The Farmer in the Swell

[This article appeared in the December 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

Search “Joel Salatin” on YouTube, and you will find him resplendent in a slouch hat, white T-shirt, and jeans, talking about the virtues of sustainable farming. His family-owned farm, Polyface Inc., nestled in the heart of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is fast becoming the most famous sustainable farm in America, in large part due to Salatin’s outspoken advocacy for organic, sustainable, and local food. What many don’t know, however, is the source of Salatin’s passion for sustainable farming: his deep Christian faith. Salatin spoke with Sojourners assistant editor Jeannie Choi about the evils of industrial farming and agribusiness and his vision for healing the land God commissions us to steward.

Jeannie Choi: What’s the vision behind Polyface farm?

Joel Salatin: Healing—healing in all dimensions. We want to develop emotionally, environmentally, and economically enhancing agricultural prototypes throughout the world. We want to heal the relationships of the people involved with the farm and our business and our family. We want to heal the land, soil, air, water, and, ultimately, the food system.

From what disease is our current food system suffering?

Well, when is the last time a farmer went and asked for money from a banker and the banker said, “Well, that’s all well and good. I’m glad you’re going to be able to grow a corn crop. But what is that going to do to the earthworms? Or to the topsoil? Is that going to go down the Mississippi and add to the Rhode Island-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that’s been created because of erosion and run-off chemicals?”

We don’t measure those kinds of things, and yet each of us intuitively understands that those immeasurable or non-quantifiable parts in a business plan are actually the most precious resources we have.

So there is a disconnect between humans and the earth?

Oh, yes. For the first time in civilization, you can actually move into an area, plug your microwave and appliances into energy and not know where it comes from, get food from places and not know where it comes from, hook your pipe up to get water and not know where it comes from, put an outlet pipe in to take your sewage to places you don’t know about, and in effect never have a sense of the ecological umbilical cord that connects you to everything that’s most important.

How did we get here?

I think it has a lot to do with not wanting any kind of relationship with the earth. We talk a lot about relationships—marriage, work relationships, family—but another very critical relationship is the one we have with the nest we’ve been entrusted to steward. This actual divorce from our ecological umbilical is an abnormality in human civilization.

Sometimes I want to go down to [New York’s] Times Square, stand on the sidewalk, and scream at the world, “Folks, this isn’t normal!” It’s not normal to get food in little packages. It’s not normal to live in homes with ‘food nooks’ instead of kitchens. It’s not normal to eat food that you can’t pronounce. All of these things are extremely abnormal and have only come as a result of cheap energy during the industrial food system. So when you look at the continuum of human history, you and I are very much living guinea pigs in a radical experiment that is changing our relationships with each other and the world.

How can we revolutionize the food industry?

Healing the food system would fundamentally flip-flop the political and economic powers of our culture. Wendell Berry says that what’s wrong with us creates more gross national product than what’s right with us. It’s a fantastic observation. Right now, our culture thrives on things being sick. Dead soil brings more people to chemical companies because they need chemical fertilizers, which makes people sick. When people are sick, obviously the medical establishment thrives. If a neighborhood or community’s food system is sick, then of course you need to import food from a foreign country, which stimulates global trade. So when you start talking about healing the food system, we need a fundamental realignment of all the power and money in our culture, and that’s why there is a tremendous amount of inertia against healing the system.

So what can we do? If you want to dream out of the box for a minute, here’s an idea: If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees. What can one person do? We have a sick, evil system, and a healing system, and the question is, which one are you going to feed? Have you gone down to the farmers market or patronized local livestock farms? Or have you had candy bars and cokes? Whichever one you’ve fed is going to get bigger, and the one you’ve starved is going to get smaller.

How does your faith inform your work?

It makes me want to farm like Jesus would if he were here right now, in charge of this place. God actually loved us and provided a salvation experience for us that shapes the way we should, with the same grace and appreciation and respect, honor the creation that God made. It’s in respecting and honoring the “pig-ness” of the pig that we create our ethical and moral background for respecting and honoring the “Tony-ness” of Tony and the “Mary-ness” of Mary. And so it’s how we respect and honor the “least of these” that creates a theological and philosophical framework for how we respect and honor the creation that God made. It's in respecting and honoring the "pig-ness" of the pig that we create our ethical and moral background for respecting and honoring the "Tony-ness" of Tony and the "Mary-ness" of Mary. And so it's how we respect and honor the "least of these" that creates a theological and philosophical framework for how we respect and honor the greatest of these.

