Did Someone Say Affordable Housing?

Words have power… and no other word in this current environment has quite as much power as the word affordable. If you want to start a culture war, couple affordable with housing and use the two in a sentence together, and the imagery that is typically visualized are people, particularly people of color, living in subsidized housing. This image usually coalesces people both black and white to line up to voice their opposition about what it will do to their community, when in fact affordable housing means nothing more than safe, decent, and affordable. Furthermore, affordable, by definition as a standalone, means nothing more than not having a cost that is too high.

If we were to further examine how affordability income is defined, it is commonly accepted that a home is considered affordable when a household spends no more than 30% of its income on either rent or a mortgage. Here are the numbers for practical purposes:

•  According to research provided by city sources, $50,282 is the average yearly salary for a worker in Duval County.  
• That equates to roughly $24.17 an hour, $966 per week, or $3,867 per month.  
• Therefore, a housing burden should not be more than $1,160 per month.

Obviously, these numbers fluctuate depending on where you are on the professional scale; however, Duval County has entire communities in which earning $50,000 a year makes you the exception rather than the norm. Since the pandemic, the cost of housing has been commoditized at such a rate that housing is no longer seen as an essential need but is more of a luxury item! No matter if we like it or not, “safe,” “decent,” and “affordable” are all adjectives that are associated with one’s capacity to pay. If we are not careful, the aforementioned will be replaced with affordable housing that means nothing more than a roof, walls, and a door– completely foregoing “safe” and “decent.”

Communities across the country have unconsciously stood by while increasing numbers of properties are concentrated in the hands of private investors, single-family housing supply is being squeezed, the number of single-family homes being converted to rental properties has more than tripled, monthly rental rates continue to rapidly rise, and a larger portion of the population is subject to potential eviction. This inaction has consequences in the form of teachers being homeless while teaching our most vulnerable citizens; or hospitals and nursing homes being understaffed because nurses are having to live an hour or more from work because adequate housing near hospitals is unavailable.

Our current housing crisis and the one that preceded it has shown us that if left to our own devices, institutional power, and its need to fill corporate coffers, will trump the average consumer every time. The mitigating factor we the people have is our capacity to leverage the government on our behalf. Therefore, now is the time for our elected officials to lean in and create sensible housing policies/solutions that work for we the people we the people before that brand new electric vehicle has to double as a mobile home in the parking lot of the local Walmart.  

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Gun #Everybody Got A Pistol

On Saturday, June 4^th, LISC Jacksonville and community partners from all over the country will take part in a national day of recognition called Wear Orange to recognize the victims of gun violence. While personally I don’t purport to be someone who is vested in the gun argument, what I do acknowledge is that guns kill people. No matter if the assailant is a mentally challenged person with a penchant for racist ideology or someone who has lost their cool and reacts to an offense, the outcome is still the same: someone had access to a gun, and now someone or some people are dead or seriously injured. According to research provide by the Pew Research Center, in 2020, 45,222 people met their maker due to gun violence. Another way to look at this is every day, 124 people in the United States die due to a gun. 

 

In communities that LISC serves across the country, “residents are 10 times more likely to die from gun homicides and 18 times more likely to be injured by guns,” based upon research provide by Everytown for Gun Safety, a leading voice in the area of gun safety advocacy. To make this point even more salient, every single day, 30 African Americans will die from gun violence. As of this writing, according to data provided by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office there have been 50 murders so far in Jacksonville. What is even more shocking is that nationally, according to the latest CDC report homicide is the leading cause of death amongst young Hispanics and African Americans between the ages of 10-24. 

 

On June 4^th, LISC Jacksonville will pause and stand with other community organizations locally and across the country to Wear Orange to honor survivors of gun violence and to commemorate those whose lives ended because of gun violence. We serve with and stand alongside community partners such as Moms Demand Action, Everytown for Gun Safety and those victims both living and deceased to collectively acknowledge the senselessness of gun violence. It is also to acknowledge the trauma that comes as a result of gun violence.

 

For LISC Jacksonville, June 4^th is not about the political posturing inherent in the gun discussion. It is about acknowledging this issue relative to the communities we serve, and the implications gun violence has on them. It is about affirming our position regarding the outcomes and interventions that we know work for those very same communities. Our work seeks to create systems of safety amid various forms of violence in our most vulnerable neighborhoods. 

