This episode features stories on working with young people to address issues like gun violence, mental health in Philadelphia, indigenous and Afro-LatinX identity, and Avogedden (an avocado giveaway in South Philly).
Block by Block is PhillyCAM’s LIVE community news radio program, featuring stories from Philadelphia’s neighborhoods as reported by PhillyCAM’s Radio News Fellows, a multigenerational cohort of burgeoning local journalists. Tune in for new episodes every other week, Wednesdays 5:30-6pm on WPPM 106.5 FM and phillycam.org/listen.
Block by Block – Season 1 is produced by Alice Hall, Brujo de la Mancha, Kris Hill, Jeff Jones, John Morrison, Maleka Fruean, Salina Singleton and us: Michelle Gilliard-Houston, and Wayne Hunter.
Brad Linder is Radio News Managing Editor for WPPM and Allison Durham is WPPM’s Radio Program Manager.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was machine-generated and may contain some spelling errors or other inaccuracies.
Kris Hill This is Block by Block, a community news program from w p m LP one hundred and six point five FM, where we explore issues affecting the Philadelphia area, with interviews and news reports filed by members of the community. I’m Kris Hill.
Salina Singlton And I’m Selena Singleton. We’re part of a team of community news fellows who have been working on the show. You can hear new episodes of Block by Block every other Wednesday evening at five thirty on p m.
Kris Hill Tonight, we’ll hear about mental health in Philadelphia, learn about a group working with young people to make their voices heard on issues like gun violence, and hear conversations about how indigenous people are perceived in the region and what it means to identify as afro-latinx.
Salina Singlton There have been four hundred and thirty homicides in Philadelphia so far this year, and more than one thousand five hundred nonfatal shootings as part of a series for block by block. I’ve been speaking with people at organizations working to address gun violence.
Kris Hill Tonight, we’ll hear your interview with P a Youth Vote Executive Director Angelique Hinton. Gun violence disproportionately affects young people, and Hinton talks about how the young people she works with feel about that and how they can and what they can do to make a difference.
Salina Singleton What is PA youth vote and how did you come to this organization?
Angelique Hinton PA field is an organization. It’s a collaboration ultimately of educators, grassroots organizers, teachers, students really working to ensure that young people are civically engaged and educated on the importance of voting, but also how to use their voices to advocate for changes they want to see in the world.
Salina Singleton I want to read two stats to you just because you know this is the population you are working with. Youth. Um, firearms are now the leading cause of death for Americans ages one to seventeen. That’s according to the Center of American Progress Action Fund. The other stat is thirty five percent of child and teen gun deaths are suicide. It’s about twelve hundred a year, according to Everytown Research. Now, this is the population that you are working with. How has gun violence influenced your civic engagement work?
Angelique Hinton So we very much do our work by leading with listening. And so what that means is we try to understand the issues that are impacting the young people we work with, and then helping to connect that to, again, elections and civic engagement and holding leaders accountable. And so over the summer, we did programming primarily with students from Philadelphia. And so of course, that was a huge issue for all of them. And so it ended up being that a good portion of our work was centered around youth and that issue in particular. And so what we did was really many young people, many people in general feel very helpless in this moment. So it’s really about helping them understand that they do have a lot of power and a lot of ability to influence leaders to take some sort of an action, right. And so over the summer, we did things such as write letters to elected leaders to let them know how gun violence was impacting students. The students wrote letters. We did a press conference in Harrisburg where the students, you know, went into the rotunda and they shared their stories and it was covered by the press. And then we ultimately did a listening session where we invited elected leaders to come in again, listen to how this issue was impacting young people. And then we did a breakout strategy session with those elected leaders to try to strategize around different things that can be done to make a difference on this issue in communities like the ones they come from. So it’s really about, again, tapping into actions that you can take, right? I always say elected leaders are only going to be as good as we demand they be. And if we’re not demanding anything of them, that lets them off the hook. So it’s really teaching young people how to constructively use their voices to start to do that, pushing that is going to create the action and ultimately the change they want to see.
Salina Singleton What do you see your parent? So you’ve raised kids through the school system. You work with youth, you’re always in the school systems. What do you see as being one of the biggest factors that are aiding in the rise in violence, specifically with youth?