Our culture simply views our plants and animals as so many inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate it. I would suggest that a culture that views its life in that respect will be a culture that views its citizens and the citizens of other cultures in the same manipulative and arrogant way.

What would you say to Christians who believe it is their biblical mandate to have dominion over the earth?

“You’re wrong!” (laughing). The scriptures are full of admonitions about creation. God knows when every sparrow falls. The Pentateuch is filled with references. Further, in 1 Corinthians 10:31, Paul says that whatsoever you eat or drink, whatsoever you do, do it all for the glory of God. If I were writing 1 Corinthians, I would have written, “whatsoever you catechize, whatsoever you sing in your hymnal”—I would have made this a very spiritual thing. But Paul didn’t. He took the most mundane, necessary things in life—eating and drinking—as his examples of how much God desires to penetrate into our lives. And so we must ask the question, how would Christ raise these animals? Would Jesus make genetically modified peanuts? Would Jesus apply something to the ground that made three-legged salamanders and sterile frogs? I don’t think he would, and that’s why I don’t—because to the believer, all life must be sacred.

Refusing to Forget North Korea

[This article appeared in the September/October 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

During the 2004 presidential election, North Korea was consistently used as a political football between John Kerry and George W. Bush in debates and media appearances, escalating to an angry phone call from Kerry to The New York Times 50 days before Election Day. Kerry accused the Bush administration of having directed focus away from North Korea’s nuclear threat, “taken their eye off the real ball,” and shifted it to Iraq.

A small group of Korean-American students would have pointed out a different focus problem, however: The United States has grossly ignored the humanitarian crisis suffered by North Korean civilians.

During a Korean-American leadership conference at Yale University, several students realized that reports of famine, inhumane work camps, torture, and ideological enslavement in North Korea no longer captured the attention of U.S. leaders, policymakers, or even humanitarian organizations. Who would bring justice to North Korea? The students decided they would. In 2004, they started Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), the first nonprofit organization solely dedicated to ending North Korea’s humanitarian crisis through education, advocacy, and aid to refugees, according to LiNK’s associate director of awareness Justin Wheeler.

Begun with just five students, today the organization has around 100 chapters in the U.S. and more than 10 chapters elsewhere in the world. “The focus at the time was predominantly on policy,” says Wheeler. “Students realized that there wasn’t really anyone who was focusing on the crisis, so these students took it upon themselves to spread the word, and that’s what keeps us alive today.” Through protests, campus rallies, and calls to congressional leaders for passage of a reauthorization act for North Korean refugees, LiNK—composed largely of second-generation Asian Americans—has proved to be an effective student movement, bringing attention to the forgotten millions suffering in North Korea.

That beginning year also saw LiNK’s first mission to help North Korean refugees get away from the Chinese border and into shelters throughout Southeast Asia and the United States. LiNK’s founder, Adrian Hong, and five other members travelled to the North Korean/Chinese border and led three unaccompanied minors out of China. Today, the young men are happily resettled in the U.S., and the organization continues to house North Korean refugees in undisclosed shelters throughout China and Southeast Asia.

LiNK maintains strict confidentiality about the shelters’ whereabouts, but connects their constituents by updating them on the safety and progress of refugees, particularly when a team of LiNK members and refugees are on the move. Once refugees are brought to safety, LiNK raises funds and provides resources to support successful integration in the refugees’ new home countries. “We use our chapters to help refugees find jobs, learn English, get to doctor’s appointments, etc. Refugees are often placed somewhere around the United States, and often we will have a chapter there,” Wheeler says.

Sadly, since LiNK’s founding in 2004, the situation in North Korea hasn’t changed much. Threats of nuclear war continue to emerge from the country’s leadership. The case of two U.S. journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, detained by North Korea and each sentenced in a closed trial to 12 years in labor camps, is emblematic of the kind of harsh treatment that North Korean citizens also suffer. North Korea has remained a political mystery since isolating itself from the world after its 1953 armistice with South Korea—an agreement renounced by Kim Jon Il this May.