 

We cannot and should not stand by and allow the narrative to continue that suggests if you live in certain areas of town, you are likely to die due to gun violence. Our commitment to better outcomes has to be bigger and bolder than that. Furthermore, if we are to address the current affordable housing crisis, we must be prepared to address the issue of gun violence in these same communities because they must be a part of a desirable and larger housing solution. 

That's My Truth and I AM Sticking To It

I AM 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen

Executive Director LISC JAcksonville

Transitioning Families Out of Poverty

One of the major catalysts when it comes to doing work in under-resourced communities is FACTS. It has always been my personal belief that emotions are simply not enough to sustain the work over time. There is always bigger and more compelling work to do. Furthermore, people who are not engaged in the space simply cannot fathom some of the disparities that exist right outside their door. They tend to be idealized as far-off scenarios that simply do not exist within their very own communities. A few examples of FACTS that have guided our work include:

• While the national unemployment rate hovers near 5.2% and locally near 5.4%, in the zip codes in which LISC Jacksonville is most active, the rate is closer to 12%.

• In the four council districts that LISC Jacksonville does the majority of its work, there are over 61,000 people living in poverty, which represents 41% of the total population living in poverty within Duval County.

LISC Jacksonville’s work in the space of Family Wealth Creation was specifically born out of the above referenced FACTS and the need to address such. While our work alone does not represent a magic potion to get people out of poverty, it does represent a prescriptive approach to giving people back some of the power and dignity that poverty takes from them.

In Jacksonville, Family Wealth Creation for LISC is centered around our work within three areas. First is our Financial Opportunity Centers (FOCs), which are career and financial coaching service centers that focus on the financial bottom line for individuals living with low-to-moderate incomes. The cornerstone of the FOC model is providing these services in an integrated way—rather than as stand-alone services—and with a long-term commitment to helping clients reach their goals, while simultaneously narrowing racial wealth gaps in historically under-resourced communities.

The second aspect of our work around Family Wealth Creation focuses on heir’s property. Our goal here is to help transfer generational wealth by assisting with financial and estate planning, probate, clearing titles, and consolidating property ownership. Our research has led us to discover that heirs face an increased risk of forced sale or eviction, cannot qualify for rehab programs or secure financing for needed repairs, and cannot qualify for loss mitigation programs when facing foreclosure. All of which can lead to deterioration of housing stock or loss of homeownership.

The final leg of our work relative to Family Wealth Creation focuses on home production. While LISC itself is not a developer, our role in creating family wealth centers on our ability to provide the necessary capital for developers to build affordable homes in areas that are underserved. This is of particular importance given that research continuously shows that purchasing a home tends to be the single largest investment that a person will make in their lifetime. To that end, over the next 12 – 18 months, LISC Jacksonville resources will be used to bring roughly 229 affordable housing units to the market, which includes Project Boots.

In the end, we recognize that the work of transitioning families out of poverty into sustainable lifestyles that afford them the ability to have options is not done alone nor in a vacuum. It takes a concerted effort on the part of several entities like United Way, Lift Jax, the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, the Community Foundation, the Delores Barr Weaver Legacy Fund and Lutheran Social Services, just to name a few who have come together.

Redefining the “Gentry”

One of the hardest challenges I have faced in my professional career is to conduct systems change. It’s emotionally, spiritually, and physically taxing. Systems are built to sustain a process, and over time as they become more engrained into our collective consciousness, their inability to be moved becomes just as resistant to the forces that would cause them to be altered. Poverty is a system, lack of access to affordable housing is a system, and all the accompanying social ills that give way to negative outcomes all feed into a larger system. 

In creating Project Boots, our collective goal was to look at what aspect of the larger system we could disrupt through our collective work. We understood that by creating affordable housing we have disrupted the grip of systemic poverty, which ultimately gives way to family wealth creation. We also understood that by creating pathways to family wealth creation, we availed ourselves to better educational outcomes. Those educational outcomes ultimately allowed participants a more informed seat at the collective table.  

However, our greatest challenge remained in redefining the idea of who the gentry was and how we would intertwine them with the people that were indigenous to the neighborhood. Therefore, we started with people who were reared and developed in the community (the gentry) and saw their success as a result of – and not in spite of – the current conditions the larger community found itself in. Having them at the table helped us establish a metaphorical bar that we hope will become aspirational for those that are currently there. 

At the same time, we simultaneously crafted programmatic offerings for new residents that met their sociological, ontological, political, and fiscal needs. For example, incentivizing new residents through a matching savings program that will be the seed money for their down payment and closing costs. Program participants must commit to attending monthly workshops that address the aforementioned areas and agree to build their homes in the community.

