washing hands with soap through biblical messages. So if we apply that to the American context and we're saying, okay, if I'm a scientist the way it's done now, the worst scenario would be the scientist comes into the church and says people need to eat more fruits and vegetables. If you eat more fruits and vegetables, you'll be healthier. Which is a common message because every doctor says it to most patients every time they go in there. If the scientist is somewhat savvy and is trying to be sensitive to the religious audience that they're working with, maybe they'll give their science-based message and they'll quote, you know, people who eat more fruits and vegetables have a tendency to live longer. They're less likely to get this disease and that disease. But then they'll, they'll marry that with a verse and they'll say the body is a temple of God. Or they'll sing a spiritual him at the end of it. But it's kind of tacked on, it's like an addendum really. So what I'm proposing is to this: if you want to go into that faith institution and you want to teach people about fruits and vegetables, then open up Genesis and talk about how when God created the world. God created vegetation and when God created human beings, male and female, God created them and tells them that fruits and vegetables are to be your meat or the primary ingredient upon what you eat. And so then you can marry in some science. Say, okay, people who do this are live longer, they have healthier lives. But it's a theological basis for the behavior and not simply a scientific basis for the behavior. Has your experience been more successful? And also maybe riffing off your experience in south Sudan? So that's the test, right? My dissertation is to test the effectiveness of those three modes. Those are the three elements of my dissertation: science only, science only with some type of religious reference tacked onto it, which is the status quo, or what I am proposing, which is a true merging. So results pending, results pending. (laughs) But I can say anecdotally in South Sudan, I will go into villages and I would teach these messages to people about mosquito nets and I would talk about how Mary wrapped little baby Jesus in swaddling cloth. And what was the reason that she did that? That this is protective. The reason that she did that is protective. And then we would say if Mary was in South Sudan where the mosquitoes were killing everyone, would she allow her to son to be bitten by mosquitoes? She would put some type of protective cover over the child and people would say oh, Mary would cover the child. Mary will cover the child. And so this is how we would teach 10 health lessons. Somebody would go teach the lessons and the people would say, we've never heard this before. Now I would go into the health clinic and I would see on the wall chart stuff, mosquito vectors, etc. People are constantly talking about malaria and where malaria comes from. But when we taught it, they say, we've never heard this before. Anecdotally, we sent another student after I was there for a year and a half after I came back. Another student went there for a few weeks and he went around and counted the pit latrines in some villages that were there. They had zero pit latrines when I was there. When he came there, there was 100 pit latrines in some of these villages. So just learning about the science was not enough to leverage behavior change? It's not enough. It's not enough. And behavior change is really, really hard. It's a hard thing to get someone to change their behavior because changing their opinion is hard. Right? Which is why we see that in the political sphere. But, it's also in our day-to-day interactions. And so you need every bit of leverage you can get. The biggest thing that they'll do differently is that they'll listen. So when when you present it as a faith argument, faith presentation, at the least, they're open. They're open to it a little longer before they shut their minds off. So it's not a panacea in such that if I come and I preached this message, then everyone's going to follow exactly what I suggest, right? It doesn't quite work like that. But what we're trying to do is what essentially what we learn in seminary. We talk about preaching being something that affects the hearing. And so that's what we're trying to do in speech in general. And so I'm using theology, using the biblical language, using something that somebody already cares about. It allows him to listen and consider it a little longer. And most likely if you're using some type of a biblical reference, then there's something that's going to come up again with even without effort. We know food culture is a very strong pull that's been there for years, but this is another kind of cultural power that could come to be leveraged. So we also talked about this a little while ago, but social determinants of health. I want to come back to that and talk about neighborhood-related health factors, social determinants of health. What are these terms and how does it fit into your work? Social determinants of health means what things are happening around the individual or group of individuals that leads them to exercise their behavior that they practice. So, in my Baltimore context, we have a thing called food deserts, or healthy food prioritization areas, or the newest term is food apartheid. And the reason why that term is has come to fore is because food availability largely falls along racial lines. And in the environments where healthy food is not available you can't expect people to make wise decisions around their food when the only