Despite these challenges, the leadership and members of LiNK continue to bring liberty to North Koreans and honor their mission statement: to exist “so that one day the crisis in North Korea will not.”

Making Places and People Bloom

[This article appeared in the May 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

In 1997, Majora Carter, a native of the South Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point, moved back in with her parents to save money after graduating with a Master of Fine Arts from New York University. That’s when she learned about plans by Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration to build a waste transfer station in her community, which already suffered from severe pollution produced by nearby plants. Angry and determined, Carter organized local environmental justice groups to win the fight against the transfer station and install new public green spaces in Hunts Point.

In 2001, Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a sustainable green economy in the South Bronx through education and green jobs training. Her work won her a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2005. She has been called the “Rosa Parks of the green jobs movement.” Carter spoke with Sojourners assistant editor Jeannie Choi about what it takes to eradicate environmental injustice and why the time for a green economy is now.


Jeannie Choi: How do you get people—from community members affected by environmental injustice to investors and politicians—interested in building the green economy?


Majora Carter: People have to see their self-interest in supporting whatever it is that we’re putting out there. When I found out that the city and state planned to build a huge waste facility on our waterfront, I was really alarmed; but many people in the neighborhood weren’t because they were so used to living this way. It wasn’t until I helped make the connection between the waste facilities that were located in the community and the neighborhood’s high childhood asthma rates that people became angry. They saw their self-interest tied up with the environmental injustice in their community, and that’s when they felt the rage that I was feeling.


What other physical effects has pollution had on those living in your neighborhood?
A big clue in public health is asthma rates going up because of the intense nature of the pollution. Diabetes and obesity are also connected because communities like the South Bronx bear a lot of truck traffic. Kids are then unable to play in the streets, which means their health is at risk due to obesity and diabetes. Also, we don’t have the same access to healthy and affordable produce that wealthier places have, and so you have this “food desert.” The last of them, which I think is more onerous, are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are a byproduct of burning fossil fuels. They have been known to cause learning disabilities in young developing minds. And where are they located in high concentrations? In places like the South Bronx.

Kids living in poor communities, who are already suffering from overcrowded schools, have learning disabilities and struggle in school, and are much better candidates to go to jail rather than on to higher education.


What were the key strategies to your 2001 victory against the city’s planned waste transfer site?
Even though this happened in the South Bronx, it was going to have citywide ramifications, so we had public interest lawyers and other environmental justice groups all working together to help create a sustainable solid waste management plan that relied on borough-wide self-sufficiency.

We worked awfully close with the city because we weren’t saying that waste transfer systems should not be in anybody’s backyard. We were saying that everybody needs to handle their own waste, but that’s not the way wealthy white neighborhoods in the city were operating. So we asked ourselves, how do you create legislation that lets each borough clean up after itself?

Recently, legislation was signed that reopened waste facilities around the city so everybody handles their own waste. But there are still politicians in some of the wealthiest parts of the city who run campaigns on closing the waste facilities in their communities. To them I say, you guys produce it, why do you think somebody else should take care of it? But that’s the nature, unfortunately, of this incredibly ridiculous, hyper-consumerist culture that we live in. People want, and they don’t want to take care of it.


What are the biggest fallacies about the green economy in the mainstream media?
That poor people don’t care about the environment. That green can and should cost more, or that green always costs more. And that you can’t alleviate poverty and support the environment at the same time.
But if you look at grassroots projects that invest in poor people—like the program that I pioneered at Sustainable South Bronx called B.E.S.T. (Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training)—you can see that the same people who are written off by most segments of society can blossom in remarkable ways.
B.E.S.T. is one of the first green jobs training programs in the country, and gives folks on the fringes, like single moms, or ex-convicts, the tools of operating within the environmental restoration field, such as wetland restoration, cleaning contaminated land, urban forestry management, and green roof installation.