The state of the indigenous residents was not lost upon us, and how they factored into our collective work was broad and required more of a systems approach because of the varying partnerships. Those partners included, but were not limited to LIFT JAX, United Way, the Community Foundation, the City of Jacksonville, and Goodwill just to name a few. Out of this partnership came a refurbished community market, the Melanin Market, and a home repair program, by which over 100 homes will have some work done to them by 2022. 

Therefore, as you can see, we collectively redefined what gentrification was by simply redefining who we identified as the gentrifier. We redistributed the wealth by starting with those who are indigenous to the community and giving them an equity stake in what was happening on the ground. The conclusion is not written yet as we are still writing chapters to our book. However, we do have a solid work plan that will allow us to build next steps that raise the bar for the future. 

That's My Truth and I AM Sticking to it...

I AM 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen

The Impact of Strategic Partnerships

Let me start by saying the work of revitalizing distressed communities is HARD. The navigation of issues associated with social detriments that ultimately impact social outcomes is inextricably tied. However, in distressed communities, the consequences of failure can be the difference between life and death. Ask anyone who does this work, and they will have countless stories about the challenges associated with the de-coupling of inter-related social issues that impact distressed communities. However, they will also say that strategic partnerships are essential to producing success.

Further, the challenge with revitalizing the aforementioned communities is poverty begets every other social detriment and one must be prepared to navigate the impact it has before change can begin. Therein lies the work of LISC. By coalescing around people and organizations that are closest to the problem, you afford yourself the greatest chance for success, as suggested by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in his seminal work “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” This same belief system is what led to the creation of LISC back May of 1980. 

LISC’s approach to revitalizing distressed communities centers around a fundamental systems-change model commonly referred to as collective impact. This approach to revitalization allows LISC, its partner organizations, and the people who are indigenous to the community to develop a common set of metrics, a common dialog relative to said metrics, a common agenda, and a set of mutually reinforced activities that will drive revitalization. In most cases, LISC serves as the entity bringing parties together — a convener of sorts. In action, this looks like the following:

• Working alongside local and state government leaders
• Listening to resident leaders and developing their internal capacity
• Bringing innovative solutions based upon our national scope and reach
• Working to remove barriers that institutional policies have created

Locally, evidence of this process can be seen throughout neighborhoods such as Springfield, Historic Eastside, the Rail Yard District, and Metro North, just to name a few. LISC Jacksonville’s catalytic investments in projects that have served as transformational opportunities for both neighborhoods and the larger city are north of $100 million dollars and $365 million dollars in terms of dollars leveraged.  

North Point Town Center

While the dollars are laudable and speak to the charitable nature of our donors and our capacity to make philanthropic dollars work, the transformation relative to place is just as impressive. Fostering real change and revitalization within our most vulnerable communities takes a collective effort. It is not a singular venture that can be undertaken by one entity successfully. Our quality of life and even our projection of who we are as a city is tied to our ability to develop strategic partnerships for the greater good. The work LISC does in the communities we work in, along with our broad list of partners, simply reflects the success of partnership at its highest and broadest level, achieving the greatest good for our most vulnerable neighbors and communities.

Housing Resiliency is a LISC Priority

Resilience as a scholastic theory has been evolving over the past 70-80 years and has enjoyed a renaissance in the past two or three decades. However, I would argue that resilience as a practical form of survival for under-resourced communities and BIPOC people has always been simply a way of life. Under-resourced communities as a whole have never had the luxury of sitting back and waiting for market corrections to change their outcome. They have always had to have a spirit of resiliency if they wanted to survive.

I would offer it is that spirit of resiliency that has helped LISC as a national organization grow to over 35 markets across the country. However, unlike any other time in our country’s history, resiliency has been tested in every form within the last five years. To that end, LISC Jacksonville, like many of our partners, has taken up resiliency as one of the core tenements that guide our work. On the ground, that translates into three fundamental strategies for us in the area of Affordable Housing:

• Production – We view the work associated with Project Boots addresses this. Project Boots is our bold, audacious plan to work with our local CDC’s and for-profit builders to build homes that meet the demands of essential workers (teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters, etc.). It is my belief that we have to make neighborhoods, particularly those north of downtown, destinations to live for the class of workers previously referenced. 
• Preservation – This includes our work associated with home repair. Indigenous people to a community must be supported because they are the fiber and the back story to all that has happened there. Therefore, as a resiliency strategy, we have made home repair a part of our Affordable Housing work.
• Protection – Our work in this area is probably the work I am most excited about because it addresses the issue of heirs’ property and the residential property appraisals and taxation system within some of our most vulnerable communities. It also affords us an opportunity to partner with the University of Florida’s Shimberg Center for Housing Studies and other key partners. 