Angelique Hinton So primarily, we work with schools that are in communities of color, lower income communities, underfunded school districts. And so the underfunding of school districts is the primary problem, right? There are programs that are cut. There are access to counselors and mental health support that is cut. And so all of that plays a big part in that hopelessness. Right. And kids not really feeling like there are other things to do. And so really, I think, you know, when you talk about solutions, we understand that community investment is a big key to addressing this issue, right? Whether or not we have elected leaders that want to actually make that investment, either by directly investing in programming in the community or making sure our schools are adequately and equitably funded is a policy decision. And so really, a lot of the work we’ve done is trying to advocate for equitable and adequate school funding. We did a huge amount of work around that issue, in particular, because that directly impacts these kids every single day.
Salina Singleton How can people.
Salina Singleton Find out more about your organization?
Angelique Hinton So we are p a u on all social media channels so they can go to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. All of them were at P a UFO and our website is p a u dot org. And if people want to reach out by email, it’s info at ufo dot org.
Salina Singleton Next, we have a story about mental health for people living in Philadelphia and other cities where people are dealing with crime, poverty, the opioid crisis, and other traumatic circumstances. Chris spoke with Irisha Picot who.
Kris Hill Uses social media to spread positive messages about mental health and advocate for self care, particularly for black women.
Kris Hill The world is a strange place to live in as we gain deeper knowledge of each other, worldly. To me, it seems like people everywhere are struggling in one way or another, but I think people in Philadelphia are definitely experiencing some of the worst parts of struggle lately. More and more people are talking about mental health, but we are still in a state of emergency as a city. Philly needs attention right now. Philadelphia is the poorest major city in the country. We are actively living in an opioid crisis, gentrification, all time high gun violence, domestic violence epidemic, housing crisis, and sadly, more. And with the poorly handled Covid nineteen pandemic, things are even worse for Philadelphia. With all that is happening around us, publicly and personally, mental health isn’t even on a lot of Philadelphians radar. We need to focus on our mental health and make it a priority. Mental health care and basic necessities shouldn’t be this hard to obtain, but people are here to help as much as they can. People like Aisha Pichet, the hood therapist.
Irisha Picot I’m a mental health professional. I’ve been working in mental health and behavioral health for thirteen years. Um, for some, some reason, you know, I have become this like self care, like guru person. I don’t even know how that happened, but I do a lot of things around like self care and mental health and like digital spaces, but as I’ve like, you know, became more, um, in depth with like the practition piece of like the work that I do. I’m like, you know, what therapy should be accessible to everybody, whether it’s your hood, whether it’s on your porch, whether it’s in your mosque. So I like to thank the hood portion of our reach. The hood therapy is that I’m just trying to bring this work and make it more accessible to to people who are living everyday lives and going through everyday struggles.
Kris Hill Iris and I discussed how people in Philadelphia have a greater risk of having poor mental health and have little to no positive mental health hygiene practices.
Irisha Picot I think we do have really poor mental health hygiene, but I also feel like we are very under-resourced place too. So I think those things go hand in hand. You can’t say we’re going to not give people what they need and then they’re going to be okay. Like there’s only so much that we can be resilient without having it’s.
Kris Hill Bad out here. And then like seeing it happen in front of your eyes every day.
Irisha Picot That is a lie. That’s PTSD. Like PTSD is no longer like, you know, we start talking about wars and vets coming home. Our neighborhoods, our blocks are these sites of violence. And I can’t imagine like growing up and seeing so much violence. And then we just think people are okay. Or we could send children to school after they didn’t see, you know, police come six o’clock in the morning, ambush the neighbor’s house. That’s a lot like people sitting on their porch and getting killed at like eight a m I was like, that’s a hopelessness. Like the person who is just going up and killing people, you don’t care about your life, so you can’t care about other people’s lives. So yeah, I think Philly need to if the spotlight is not shown on Philly, then we need, you know, a better mental health hygiene. It definitely needs to be.
Kris Hill Later on. We talked about people leaving Philly, how that affects the city and how we need more people and resources in the city so we can help one another grow and flourish.
Irisha Picot And I remember I was plotting to leave, and I reached out to a professor that I had at VCU, which is where I went to undergrad. And she said something that I always give this advice to other people. She was like, if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you gotta create it.
Kris Hill And it’s like, I don’t want to move away and go live in Beverly Hills And we need you. Yeah. Yeah. I’m like, I feel like I want to speak on this. I want to talk about mental health. I want to make people, like, uncomfortable, but like, in a good way to, to show you something new, to bring you to, to bring you to peace.