Tell me about a B.E.S.T. student who stood out to you.
One of my favorite stories is of a young man who came through our program, a really sweet guy who had deep dimples and liked to quote Martin Luther King Jr., the Quran, and the Bible. Once the mass media started to take notice of our work, we had a huge profile in USA Today, and I’m looking at this article and the first paragraph mentions that this young man spent 10 years locked up for armed robbery. And I thought, you’ve gotta be joking! It didn’t even occur to me that somebody that gentle, kind, and loving had that in his background.

That’s when it hit me: His transformation had everything to do with the work he was doing. Horticultural infrastructure development, urban forestry management—all those things provided him with this beautiful outlet to nurture. Studies show without a shadow of a doubt that horticultural therapy works, that when you expose people even to small clusters of nature, even in a very urban area, crime rates go down because people want to be near it.


You’re also an advocate of grassroots organizations being at the table when decisions are made by people in power. What green economy initiatives do you want the Obama administration to take up?
Very simply, I think that the Environ­mental Protection Agency needs to regain its moral authority as the environmental stewards of this country and really push for things like the national grid so that we can actually have renewable energy. One major national problem is that there is no integrated transmission system for energy distribution around the country. In order for the renewable energy economy to really flourish, we’ve got to be able to connect the places in the country that have sources of renewable energy, like the sunny Southwest and the windy Midwest, with places that need renewable energy. If the federal government developed that grid system, we would see more businesses flourish by using renewable clean wind and solar energy.


This past summer you left Sustainable South Bronx to start an environmental consulting firm, the Majora Carter Group. What is the vision for this company?
I realized that the work was not particular to the South Bronx, but rested on the universal idea that when you apply care and resources to even the most challenged situations, beautiful things will grow. So I started the Majora Carter Group to work with municipalities, business leaders, and universities from all around the country as stakeholders.

Our first client is Elizabeth City State University, which is part of the historically black college network, in northeastern North Carolina—an incredibly poor, predominantly rural and black region. The major economic generators down there are mega-hog farms. Unfortunately, the owners bury the excrement in these lined pits, which often leak and then contaminate the area. Elizabeth City State Uni­versity is excited about the possibility of transforming that 21-county region, and so we’re working with them to develop a green economic development plan.


Do faith and spirituality inform your work?
Oh yeah! We are asking our clients to honor other people, to see them with dignity, and to treat them that way. The foundation of what we do is very spiritual in nature. We want people to be authentic. We want people to see each other in love because when you think about it, oppression is as bad for the oppressor as it is for the op­pressed. We have commodified pain in some way, and we don’t want to see the suffering of others. I’m asking folks not just to see the suffering of others but to understand that they could be a part of alleviating it. That is a deeply spiritual endeavor.


What keeps you going?
Understanding that people’s lives have been changed. I know that our work is having an impact and I know that at some point people are going to realize that this is how we need to roll.
My friend Van Jones often says, “Little green fairies are not going to come out of the sky and install solar panels or urban forestry. People are going to do that.” And we need to look at the people. There’s room for everybody.

The Green Industrial Revolution

[This article appeared in the May 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

Throughout Pittsburgh are signs of a city that once pulsed with wealth and prosperity as the steel industry boomed in the early 1900s, only to suffer decline with the fall of American steel in the 1970s. Abandoned factories along the waterfront and boarded-up stone chapels stand like ruins, reminding residents of what once was. Today, the city has more than 14,000 vacant lots, scattered mostly in low-income neighborhoods such as Hazelwood and Larimer.

Amid the urban plight, however, a startup called GTECH—Growth Through Energy and Community Health—is giving Pittsburgh new hope. Founded by three graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University in partnership with Steel City Biofuels, GTECH hopes to revolutionize vacant-land management in an unconventional, earth-friendly way: by planting sunflowers in Pittsburgh’s empty lots.
“Sunflowers improve soil quality and produce seeds that can be turned into biofuel,” says Andrew Butcher, co-founder and CEO of GTECH. “This biofuel can be sold to help offset the cost of vacant land, which is often a prohibitive factor in managing vacant space.” After two years of existence, the organization has planted sunflowers in four Pitts­burgh neighborhoods and has started a job-training program to teach low-income locals how to tend and cultivate the fields.

