Small Things Add Up
Transcriber: Irfan Shaji Alamana
Reviewer: Yinchun Rui
And
sex workers taught me how to
organize my home community.
At twenty four, I moved back
home to Memphis, Tennessee.
Very, very excited to change the world.
I knew that single handedly I was
the person that could show up.
And fix any issue. My textbook knowledge
equipped me to handle social injustices,
to be able to look at social
ills with a very,
very thoughtful eye to come up
with any solution needed.
And then I was humbled the social
ills were way bigger than what
I ever anticipated, the issues that plague
my community were things that we
never even talked about in my classes.
So at twenty four with my Ivy
League education from
the University of Pennsylvania, I moved
back home to Memphis, Tennessee,
to have walls. And I didn’t
really know what to do,
but I knew at twenty four that
the responsibility and really
the opportunity existed for
me to be able to serve.
So I went back into my memory banks
to an experience actually,
that happened a year prior
at twenty three,
when I was able to do research with the
Dunbar Institute in Calcutta, India.
And when I got on the plane right before
when they were interviewing us
and letting us know about the opportunity,
they told us that we would be working
with the sex workers union.
I was like, I’m just going to India.
So this is exciting.
We’ll figure out what that
means when we get there.
And so when I got to Calcutta India,
I was really, really, really,
really inspired by the women and their
struggles and more importantly,
their solutions. You can imagine going
into a bank saying that you are
a sex worker is your profession.
You don’t get the loan.
And when your kids go to school, they get
teased and at every layer of your life,
there’s some type of disenfranchisement.
And so this mass of women decided to form
their own union to create their own
schools and to create their own bank,
which is actually what I was there to do.
I wasn’t there to change their
minds about their profession,
to give them any type of
advice on anything.
I was there to measure client satisfaction
with their bank.
They had had their bank in existence
for well over 10 years,
and so we were there as researchers to be
able to figure out things that were
working and outcomes that had come
over the 10 years of them having
a very unique collection model.
They would take sons and daughters
of sex workers and use them
as runners to go from the
brothels to the bank so
the women they weren’t
accustomed to saving,
they hadn’t come from generations of
fiscal savviness to be able to make any
type of dedication to being
wealth builders.
But their belief in small things adding
up made all the difference.
Our study showed that over time,
these women were able to progress out of
their professions into new ventures
and actually turn into entrepreneurs
and become brothel owners.
So over the time of them just
trusting the process,
everything trusting the process, sending
small nominal amounts to their bank,
they were able to accumulate funds that
actually was life altering for them.
So come back to me at twenty four
in Historic Orange Mound,
the oldest black community
in the city of Memphis,
with the issues that I was facing.
I remember that and I’m like, Hmm,
I think we can do something here.
Spare change, everybody has it right.
You’ve already seen that it adds up, and
so we began to collect spare change.
I started the nonprofit Juice
Orange Mound in 2016
and we did our very first collection in
twenty seventeen with 30 volunteers in
two hours. We went to a
third of the community
and we collected asking neighbors for
their spare change. And guess what?
They gave it excitingly a little, you know
, confused about what was going on,
but still spare change was coming.
Spare change came from elder.
Spare change came from
high school students.
Spare change came from people
who identified in the moment
as being addicted to different substances.
Spare change came from prostitute.
Spare change literally in my community
came from every corner of the community.
It didn’t disenfranchise, and so
we collected their spare change
and we were able to accumulate
five hundred
and ninety two dollars in spare change
nominal gifts to the organization with
the belief that we would be able
to do something with it.
Now you’re thinking five hundred ninety
two dollars doesn’t really sound like
a lot, but we have over thirty five
hundred parcels in my community,
and if every house gives five dollars,
every quarterly collection,
we can raise over fifteen
thousand dollars.
Now, if you’re a nonprofit
leader like me, you know,
the a sixty thousand dollar guarantee in
your bank account annually can make
a difference. And if you’re a nonprofit
like me, then you know how to work it.
That 60 can easily turn to 120 with
a little leverage going to other
players to ask them to match
and then asking those players
to match. Right.
You can grow this amount into whatever
it is that you need it to be to serve
your community. At 23, if
I had a closed mind,
I would have missed out on one of
the greatest lessons that
I’ve ever learned.
Undeniably, sex workers taught me how
to organize my home community
and are continuing to equip me with a
methodology to be able to make change.
So to everyone listening. My hope for you
is that you will open your hearts
and open your minds to be able to make
change in your lives. Thank you.