Over the next nine months, LISC will invest $25,000 in legal services to preserve title ownership and sustain $1 million of assessed home values, which furthers LISC’s Project 10X goal of generating lasting equity and wealth through homeownership.

While the work of LISC Jacksonville is no panacea relative to affordable housing, it represents one aspect of the work that has to be done in the resiliency space. It represents more than the occasional lip service and scholastic treatment that is often levied upon those who live in under-resourced communities.

LISC is Larger Than Jacksonville

There was a quote that I heard recently on a commercial and it suggested that “size was everything.” As I reflect on that and look at the scope of work conducted by LISC Jacksonville, I have to smile and say I tend to agree. I agree in as much as our size has allowed us to partner with the City of Jacksonville to address some of the most pressing issues that face our under-resourced communities. It has allowed us to partner with Fortune 500 companies to deploy capital during the COVID-19 pandemic in an unprecedented manner. Finally, our size nationally has allowed us to leverage and develop a technical resource base that serves over 38 major metropolitan areas and rural communities.

While to a great degree our size does matter, LISC Jacksonville has not lost sight of the humanity our work requires or the directional dexterity that is often required when you are working with some of the most under-resourced communities. I would offer that it’s all those elements combined – size, humanization of the issue, and dexterity – that puts us at the front lines of our work and makes us the go-to partner for resource and programmatic deployment.

To that end, much of the aforementioned is maximized when we as a local office partner with our national team to bring resources and programmatic offerings to Jacksonville, such as the Uber Vaccination Program, which provides rides to vaccination locations at no cost. We have also partnered with Chipotle’s Juneteenth “Round Up For Change” initiative and the Macquarie Group Foundation to garner support for our work around criminal justice reform. These are just a few examples, with much more to come, of how partnering with those outside our county’s borders can have a direct impact in our own back yard. 

In this newsletter, we also address how to leverage the power of our national office in the areas of disaster recovery and resiliency. And yet, all of this is still just a taste of everything that is possible. While size can be relative, I would argue that LISC nationally and locally have maximized our size and abilities to generate an unprecedented level of impact in our under-resourced communities and beyond. And as our community increasingly recognizes the positive, city-wide economic and other impacts of uplifting our most challenged neighborhoods, LISC – both locally and nationally – will continue to play a leading role in bringing the necessary resources to the table to improve the quality of life for our most vulnerable neighbors and our city overall.

Getting to the Root of It

I was recently challenged with the question of how LISC Jacksonville in particular gets to the “root cause” of what constitutes our work. After reflecting a bit, I came away with the belief that we, meaning LISC, would have to have a solution to detangling poverty. While I do believe that there are many smart people within our organization, I also fully understand the issue is far too complex for one organization to have all the solutions. Furthermore, I am a practitioner of systems thinking, which suggest that problems such as poverty are part of a wider social issue.

To that end, LISC nationally has decided to address those “root cause” issues through an aggressive plan called Project 10X. Locally, that translates into three distinct programmatic offerings that reflect our local capacity to alter those issues that lead to generational poverty: Project Boots, Family Wealth Creation, and Financial Opportunity Centers® (FOCs).

First and foremost, Project Boots is our way of creating generational wealth through the mechanism of home ownership. Research is clear that homeownership is perhaps the most common form of generational wealth creation, and we are targeting our LISC-supported communities as the place to start. However, what makes our work so unique is that we are targeting essential workers as program participants.

Secondly, in terms of our work to address other underlying issues that impact generational wealth is our work in the area of Family Wealth Creation. Our goal here is to help transfer generational wealth by assisting with financial and estate planning, probate, clearing titles, and consolidating property ownership. 

Lastly, in our efforts to address “root cause,” we continue to deepen our work within our FOCs, which are career and financial coaching service centers that help low- and moderate-income people build effective money habits and focus on the financial bottom line. Currently, we have three centers in Jacksonville with a goal of adding one a year for the next three years. 

I will be the first to admit that in isolation our work alone will have very little success. The “root causes” are entirely too intertwined with large-scale systemic issues to change. However, when we partner with other agencies and engage in a systematic approach to change, we can get at the source of what holds back our most under-resourced communities.

We will have more to share about these initiatives in the coming months that we look forward to sharing with you.