But GTECH’s strategy is more than just a business model—it’s a vision for a green economy to replace the steel economy of the past. “This is an ideal mechanism to create a platform for green job opportunities,” says Butcher. “The heart of this project is the convergence between multiple sectors in the green economy: renewable energy, agriculture, and waste management environmental services.”

This is music to Charlotte Brody’s ears. As the program director at Green For All, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit intent on building a nationwide green-collar economy, Brody considers GTECH an example of the future of industry. “This is one of those little programs that I think suggests the possibility of what we can do,” Brody says. “I’m pretty fond of what’s going on in Pittsburgh.”

THE MAINSTREAM ENVIRONMENTAL movement in the United States has been a predominantly white, middle-class endeavor, focused on wilderness preservation and governmental regulation. But there has also been a movement against “environmental racism” led by African-American, Latino, Native American, and Asian poor and working-class people.

For example, in 1979, African-American residents of East Houston, Texas, represented by attorney Linda Mc­Keever Bullard, sued Southwestern Waste Management Corp. for “environmental discrimination” for designating black neighborhoods as industrial waste sites. Their victory became a landmark example of low-income minorities fighting against the placement of hazardous facilities in their neighborhoods. Similarly, in 1982, the predominantly African-American community of Warren County, North Carolina, protested a toxic landfill in their neighborhood by blocking trucks carrying chemical waste to a local dump site.

Stepping into this stream of environmental advocacy are the efforts of Van Jones, Green For All’s founder and the newly appointed special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation on the White House Council on Environmental Qua­lity. A Yale Law graduate from Jack­son, Tennessee, Jones founded Green For All in September 2007 to build an environmental movement that includes poor people suffering from environmental racism.

“Unless everyone is included at the decision-making table,” Jones says in his book, The Green Collar Economy, “even the best-intentioned proposals miss chances to do good—and may unwittingly even do harm.”

An example of the law of unintended consequences is the 1980 Superfund law. Superfund legislation was passed by Congress in response to organizing pressure leveraged by a 25-year-old middle-class white woman, Lois Gibbs, who found that her children’s public school was built atop a chemical waste dump in Niagara Falls, New York. The Superfund law taxed petroleum and chemical industries to create a fund for cleaning up hazardous waste sites all over the nation. Unfortunately, a result of all the attention on these hazardous sites was that corporations sought to make them less visible by moving them into poor communities of color.

This kind of racist environmental injustice demands our attention, says Kristin Rothballer, managing director of Green For All. “When I was growing up in the ’80s, everyone talked about saving the whales and saving the trees. But what about saving the kids living in West Oakland who are suffering from asthma because of all the pollution in the community?” Rothballer says, pointing out that even today, the people who most benefit from mainstream environmentalism’s successes are the rich. “Who can afford to buy hybrid cars and organic produce?” asks Rothballer. “There’s been a premium price on things that are green, which has locked a lot of lower-income people out of being able to benefit from the amazing, innovative steps forward that we have taken. In many ways, Green For All is a response to this injustice.”

By working hand-in-hand with government and local communities, Green For All hopes to create a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty by creating a green-collar workforce of men and women trained with skills such as installing solar panels, tending community gardens, and weatherizing buildings. The idea is not new, but to the folks at Green For All, now is the time to take it to a new level. They see it as the most economically viable option out there—and the approach that makes the most sense.

“We have to both change the way people interact with the environment and change the way people interact with each other and the economy at the same time,” says Green For All’s Brody. “And we get the joy of being able to say, ‘We can solve two problems at the same time.’ In fact, they’re the same solution and can’t be solved unless they’re solved together.”

SO HOW DOES a nonprofit organization create an entirely new industry? The effort is three-pronged. First, Green For All works at the federal level, advocating policies that would put Americans to work retrofitting and repowering the country.

One of the earliest successes for Green For All was the passage of the Green Jobs Act of 2007, which authorized $125 million per year to create an energy efficiency and renewable energy worker training program. This pilot program trains workers for green jobs in a range of industries, such as retrofitting buildings for energy conservation and sustainability. The legislation became Title X of the Energy Independence and Security Act, which Congress passed and President Bush signed in late 2007, but the funds were not appropriated until 2009, when it was increased to $500 million in President Obama’s economic stimulus package. It is now up to the Department of Labor to administer the monies in consultation with the Department of Energy. Green For All is working to ensure that communities across the nation are accessing the funds to help the poor.