Irisha Picot I wrote an article like two years ago about how I grew up with a lot of black folks who had anxiety, but they would always say, um, like, my nerves are bad. Like they was. It wasn’t able to label what it was, but they, it was, it was anxiety or it was like panic attacks. But now we can like label these things and we can get like the, the help and support we need. So I do think we’re on the rise.
Kris Hill We also touched base on self-care and change, taking care of your mental health and the little things that go into nurturing your mind, body and soul.
Irisha Picot You know, it just takes some willingness and some intention. Yeah, self-care should not cost. Self-Care is really about like those little things you put in place to help you on a day to day basis. Like when it doesn’t feel good, when it’s harming me, just let it go. You got to set your environment up so you can be successful. Yeah. But like change happened in like small increments. So do a little something different. You know, once a week than that a couple times a week, then it may lead to, to something every day. You build habit as you go. I think overall, I want to see people, my people, community wise, I just want to see us like healthier mentally and getting all those things like address.
Kris Hill Inner city living is a rough experience that many of us have had to endure, especially black and brown folks, safe spaces, taking care of our mental health and each other needs to be talked about more and implemented into our culture and way of life. Thankfully, Orisha gave us some organizations that are here to help hike and heal. Girltrek. Le pido l a p I’d o and Sankofa Healing Studio, all led by black and brown people of the community. This is Chris Hill signing off of Block by Block radio news show.
Kris Hill Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated from September fifteenth to October fifteenth. During this year’s celebration, Block by Block reporter Michelle Gilliard Houston spoke with the director of La Casa Latina, the Center for Hispanic Excellence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gilliard Houston For this story. I wanted to look at the layered and often complex identity of those in the Latinx community, specifically those who embrace an Afro Latinx identity. I was able to speak to Doctor Krista Cortez, a scholar in academia and director of La Casa Latina, a cultural resource center at the University of Pennsylvania, Doctor Cortez shared their personal story, embracing their afro-latinx identity, as well as sharing their research on the subject as a scholar in academia.
Krista Cortes More black folks were taken from Africa to Latin America and the Caribbean than ever made it to the United States. And so blackness is a part of the fabric of these countries. Um, and the number of people who have some connection to a black ancestor, right. Is, is, is, is enormous. You look back a couple generations and a lot of people will find that they have, you know, ancestors who, who are descendants of, of Africans from the slave trade. So it doesn’t matter how we look. We all are Cuban. We all are Nicaraguan. We all are Panamanian, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, etc.. I grew up in New York. My parents were born in Puerto Rico. Um, and they came over relatively young, like, you know, elementary school age six, seven years old. Um, but my father is black presenting and my mother is not, she’s very fair skinned. And even though they both identify as Puerto Rican, both having been born on the island, um, obviously how they racially present has impacted kind of how they’ve moved through the world. And so my father, black presenting, was raised by a fair skinned Puerto Rican. His blackness wasn’t emphasized. It was his Puerto Rican ness. And my mother, not being black presenting, um, also leaned into her Puerto Rican ness. And that’s, you know, again, culturally and the types of food we ate and the way we celebrated holidays and kind of the way we understood family all comes from our Puerto Rican ness and our culture, our ethnicity, not necessarily our race, but all of that to say that blackness wasn’t emphasized in my life, but there wasn’t really anybody to do that for me. My father, I didn’t grow up with my father around, but I was always the darkest person in my family, all of my black presenting family from my father’s father’s side. They had left New York in the seventies and 80s, but they weren’t around, so it wasn’t like at family gatherings I was going and I was seeing people that looked like me. I told you I was the darkest person, but I also have curly hair and nobody else had hair like me. And for my mother, she didn’t know what to do with it, like she didn’t know how to take care of my hair. She took me to the local beauty shop and they didn’t know how to do with my hair. So what did they cut it? So most of my childhood I had, like, this small afro. Then I remember being maybe ten, eleven, twelve ish and my grandmother saying, oh, I found a hair shop there and it was a Dominican salon, but I was leaving with straight hair. Right. So you’re, you’re in the beauty salon all day to get this thing done to your hair. And then like, oh, you have to be careful with your hair. You have to wrap your hair. You can’t sweat, you can’t play, you can’t do this. It was later that I began to realize how those kinds of things socialized me into not liking my curls. like maybe twenty twelve. I stopped putting heat in my hair. I stopped any kind of straightening. It’s part of my rejection of right and made me not like a part of myself. That is beautiful and it’s natural. And it’s, you know, it’s me. It’s how I was created. Specifically, once I left home and I went to undergrad was when I really began to explore my blackness and kind of come into myself as an Afro Puerto Rican person because it was important to me. It was being in college, having that freedom to do the reading, to explore, to have new experiences, to be around a majority of black folks for the first time in those ways and really kind of live our shared experience. Um, for me was important in my becoming an Afro Puerto Rican, as a scholar, as someone who has devoted my academic life to thinking about these things and writing about these things, a common narrative is that the Latinx community is inherently anti-Black, right? That Latinx people are anti-Black. That’s not true. I want to say it in that kind of definitive way. It’s it’s not true. But there’s these troubled histories and pasts that folks continue to contend with in the present day. To be clear, it’s complicated, but what I really wanted to emphasize is how blackness is not phenotype, how blackness is imbued in our practices. So all of these things to me tie back into what blackness is, right because there’s a scholar, Nicole Fleetwood, who writes about blackness in the visual. And talks about how we can’t define blackness, that we can only define what is not blackness. And blackness is literally everything else.
