If you look at, you know, a lot of newspapers, but certainly in our region, any popular newspaper publication, like the Tennessean or the Nashville Scene, you just look at the comment section if you want to know where the divisiveness is. It’s as vitriolic as possible. A lot of it…if you’ve see an article on wages or on incarceration, there’s somebody, often somebody, often, I think someone who looks like me, a white male, who’s somehow either veiled or not, talking…saying there’s some racialized reason why our society is essentially stratified by race in a lot of ways. I think, it’s really, in a lot of ways, these kind of other-izing of people that is really at the heart of the divide. Where, essentially I think they’re saying there’s something inferior about some people, group, if you really get down to it. They’re not saying…They’re not looking at some of the realities…that mass incarceration is…Folks who like me use and sell drugs at the same rate as black and brown people, but 3/4 of those in prison are black and brown.

Sr. Simone (off-camera): Amen.

O’Connor: With wealth, it’s a 20:1 ratio; for every $20 there’s $1 of black wealth. 18:1, I think, for Latinos.That’s got historical reasons. If you really press some of these people, they would say that it’s something based on inferiority, but it’s our oppressive history.

I’m from Garden City Kansas, which is an hour from the Colorado border and an hour from the Oklahoma border. There I am involved in the Dominican Sisters Ministry of Presence, which is a direct ministry with the economic poor. In our town of 30,000, we are majority minority and those people come from 25 different countries. We have children born in 25 different countries in our school district. They speak over 37 languages because of all the dialects. When I first went there, we were serving a majority of Spanish-speaking in the ministry with the poor. Now, it’s majority Anglo, English-speaking people because of the economy of our country and of our state. The latest newly poor people are those that had been working in the oil industry and have been laid off because of the cut back on it. We have refugees coming from Ethiopia, Somalia, Burma and so forth so it’s a very mixed-type of situation. The reason for them being out in the middle of nowhere in Western Kansas is because of the job market in the dairy industry and the beef-packing plants and all the other jobs that go with them.

Our ministry with the poor allows us to be in the homes, with the families, and so we see life from their side of the story. Like the man who, with tears in his eyes said, “I don’t want my children to hear me asking for help. I’ve never had to in my life. Now I don’t have the ability to pay my light bill.” Then you have people who are saying “People are poor because they want to be. It’s their choice. They’re on welfare because of that.” You just need to bring this type of the story so that they know it’s very real that people aren’t choosing it. This is the first time in their lives that they are poor or they’ve had a major medical problem in the family and they aren’t qualified for getting healthcare. It’s an endless black hole for them.

I think the message that I want to give—just to reiterate—is I think if each individual would take a moment to step outside of their comfort zone, and you can do that in a lot of ways like Sister said—sister said you can be in a coffee shop and say “Hi” to a stranger and say anything to spark up a conversation, or you can pay it forward like you’re in a coffee shop, you can step up and say “Let me buy that cup of coffee for you.”…Those are really simple things to do, but it opens up the world to other people. It slowly lets people into your world. Then they let you into their world. Another big way to do it is, many people have your faith, be you Jewish, be your Christian, be you Muslim, and if you step outside of your comfort zone and consider visiting another church, learning about another faith. It doesn’t mean that you have to convert; it just means you want to learn a little more about other people. I think we get to know people through their faith. I think that’s really important. We get to find out how much we have in common, rather than how different we are.

I think the way I have experienced divides in my life is that, being a person of color, I have experienced overt racism. Being a professional nurse, I have experienced the assumptions of my being “lack,” being “less than” because I am a person of color. An example of that is, I’ve had people walk up to me, even though I have a badge on that says “Carlita Logan RN,” I’ve had people walk up to me and say “Could you get me a nurse?” I get that. I’ve had people in management assume that I know less. I think the biggest divide that I’ve experienced is I’ve seen how people who are white, people of non-color, can walk the street and get a job. The assumption is when they get that job, that they’re qualified for that job, that they know how to do their job. I can walk, or other people of color can walk, into a place of employment and get the job, but, for me, I had to reprove every day that I didn’t forget the knowledge that I had attained the night before.