The “Why” Behind Investments in Historic Eastside

 One of my favorite “live” albums of all time is Frankie Beverly and Maze Live in New Orleans. During one of the intros to his song “Southern Girls,” he states that people asked him why he did a live album in New Orleans, to which he replied, “Why not ya dig.” That response is what comes to mind when I’m asked why LISC Jacksonville continues to invest in Historic Eastside with the Eastside Home Repair Program, discussed in this newsletter, and is launching a program in September called “Project Boots.” 

While the aforementioned quip may be more satire than anything, the reasons for “why” Historic Eastside are both personal and strategic. First and foremost, I spent the majority of my youth being shaped and molded by the community called Historic Eastside, but during my time as a kid we simply identified it as “Out East.” The myriad of families that called “Out East” home reflected a pathway to success for myself and many of my friends. The postal worker lived next to the social worker who lived next to the teacher who lived next to the longshoreman who lived next to the lawyer was a visible possibility of what any of us could and eventually would become.

However, as access become more available to me and many of my peers and disinvestment became more common, what we knew and appreciated became a distant memory, leaving in its wake an aggregation of poverty and all the accompanying consequences. You may ask again why the investment in Historic Eastside and I will simply say again, “Why not?”

LISC’s investments in Historic Eastside do not represent a singular investment in a social program with the hopes that the people will somehow be better. Our investments in Historic Eastside represent a belief in the enterprises that have been tried and true in terms of disrupting the entanglements that poverty and lack of solid investments bring. During the last 10 years, LISC Jacksonville has invested in people, homes, and technical assistance to empower the people who are closest to the issue with the tools to be a part of the change they want to see. We have partnered with organizations ranging from the United Way to LIFT JAX to Operation New Hope to get the work done.

Our latest work, including the Eastside Home Repair Program and soon-to-be-announced Project Boots, represents our latest iteration in terms of getting that done. It represents our deepest dive to date in terms of transforming a neighborhood by making Historic Eastside a destination where people want to live without displacing those who currently reside there. It is LISC Jacksonville’s belief that through a mix of corporate philanthropy, social responsibility on the part market enterprise, municipal policy, and investment we can collectively work together to deliver a product to market that gets east siders back home and becomes a destination for others.

Therefore, I say, when people ask me why LISC Jacksonville makes investments like these in Historic Eastside, I simply say, “Why not ya dig?”

My Confession

Confession…

I 

AM 

Conflicted 

I like everyone else was waiting with baited breath, particularly Black America on the verdict of Derek Chauvin and while I was relived in the sense he was found guilty I found myself conflicted.  Conflicted in the sense that “accountability” is a thing when the life of a person of color is held in the balance.  It’s as if Lady Justice has the capacity to develop a level of spontaneous capriciousness when a black body is involved at the hands of law enforcement. 

Today justice was served, but bills are still past due for Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Corey Jones, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, Matthew Williams and Eric Garner just to name a few.  Further, my conflict lies in the FACT the aforementioned and countless others not named here will NEVER see justice or accountability.   They will only see settlements and Lady Justice will continue on remaining blind, deaf and willfully ignorant to them and their subsequent deaths.  Therein again lies my conflict.  

As I said before I am happy justice was served and I pray the Floyd family has found solace in the fact that someone will be held accountable for the death of their loved one.  However, I have been conditioned to know that neither my degrees, my 800 credit score, my relative good standing in the community, my nomination for an Image Award or anything else will save me if my movements are sudden and an officer of the law determines he or she felt threaten.  In some cases it might not even save me if I am in my own home.  I can just as easily be another name in the platoon of names that look like me who were killed at the hands of law enforcement and no one was ever held accountable for my death. 

My conflict is both real and heavy and is part of the duality I labor with every day. If I am honest it’s the double consciousness that W.E.B Du Bois talked about.  Knowing that I must navigate a dual justice system that has the capacity to turn a blind eye to my cause and call for justice and accountability.  This reality has made me condescending when it comes to verdicts like Derek Chauvin's. 

As I reflect today the system simply worked, but yesterday (Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, etc.) it didn’t and tomorrow it may not especially if there is not a preponderance of evidence to make it.  The burden of proof George Floyd’s death and subsequent Derek Chauvin’s conviction left for others to have to establish simply to get justice is untenable and poses a problem that mutes my capacity to celebrate. Because what I know is that between 2015 – 2020 people who identified as Black (1,480 or 296 people each year over 5 years) were killed by law enforcement and very few of the people involved saw a courtroom.  Let alone a trial.