Kris Hill Block by blocks, Brujo de La Mancha is producing a series of reports on native people in the Philadelphia area as part of that series, Brujo. Wanted to know what young African American people learn about indigenous people in the region, and he spoke with Chris about that.
Brujo de la Mancha I know there’s a simple question and maybe everybody asks you, but for the audience out there, who are you? How you described yourself. So people that cannot see you, they may hear about you.
Kris Hill My name is Kris Hill. I’m very chill. I’m laid back. I like seeing people Flourish in their own state. I like giving people the space to be themselves, and I love seeing people be the best versions of themselves and being nice humans. I’m very artsy. I feel like I try to make a creative project out of almost everything. I like going against the state of kind of the world. You could say America, but kind of the world. I like being the pushback because somebody has to be, you know, everybody can’t be quiet or there will be no change. So I like shaking things up. I like making people think differently and think about, well, what do I want life to look like? Instead of this is how people are telling me to live my life. I like showing people that there’s more to life than just living in capitalism.
Brujo de la Mancha That’s amazing. That made me understand. That’s the reason I’m interviewing you for this thing, because I was looking for outsiders too. And you know, we live in a new era globalization, people from different cultures and places living together and as well, you know, even between the same cultures, also different understandings and different points of view, you know, and a lot of African descendants, African Americans now also have some roots with themselves, you know, uh, because colonial times and the history about, you know, the creation of this continent and so on. But, uh, you know, I got to meet you through this new program. And, um, we were talking about indigenous people. You know, this is the heritage of indigenous Native American Heritage Month. So my question for you is what it means, uh, indigenous peoples celebration for you.
Kris Hill For me, recognition and giving somebody their props. But yes, I like that we’re changing what was taught in school. I like that the truth is now being implemented because Christopher Columbus did not discover America. Not only that, but it’s one of the most horrible things that has happened in history because he came and just violated a bunch of indigenous people and Native Americans, and I’m just glad that they are being recognized. And his name is no longer the quote unquote, founder or found America. I’m glad that it’s now being put back into the hands and to the people who actually were here.
Brujo de la Mancha Yeah, that’s the idea. That’s a big understanding. And, uh, you know, as you a new generations of the city of Philadelphia as well and United States and this be the first capital, you know, where they are settlers or, or the American people create their, their country. Right? So this is very important for people to know. As you said, it’s a change out there. So, uh, what do you know about indigenous people from this continent or maybe people what did you learn or how you heard about them?
Kris Hill Overall, I would say not much. I would like to learn more. And that’s another reason why I was excited about your podcast, because I personally would like to learn more and just be educated on the right things instead of what I learned in school, because all these things I learned in school, I’m now learning that was lies. And it’s like, how did lies make it into the educational system? And now I can’t even really trust what schools are teaching us history wise, because it’s now coming out. Oh, that’s a lie. That’s a lie, that’s a lie. So it’s like, what do I know? You know?
Brujo de la Mancha Yeah, that’s very important. A very strong comment and very related. Also, as you being a Philadelphian and knowing about your roots and the history, not just the city where you grew up, but where your family come from and all that too. You know, you get to learn new things. And that’s important about this type of celebration of the Philadelphia Indigenous People Day or the Heritage Month for people to get to know and to see their neighbors are still alive and they are here around, you know, and it’s not something that is only on books or even that lights the, you know, there were no more here. So they’re still around. But just one more question. Name something about neighborhoods in Philadelphia, like, what do you know about neighborhoods from Philadelphia?