thing that they see is bad food. It becomes normal. So when we talk about people eating better, the social determinant of health is what's available to them. What's the norm within that community? What are the barriers that they have to go through? And how hard is it to buy or purchase, eat healthy food if they want it to. How does your involvement with the Black Church Food Security Network address those things? That's one piece of a larger portfolio of your work, but we would love to hear more about that network and what it's trying to do. So the Black Church Food Security Network is trying to do several things. Baltimore has so many problems, it's really hard to specialize on any one. And so the network is trying to address the food problem. And we use black churches because black churches are in abundance everywhere healthy food is lacking--where healthy food is lacking, there's an abundance of black churches. The goal is to work with the black churches, partner with the black churches, so that they can be vehicles of change, right? We partnered with churches, qe planted gardens in several churches around Baltimore. We have market days, so it kinda like a farmer's market, but it's happening at the natural meeting times of the congregations. We started off with ARK Church in Baltimore city. They had a Wednesday Bible study--midday Bible study. So we started off selling fresh produce at midday Bible study. And then now we've moved on to Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, which is pastored by Reverend Dr. Heber Brown. He's a great, great friend. And he's kinda like the lead of the Black Church Food Security Network. So now at his church on Sundays there's a farmer's market that is set up at the church. So people come to worship service like they always have. And then after worship service, the market is set up and those who desire--and everyone is encouraged to participate--but those who desire can come in and purchase food that's available. You've got a lot of different pieces of work. So what solution or opportunity are you most excited about right now? I's hard to say. I'm excited. So we now have a farm. It's called Strength to Love 2 Farm in my church. My church started the farm before I was ever involved in it. But now it's there. We're trying to figure out how to mature it and see grow to its fullest potential. That farm is in the middle of a neighborhood called Sandtown. Sandtown was the neighborhood where Freddie Gray was from. He is the young man who died in police custody a few years ago. And in response to his death, there was what we like to call the uprising where CVS was burned and there was violence between police officers and high school children. The National Guard was called in. Children were called thugs by the Mayor, by the president. It was a good time in the city because people were awakening to the issues, but it was a very rough time in the city because there was a lot of destruction. Things happened not the way that we wanted them to happen and the city was characterized in the way that was not honest. And that is the ground work for this place-based intervention? Sorry, yes. So you're asking about what makes me excited? And so the farm is right in the middle of that neighborhood. It's 1.5 acres. We're growing food there. We're employing returning citizens, coming home from incarceration, returning home from incarceration. We're selling a large amount of that produce to high end farmer's markets because we're trying to create employment. But then a portion of that food is also going within the neighborhood. So we're solving problems. We sell a portion of that food through the Black Church Food Security Network and we sell some of that food at the farmer's market on Sundays. And it becomes also an educational space. People from all over the city come into one of the areas of the city that frankly is despised. It's a despised area by many people. Most people are afraid to come in there. They don't want anything to do with it. But people will come to learn about the farm and the see the farm to witness it. And so it gives everyone who works there a sense of pride, which is great. Which is one of our huge issues that people here are lacking dignity. And so, any type of positive attention helps build that up. There's a lot of layers to that project, the dignity, the inclusive economic growth, the food security elements, education. I can see why you're excited about that one. It's a lot of layers. So if you wanted to talk about like what social determinant is most impacting why we have some of these food issues? And I would say it's the clustering of poverty. And so whenever we're envisioning putting low income housing or federal housing someplace, they're envisioning putting it in a place that is already highly stressed. Which doesn't make any sense, right? So Heber really liked to say, oh, it's a food desert. But it's not just the food deserts it's an employment desert, all these other things. It's really a life desert. And so people in some of these neighborhoods are dying 20 years younger than the affluent neighborhoods within the same city. We're talking like two miles away. People living there with a 20-year life expectancy difference. So why did that neighborhood get that way? Why did they put all the people who are enduring the most stress in life all in one place? Even with all these different programs, even the farm, it is not enough to overcome all the issues that are associated with it. And so I believe the real issue is to disperse poverty.   Produced by Deborah Hill, Duke World Food Policy Center