So pardon me if my exuberance is tempered by a scoreboard that reads them 296 me 1.

That’s my truth and I AM sticking to it…

I AM 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen  

The Cost

As a generality I would venture to say black men never want to be martyrs.  However, the almost daily public execution of black men has created martyrs of many men without their permission.  The frequency at which this is happening, I am embarrassed to say, has rendered me numb to the news of another black man’s death.  See at one point, a small part of me used to die when I heard that a black man met his death in a senseless manner and it somehow got blasted into my consciousness.  I would spiritually, intellectually and emotionally mourn his passing as if I knew him, when in fact our only connectivity was race, gender and the news.  I would chide the collective community for what I considered our collective carelessness and normalizing his death because I wanted to live, and no matter who he was or what he did I am sure that on his worst day or in his worst moment he did too. 

 

Fast forward to now and my spirit has intersected with the Law of Self Preservation and the Law has won; which suggests that I cut off that which may harm me, and the weightiness of black men dying is a lot to bear. Now you add law enforcement to the mix of participants, and the ask becomes entirely too much.  At least for me.  What’s more grim and heavier relative to law enforcement is the movie-like appeal their role in the death of black men has taken on (Cops = Good Guys, Black Men = Bad Guys).  The implications and permanence of good guys versus bad guys and the death of said bad guy being uploaded almost daily to my psyche has created a cycle of social confusion that I just can’t/refuse to carry around. 

 

I would venture to say death at the hands of those who may have some real or imagined beef is one thing, but layer in those who took an oath to protect and serve and it becomes akin to the Chinese torture method of lingchi (death by a thousand cuts).  Therefore, as a means of coping I chose to mentally check out and preserve ME instead of waiting and watching while I die a spiritual and emotional slow death. 

 

This is not to say I have become or intend to become any less of a conscious objector to the spiritual, intellectual and social genocide that is playing out before me.  I just had to make a choice and the frequency of those thousand cuts made me rethink my collective actions.  What does that mean or what does that look like I am not sure, but what I do know is it doesn’t look like me clicking on or watching every tragic story about a black man dying.  I simply don’t have room at the inn for that.  

 

That’s my truth and I AM sticking to it…

 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen

 

904Live.com

Truth as I See It

The discernment of truth from fiction has never been as arduous a task as it seems to be these days.  Outside of the human element to flower the truth, the flowering of the truth as manufactured by artificial intelligence has made discernment and truth seeking a conscious task.  So much so that there are articles that focus solely on “Best Practices” for discovering the truth. 

Imagine the work one must go through in every aspect of his or her life to get to the point of making intelligent decisions based upon facts.  Also take into account that according to research humans make upwards of 35,000 decisions a day.  I don’t know about you, but I want to have some universal truths around certain aspects of my life.  I want to believe without much thought that the food that I eat, the air I breathe, the institutions I depend upon (government, religious, etc.) are operating with my best interest at heart and truth is at core of those entities.

I frame this particular musing in light of truth because what the recent protesting has brought to bear is how many of my white brethren have been vested in facts that simply are not grounded in truth.  See what the deaths of Armaud Arbery, George Floyd and Brianna Taylor’s death has shown white people is the ghost of race and racism that black people see are real and are not just figments of a time gone by.  It has made plain that people of color complaints of a systematic ideology based solely upon the color of one’s skin can both be a cause of death and or an economic barrier. 

However, if there was a silver lining to the issues of today is the fact that when I look at the front lines of the revolution there seems to be a shared responsibility in terms of moving humanity forward.  Which brings me back to truth.  What the revolution has further done is made my white brothers and sisters look in the mirror and juxtapose the untruths their parents have been raised to believe about black and brown people against the truths they as young adults have grown to know for themselves.  It’s hard to justify death and systematic inequality when you see it in real time and right before your eyes.  

While white supremacy spun at its unconscious normal rate the pandemic slowed the world down to a crawl.   Making the entire world acknowledge separate and unequal treatment, particularly here in America.  While a resolution is still TBD that will quell the Negrophobia that has gripped the country for over 400 years what is happening now makes some of us hopeful.  At the very least it gives those that went on before me solace that at least the revolution moved from Soutel to San Marco and from Auburn Ave to the doors of CNN.