Kris Hill You know, I actually don’t know much about natives from Philadelphia. I will be transparent and honest because I don’t want to come on here and start saying things that aren’t true, because I’m just contributing to lies, being a part of like our quote unquote history. I did want to just talk about Indigenous Peoples Day and what I’ve observed when it switched to Indigenous Peoples Day, I was in high school and I kept asking my teachers. I was like, why are we in school? If when it was Columbus Day, we had no school? But when it’s Indigenous Peoples Day, we’re in school basically saying now that now that we’re not celebrating a white man, we no longer need a day off. I felt like that was disrespectful. And then even looking on the calendar, Indigenous Peoples Day is first, but it still has Columbus Day right next to it. Is it really this deep that y’all can’t let Columbus go? He didn’t discover it. Let it go. It’s not his day anymore. So I just feel like that right there shows you what America, who they hold as importance. Because we had a whole day off to celebrate Columbus Day. But when it got switched to Indigenous Peoples Day, it wasn’t a big hoopla anymore. That just really showed you in real time that America just continues to only give props to white men and only care about white people, even when they don’t deserve it in any aspect.
Brujo de la Mancha Wow. Thank you. Very well done. I was going to say at the end, anything else would you like to add? But you did it. You nailed it.
Kris Hill A Philadelphia nonprofit called Sharing Excess is giving away free avocados at FDR Park in South Philly today through Friday. The group’s mission is to keep food from going to waste by collecting extra food from farms, restaurants and grocery stores and distributing it to food banks and other community organizations. But Operations Director Victoria Wilson says they ended up with so many avocados this month, they wanted to do something special.
Victoria Wilson This is Armageddon, so we are giving out free avocados to everybody in Philadelphia down here in FDR Park, because there’s a massive surplus of avocados right now in the food industry, specifically in Pennsylvania. We’ve had some suppliers who are not able to sell them before they go bad. So they’ve given us literally truckloads of avocados, and we’re just going to give them all out. It’s for a few different reasons. So inflation is one of them. People are buying less avocados because they are just massively expensive right now. I also think a lot of growers did not expect that to happen. So they were producing as much as normal, if not more. And it just ended up with a ton of surplus.
Shawnee Brinkley Oh my gosh, I love avocados. This is like Christmas in October. This is like my delight for today.
Kris Hill Shawnee Brinkley drove from South Jersey to pick up boxes of avocados. She says she’ll be sharing some of hers with her nephew, who is also a fan and using some to make guacamole.
Shawnee Brinkley Oh, and I love making chocolate avocado pudding. That’s really, really good. And also, you can do it for smoothies. So if you cut it and you freeze it, then when it’s time to make your smoothie, you can just pop it in there. So.
Kris Hill Word of the avocado giveaway has been spreading fast on social media. Victoria Wilson with Sharing Access says when the giveaway began at noon today, some people had to wait in line for forty five minutes before they could pick up cases.
Victoria Wilson We were not expecting the turnout that we got today. We’re really, really happy that we did. It just kind of forced us to bring more avocados into the space and get more out. But we’re really happy with the way that Philly kind of just spread this message all around. It really goes to show you that people care about their neighbors and sharing with their neighbors. A lot of people have come here today, and they’ve filled up their trucks saying that they’re going to bring it over the water to Camden. They’re going to bring it up in the Northeast Philadelphia, and they’re going to set up their own stands and give out to their neighbors and communities.
Kris Hill And continues tomorrow from noon until six at FDR Park and again Friday from noon until three. Because of strong demand, Wilson says tomorrow people will be limited to one case of free avocados, but with forty eight avocados in a box, that will still go a long way.
On a final note, there are less than three weeks till Election Day. The deadline for registering to vote in Pennsylvania is Monday, October twenty fourth. You can visit a voter services dot pa dot gov to check your vote, to check your registration status, register to vote or find your polling place for the November eighth election.
Salina Singleton Block by block is produced by Alice Hall, Brujo de La Mancha, Jeff Jones, John Morrison, Maleka Fruean, Michel Gilliard, Houston, Wayne Hunter and us
Kris Hill Kris Hill
Salina Singleton and Selina Singleton.
Kris Hill Brad Linder is our radio news managing editor for p m. Allison Durham is Wfmz radio production and programming coordinator, and Brujo de la Marca is our board operator. We’ll be back in two weeks with a new episode of Block by Block, featuring more stories about issues affecting life in the Philly region.