Do churches have a responsibility for the physical health of their members? Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, III a community organizer, social entrepreneur and Senior Pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church joined The Rural Health Voice to discuss how churches and other members of the faith based community can address health on a very local level. Links: Black Church Food Security Network Coalition for Healthier Eating Farming While Black

On this special edition of Midday observing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2019, three conversations around three areas that defined Dr. King’s work: economic justice; non-violent resistance and dreaming of a future where hard work and talent are rewarded, without regard to race. Later in the broadcast (and posted sequentially on our Webpage and podcast stream), we’ll hear an interview I conducted with the peace activist Elizabeth McAlister, to whom Tom spoke earlier this month from her jail in Georgia, where she is awaiting trial after an anti-nuclear protest at a US naval base, where she and six others were arrested last April. We’ll also meet a gifted and compelling 10 year-old girl named Charlie Martin, who is this year’s winner in the Dream Big Essay Contest for Baltimore City public school children. We’ll hear about her dreams of becoming a writer. We begin today with a conversation about the American Dream, and how access to that dream has evolved for African Americans since King’s movement in the 1960s. President Donald Trump often asserts that Black unemployment is at an historic low. We’ll examine that claim, and talk about a report released last year by the Associated Black Charities that analyzed employment rates in Baltimore City through the lens of race. Tom's guests are Anirban Basu, the chairman and CEO of the Sage Policy Group, and the chair of the Maryland Economic Development Commission. He also hosts the Morning Economic Report here on WYPR…And the Rev. Dr. Heber Brown III is pastor at the Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, and the founder and executive director of Orita’s Cross Freedom School, and the Black Church Food Security Network.

Today, we mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with a reflection on his work, legacy, and a discussion about the state of Civil Rights in America today. Fifty years later, what has changed for people of color and economically underserved populations in our country?Tom is joined in Studio A by, Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, Senior Pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church and founder of Orita's Cross Freedom School; and Rev. Dr. C Anthony Hunt, Senior Pastor of Epworth United Methodist Chapel and King scholar.Joining us from NPR studios in DC is Myesha Braden, Director for the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Baltimore restaurateur John Shields joins Dan for a conversation with the Rev. Heber Brown III, pastor at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, about the Black Church Food Security Network. This is an effort to use churches to influence their members to not only eat healthier foods, but to eat what they grow or what African-American farmers grow. The network, with eight churches, is having its second annual launch event on Saturday, March 17 at New Creation Christian Church. The program hopes to double the number of church gardens in the network this season and to connect neighborhoods that need fresh produce with black farmers in Virginia and North Carolina.Links:http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bs-hs-faith-communities-health-programs-20170508-story.htmlhttp://www.blackchurchfoodsecurity.net/home.htmlhttp://www.blackchurchfoodsecurity.net/events.html

February 26, 2018 - Russian Meddling in Baltimore - We begin a new series, "Different Takes: Russia and the New Election." Our conversation starts right here in Baltimore with the Rev. Dr. Heber Brown, Pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, who talks about his encounter with Russian interference during the Freddie Gray uprising, through discovering the Russian-created Facebook page called The Blacktivist.