That’s My Truth and I AM sticking to It…

I AM 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen

Fathers Day Speech Manuscript

Giving Honor to God for allowing me to share this moment and space with you.  In this day and time with so much going on within the world and within our own community the ability to be here with you I don’t take for granted.  I often say somewhere and someplace a 48 year brother just took his last breath so again I AM just thankful to be here with you.  Secondly, I would like to thank my man Bo Gator for asking me to share this moment with you brothers.  The ability to be in a room of conscious men who have taken up the mantle of fatherhood in such a deliberate fashion is such an energizing experience for me and to not be here would almost be criminal.  Lastly, I want to thank you the “FATHERS, the wanna be FATHERS and all the dudes who fill in as FATHERS for being here.  As a reasonably new father in terms of name I know how thankless at times our role can be.  We often get the worst gifts, the least amount of credit when things go well and ALL the credit when things go bad.  It’s funny just the other day I was doing some reflection and it came to me that we don’t even have a song.  I mean there is “Dear Mama,” “I’ll Always Love My Momma,” and just plain ole “Momma.” 

To that end I won’t hold you long, but I wanted to share with you what I see as the 3 paradigms of manhood, but more importantly how those things fit into the paradigm of fatherhood.  But before I do that allow me to say by no way shape form or fashion do I see myself as some sort of parental expert but I do see myself as a father sharing his thoughts about fatherhood with other fathers. That being said here we go.  

1.    We have to be our own truth tellers.  It is my belief that we have internalized so many of the untruths about who we are as black men particularly as fathers that sometimes we find ourselves representing and even quoting the very lies that were told about us.  Matter of fact here are a few that I often hear that I want to simply dispel. 

a.    There are more black men in prison than in college 

For the record, there is NOT and I repeat there are NOT more Black men in prison than there are in college.  Matter of fact according to the Department of Justice, the U.S Census Bureau and the National Center for Educational statisticsthere are approximately 1.4 million black men in college versus 840,000 in prison and this number is inclusive of federal, state and local jails.  However, the education numbers didn’t even take into account some of the large state HBCU’s like FAMU or TN State, etc.  

b.    If the black community had more back men particularly fathers taking care their families, then communities wouldn’t be in the shape they are in

According to the National Center for Health Statistics when it comes to Black men and their families particularly with children under 5 for which the data was kept Black fathers led every group including white men in terms of time spent with their children, reading to their children, eating a meal with their children, playing with their children and even giving their children baths.  That is for those who live in and outside of the house. 

c.    Brothers don't get married and have more children out of wedlock than anyone else  

In terms of marriage according to the same source above black men are no more likely to be married or not married than any other racial group.  However, our lack of commitment to the institution has somehow made us the scapegoat for what’s wrong when the fact of the matter is black marriage has always been a fragile institution since the days of slavery when master was the determining factor on who got married and who didn’t.  Not to cast any type of shade or downplay what’s going on at the Boarder today, but African Americans been getting separated from the parents since our introduction into this country.  

However, by a show of hands how many of you have heard or in some cases even repeated the narratives I just referenced.  

That being said as I mentioned earlier we have to be our own truth tellers and be willing to stand in our truth and what that doesn’t allow you to do particularly those of you in this room is to be willfully ignorant because the one thing you can’t do is unknow the truth and the truth is we are not what we get told we are as black men and particularly as black fathers everyday.  

2.    We are as the late Derrick Bell wrote in his book “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism” the faces at the bottom of the well.  However, what we don’t often realize or realize to late is there is wisdom down there and we particularly as black fathers and specially as black men must do is find a way to communicate that wisdom to our children.  For as long as I have been doing this work involving community I am continuously amazed at how many of us spend our days trying NOT to be that face. That somehow in the midst of everything that we will accomplish our individual accomplishments will somehow be the ID badge we need to gain access to a better quality of life.  While having access is not a bad thing at all where it turns sour is when OUR access becomes insularly from the collective struggle of our larger community. No matter how we point to erroneous statistics and believe you the individual are the exception to the rule the global minority will always remind you that you are NOT and as black fathers that can be a detriment to us. So the wisdom and tenacity that has sustained us as Black men and was forged in us through the middle passage and seared into us through slavery and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement and allowed us to come through the crack epidemic and the prison industrial complex has to be instilled into our children because I will tell you from my lens WE are producing a collective of smart yet delusional generation of children.  It’s beyond criminal when we as Black men walk away from our children and leave sisters to navigate child rearing alone.  And no amount of Jordan’s or KD’s or even monetary contributions can create what kids are going to need that only comes through time and your presence.  

