With $55,000, Melvin Giles can buy a lot of fuel — er, bubbles.
Giles, a lifelong Rondo community activist and urban gardener in St. Paul, is known for blowing bubbles as a central part of his peace advocacy. In addition to co-leading the Urban Farm and Garden Alliance and spreading joy with bubbles, Giles also installs peace poles, simple monuments with the inscription ‘May peace prevail on Earth’ in several languages.
And as a “Star Trek” fan, he considers himself a time traveler — looking backward in time to draw lessons from the past, and looking generations into the future at a better world.
His ethos, simply put: “The peace poles are my time traveling vehicles, and the bubbles are the fuel,” he said.
He’s also one of seven inductees in the new Black Legacy and Leadership Enrichment Initiative, a pilot program that awards unrestricted grants of $55,000 to local activists so they can rest, recharge and ultimately better serve the community.
The other inductees include DejaJoelle, an artist who uses dance and spirituality to promote healing; Farji Shaheer, a violence-intervention specialist who specifically works to guide survivors away from retaliation; Anura Si-Asar, the founder of a publishing company and K-12 education program aimed at African cultural heritage; Corenia Smith, a community organizer and policy advocate for reproductive justice and violence prevention; Princess Titus, who guides people of all ages toward healthier eating patterns and trauma responses; and Antonio Williams, a voting-rights advocate and formerly incarcerated community mentor.
The grant initiative is a collaboration between the Minneapolis-based Cultural Wellness Center and the Pohlad Family Foundation, which over the past several years has crystallized a focus on racial justice and housing stability.
The grants are an investment not in activists’ work but in themselves as people to support their personal well-being, said community elder Atum Azzahir, the center’s executive director. And before they can rest, they have to figure out how to rest.
“The whole process is: Study yourself as you try to rest,” Azzahir said. “These are very busy, very active, very intensely committed people, and we know, for them, to rest is going to be a study.”
So over the next year, grantees will work through the Cultural Wellness Center’s flagship self-study curriculum, which views rest as more than just taking a break from external forces that wear a person down. True recuperation, Azzahir said, means engaging in deep internal reflection so a person can emerge strengthened and feeling whole.
From this perspective, getting a massage or taking a trip, for example, are meaningfully effective only when they’re undergirded by this active introspection process. The point of the legacy grants is to give community activists the resources to do both, Azzahir said — to allow themselves to realize that, yes, maybe a weeklong solo retreat would indeed be restorative, and then to depart for seven days without worrying about whether their family will have food on the table.
As Azzahir suspected, Giles said this mindset shift isn’t necessarily intuitive in our culture.
“It’s hard for people to get into that mode because we are so busy being on the treadmill that says do, do, do, do,” Giles said. “Like we are human do-ings, instead of human be-ings.”
Watching racism and neglect and disinvestment affect your grandparents, then your parents, then you — it can have a weathering-down effect on a person, Azzahir said. She grew up in Mississippi and, as an activist, has spent her career working to build back strength and rootedness in African-descendent communities.
“I remember Emmett Till’s murder,” she said. “I remember all of those things that are planted in our memory, as Black people. What the Cultural Wellness Center is about is healing our memory.”
Grantees in the initiative will ultimately be given a budget of $70,000: The no-strings-attached recuperation grant of $55,000, plus an additional $15,000 to support the community initiatives to which the activists might have otherwise devoted time and effort had they not been taking time for self-improvement.
Participants were selected by a 10-person screening committee; community elders helped devise the evaluation criteria, including questions on the clarity of applicants’ personal conceptions of rest and on the work that a year of rejuvenation might help them perform more strongly. Out of 162 written applications, 60 people were invited to attend in-person interviews and, ultimately, seven were chosen. The pilot program is scheduled to last for three years, for a total of 21 grantees.
As for Giles, he’s hoping that the recuperation enabled by the grant will allow him to time-travel into the future and focus on the “legacy” portion of the Black Legacy and Leadership Enrichment Initiative. After decades of activism — now as one of “those of us who’ve got the gray hair,” he joked — he’s exploring how to pass on the torch in a sustainable way. To not just drop responsibility into someone’s lap and hope they know how to keep the proverbial flame alive, but to truly support and listen to your successors so they can continue the movement.
And as an urban gardener, Giles sees an answer right under our feet: Gardening, particularly working in the soil, as a way to build health, wealth and connectedness in communities.
“If you go outside and grow something, you go outside and pick your fresh tomatoes, that’s $1,” Giles said. “You go pick your peppers — that’s another form of wealth that you’re not spending, or that you’re investing. There’s divine magic in the soil that helps people just be calm and collected.”
Already, Giles said the grant is helping him breathe easier — figuratively, yes, but literally, too.
“It means I can blow bubbles easier,” he said, opening a bubble wand. “Or buy fresh bubbles! But yes, it does mean to be able to stop and offer opportunities for other people to be able to accept the torch. That relaxes me.”