Listen to a Special Broadcast of The Michael Imhotep Show, Sat. April 30th., 11am-1pm EST with host Michael Imhotep founder of The African History Network on Blog Talk Radio. We will also broadcast on Facebook LIVE. Visit our Facebook FanPage "The African History Network" to watch LIVE at https://www.facebook.com/The-African-History-Network-186625219983/.  1) Hip Hop Artist Lil Kim recently posted Instagram photos that were unrecognizable.  We dealt with Colorism, Self Hatred and the Effects of White Supremacy. Lil Kim is suffering from low self esteem. We have to protect our daughters from this type of behavior. 2) Harriet Tubman is going to be the new face of the $20 Bill. Is this a good thing since African American Women are devalued in this society?  We'll discuss why this is a slap in the face to African American Women. 3) Since Prince passed on April 21st, 2016 a lot of information has come out about his humanitarianism, philanthropy and knowledge of history. We discuss Prince being Unapologetically Black, studying Dr. John Henrik Clarke and more.  4) This date in African American History - Muhammad Ali refuses the draft. http://theafricanhistorynetwork.net/Events BALTIMORE: FREE EVENT - Sat. April 30th, 2016, 6:00pm-10:00pm Reality Speaks Of Solviaz Nation presents a presentation by Michael Imhotep founder of The African History Network, "Redistributing The Pain: How African Americans Historically Fought Back With Economic Boycotts & Cooperative Economics".  Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, 430 East Belvedere Ave., Baltimore, MD 21212

Listen to the podcast “Lil Kim, Colorism, Self Hatred and White Supremacy/Did Prince Have A Will” from “The Michael Imhotep Show”, Wednesday, April 27th, 2016 Listen online at http://tunein.com/radio/Empowerment-Radio-Network-s199313/ or by downloading the "TuneIn Radio" app to your smartphone and search for "Empowerment Radio Network" or at www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com and for the podcasts. 1) We did a recap of the Tuesday primaries in 5 States. What's next for Sen. Bernie Sanders?  2) Hip Hop Artist Lil Kim recently posted Instagram photos that were unrecognizable.  We dealt with Colorism, Self Hatred and the Effects of White Supremacy.  3) Tyka Nelson, Prince's Sister said to her knowledge, he did not have a will.  What does this mean for his $300 million empire?  4. Detroit you win a National Chess Title. 5) This date in African American History. Visit www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com for DVDs by Michael Imhotep and documentaries like "Hidden Colors", "Out of Darkness" and "Resurrecting Black Wallstreet The Blueprint". https://www.facebook.com/events/1085860484803893/ BALTIMORE: FREE EVENT - Sat. April 30th, 2016, 6:00pm-10:00pm Reality Speaks Of Solviaz Nation Event presents a presentation by Michael Imhotep founder of The African History Network, "Redistributing The Pain: How African Americans Historically Fought Back With Economic Boycotts & Cooperative Economics".  Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, 430 East Belvedere Ave., Baltimore, MD 21212

Listen to The Michael Imhotep Show, Tuesday, April, 26th, 10pm-12midnight EST with host Michael Imhotep of The African History Network.   CALL IN WITH Questions/Comments at 1-888-669-2281.  POST YOUR COMMENTS.  WE MAY READ THEM ON AIR.  Listen online at http://tunein.com/radio/Empowerment-Radio-Network-s199313/ or by downloading the "TuneIn Radio" app to your smartphone and search for "Empowerment Radio Network" or at www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com for more info and podcasts. 1) Dashcam Footage Shows Fla. Deputies Discussing Whether to Rescue Drowning Girls in Stolen Car. 2) Prince the humanitarian and student of African History. A lot more information about Prince, what he studied and his philanthropy have been revealed and it's fantastic. 3) R&B singer Bill Paul has died at age 81. https://www.facebook.com/events/1085860484803893/ BALTIMORE: FREE EVENT - Sat. April 30th, 2016, 6:00pm-10:00pm Reality Speaks Of Solviaz Nation Event presents a presentation by Michael Imhotep founder of The African History Network, "Redistributing The Pain: How African Americans Historically Fought Back With Economic Boycotts & Cooperative Economics".  Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, 430 East Belvedere Ave., Baltimore, MD 21212