“We want to create a much better set of evaluation tools to make sure that the people who need these jobs are at the table helping to create the plans that are going to work for their community,” Brody insists. “That’s why we’re gearing up to be conduits between the legislative language and what people need for that language to make a difference in their communities.”

The organization’s second objective, then, is to work alongside local municipalities and businesses to create examples of how a green economy can be built through a joint effort of green business enterprise and government-funded training programs for low-income community members with high barriers to employment due to a criminal record, illiteracy, or a lack of basic job-readiness skills.

Vien Truong, senior policy associate at Green For All, believes that joining federal regulations with local business strategies will create the market to support a green economy built upon the labor of trained green-collar workers. “When the market is honed to meet the demands for renewable energy, that’s how we’re making an impact on the local level,” Truong says.

A notable example is the Oakland Green Jobs Corps. Developed by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an Oakland-based nonprofit founded by Van Jones in 1996, the Corps is a training program for young adults that provides “soft skills” such as job readiness, financial management, and environmental awareness, as well as vocational “hard skills” in key sectors such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and green construction. During the three-month training period, trainees earn $9 an hour for 20 hours a week, after which the trainees are placed in six-month paid internships with local businesses that pay a living wage. The program was launched in October 2008 with 20 trainees, and Green For All hopes it will be duplicated in other cities.

“What we are trying to do is create really good examples of the kind of programs we can create at the federal level, so that cities and counties can be gearing up to take advantage of these federal opportunities,” Brody says. By supporting programs such as the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, and ex­trap­olating salient principles that can be shared with other like-minded organizations in other parts of the country, Green For All hopes to be­come a networking agent that links practitioners with one another, lifts up best practices, and leverages successes to build a comprehensive national move­ment.

“Part of our philosophy is that we don’t have all the answers at Green For All,” says policy associate Stacy Ho. “So what we’re trying to do is give technical assistance to build communities of practice and link practitioners together. They are the ones who know what works. If they talk to each other, then they are able to arrive at better solutions.”

To facilitate these conversations, Green For All’s third objective is to partner with five “green-collar cities”—Atlanta, Pitts­­burgh, Philadelphia, Seat­­tle, and Newark, New Jersey—and work closely with local leaders and grassroots organizations to support programs on a micro level that demonstrate the efficacy of green job training programs. One example is Newark’s program to weatherize 30 homes of senior citizens, which lowered energy costs and emissions for the seniors while simultaneously creating green jobs. Another is Pittsburgh’s GTECH sunflower project.

“We will travel to these communities and meet with major decision-makers at the local level to spread our vision and message,” says Rothballer. “We work closely with these cities to figure out what it really takes to build strong training programs and strong capacities in the communities to hire people out of these programs and retrofit a city.”

With the passage of President Obama’s economic recovery bill and Van Jones’ March appointment to the president’s Council on Environmental Qua­lity, Green For All faces an un­precedented opportunity to integrate its strategies into America’s future economic growth. Its current main objective is to get local communities involved in accessing and spending recovery dollars toward building a green economy.
In a conference call hosted by Green For All about the president’s recovery bill, Jones urged listeners to go directly to city hall, city council meetings, and mayors’ offices to ask what funds will be available and to propose green projects that require funding. “It’s time for us to go from hope to change, from inspiration to integration,” Jones said. “We have to capture these dollars and use them to put people to work. This could be a huge opportunity for our movement.”

While Green For All is not religiously affiliated, the staff believes there is a special opportunity for faith communities to utilize the funds of the recovery act. “Faith-based organizations are able to directly influence their membership toward helping address the needs of the communities,” says Ho. More important than logistical strength, however, is the faith-based community’s calling to honor the inherent connection between faith, justice, and creation care—a connection similar to that which inspires Green For All.

“As we seize this moment to really shift our world, what drives us is a desire to restore community,” says Rothballer. “When we think about what it means to take care of people and the planet, the heart and soul of our movement is about how we commune with each other.”