3.     Finally, in the words of my dear brother the late Orrin Reddick “We All We Got.”  In other words we are our brother’s keeper and that in and of itself means that we have to hold each other accountable.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise it is NOT rough out here.  Our children and their children’s children are inheriting a world where the rate of change is unprecedented.  Therefore, we have to step up.  We have to help each other step up.  At the same rate, we have to hold brothers accountable, just like we do when it comes time for putting gas in the car or his half on the hotel bill on a road trip, weed, his part of the bill at the restaurant, we have to do the same when it comes to their children.  We cannot afford to stick our heads in the sand when we know our boy or main man got kids and won’t take care of them.  That has to be a deal breaker for us.  And no sister can keep him from that.  You can’t let that be his excuse let alone your excuse.  We have to have the same level of vigilance about seeing our kids as they do about collecting child support.  

And when it comes to our kids we have to be prepared to meet contempt with outrage, we have to be prepared to meet complacency with a sense of urgency, we have to meet lies with truth, we have to meet all the things that we know that go against our children being decent human beings with a sense of righteousness. And sometimes that accountability starts with the man in the mirror and once that is done we have to be prepared to take someone else along with us.  That someone could be another brother or a friend of our kids, but we got to bring someone along.  The road is filled with too many challenges for you to think all you have to do is look out for you and yours.  The reason we are here today is because a brother had the wherewithal to start Better Dad’s Society and bring all of us along for the ride to learn from each other and grow from each other and support each other therefore you don’t get to think I AM doing my job simply by taking care of your own.  We come from a collective community concept and our very survival has been built upon it no matter what the global minority says to you. Our bootstraps have always involved other people.  

Finally, when its all said and done and our time is done it is my prayer that the wisdom we have learned from each other as men and fathers will be transmitted down to our children’s children children and we will be able to say finally free at last free at last thank God Almighty we are free at last.

Right on to the Real and Death to the Fakers…

I AM 

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen

When Cultural Norms Prove Financially Costly

By Dr. Irvin Pedro Cohen – I often say children represent the hope of what a community can become. But many of us know it takes a village to get there to ensure our children receive the best education possible, both in and outside the classroom.

In recent years, we have seen tremendous progress in student achievement. High school graduation rates are on the rise. In fact, over the last four years alone, the number of students who graduated in Duval County increased by 11 percentage points, according to the Florida Department of Education.

And while reading, math and science are all core areas of education that are critically important to our children’s futures, we must also make sure they receive the right financial education to reach their fullest potential.

We don’t have to look very far to see why this is so important.

In many Jacksonville neighborhoods, I see that poor financial habits have become ingrained as a cultural norm, particularly within low-income African-American households. For decades, our young people watched their parents, grandparents and other relatives rely on check cashers, money orders and other alternative financial services to access their money and to pay bills.

These unbanked or underbanked families often spend nearly 10 percent of their income annually on the fees associated with these alternative financial services. That’s the same percentage the average family spends on food every year. And yet, these facts do not account for the impact the abundance of alternative financial services providers has on neighborhoods in terms of being destinations where people want to live.

I realize we have to meet people where they are and for many years, these services seemed like the only option for a variety of reasons. In some cases, it was that traditional banks were absent from neighborhoods. In others, people didn’t trust them or had bad experiences in the past. Whatever the reason, we must help our children develop healthier financial habits so that we can break the cycle of poverty that perpetuates when check cashers and alternative financial services become the sole options for people.

And there are ways to do that. For example, while many families have little-to-no access to mainstream financial services, many do own smartphones. Combined with a good prepaid card, instead of using a check casher, they can have their paycheck deposited on the card. And instead of purchasing a money order, they can use that card and their smartphone to pay bills online or with an app.

This does, however, require those same communities to have adequate access to technology platforms. But I’ll save that for another conversation. Bottom line, it’s not an either-or choice – the two go hand in hand.

Adult family members must set the example for how children can manage their money, save, budget and, ultimately, reinvest in their community.

The First Coast YMCA – particularly the James Weldon Johnson Branch and Tiger Academy, the YMCA’s charter school – has made financial navigation on the part of the families and students we serve a focal point of our work. Through collaborations with financial institutions like VyStar and Fifth Third Bank around financial literacy and simple saving tips that consider families’ fiscal capacity, we’ve made inroads. Although small, each step forward counts.

Sometimes, it’s easy to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. But together as a village, we can help our children see a new way and pave the way for Jacksonville’s brightest tomorrow.

Dr. Irvin PeDro Cohen is the vice president of social responsibility at the First Coast YMCA.