There’s a disconnect here in Nashville between this image of wanting to be the “It” city, this image of wanting to be the next big thing, but forgetting that there’s a history. So one of the stories that was told at the table around this question of affordable housing and development was that Marie was talking about a house in her neighborhood, kind of Wedgewood, 8th Avenue corridor that was there one day and gone the next. That the house was a long-standing family in the community and it was obvious that something was happening, but she got home one day and the house was rubble. I guarantee you there will be 3 or 4 condos that go up in that place. So I think that the question that Nashville is asking itself right now is “What is the soul of this city and what is it going to be moving forward?” It’s a big small town, right, with big city aspirations, but there is soul, there is a rich and robust history here. And holding onto that and making sure that people aren’t displaced, both physically–through housing or transportation–but also emotionally, also historically.

There’s a question about displacement that I think is at the core of what’s happening in this community right now. This conversation needs to continue, right, and it’s happening in other spaces all over Nashville, but what would it look like for us to take this conversation to partner with folks in South Nashville? With our Brothers and Sisters network of community there? What would it look like to take this conversation physically–I mean physically take it–to North Nashville and historic communities there? I think that it’s easy to have these conversations in silos, and those conversations are happening,but until we figure out a way to talk across some of our discomforts– because some folks in this room, I would argue, wouldn’t go to South Nashville or North Nashville naturally, right?– so I think there’s a negotiation of figuring out how to step outside of our comfort zone, to engage people in deeper work.

The second thing connected to that is that we need to start cultivating inter-generational partnerships because there are elders in this space who have been here for 30, 40, 50 years who know the history of this place. And if we are concerned about the soul of our city, they carry that memory and there are young folks who are coming up who don’t know that history, or transplants like me who don’t know that history. So until we start building those really deep inter-generational partnerships as well, I don’t know if we can move forward.

If we’re really going to close the meal gap in this country, we’ve got to have an “end the line” strategy. So we call it “feed the line and end the line.” Feeding America calls it “feed and lead.” What we’re trying to start…They called it “shorten and strengthen.” We said that wasn’t bold enough. We wanted to end it. We will continue to feed. We will get 50% bigger than we are right now. But the idea is we also want to engage in “ending line” conversations. How do we get the wage up? So we took our own–was it a year ago we did in? In September I asked the board and we went through great conversations about raising the base pay near to $15 an hour, so that anybody that works here gets $15 an hour.

We already had healthcare. What we really said was “I need the moral imperative if I’m going to go out and challenge everybody else.”

Sr. Simone: Exactly. Then we’ve got to do it.

Habash: Nonprofits don’t do it. Faith-based organizations don’t do it.

Sr. Simone: We had that same conversation.

Habash: I said “if we’re not going to do it ourselves how are we going to go out and ask other people to do it?” So, we said we could do it. You know what? In a year it’s paid for itself. The increase, because we had a turnover rate…people’ll leave for 20 cents more at a warehouse job kind of thing. So we had it pay for itself in terms of not having the turnover that we were having, not having the training expenses that we were having.

Sr. Simone: Amen.

Habash: It just went on and on, and it works. Nationwide Insurance just announced that they 900 employees that they just moved to $15 an hour. They’ve taken the step as well as one of the largest employers in town. So it’s starting to catch in terms of getting people to understand. I mean I grew up in Steubenville and my dad was a construction electrician. My uncles were all steel mill guys. We grew up Catholic parochial schools. Mom never worked until I was a junior high school. We haven’t figured out how to replace that in this country. That’s the issue with me. We’ve lost the middle class because there is a one-family worker, you know, middle class, dad never made more than $40,000 a year and I’ve got 5 brothers and sisters, so there was a lot of us. That all worked. But somehow, as those jobs started to go away…and everybody blames overseas. We lose more jobs to technology than we do anything else. That’s going to happen. Technology is going to replace workers. We’ve got to figure something else out, you know. You’re not going to stop that from happening .You got to create. “What’s the new” and “how do we start to get people to step in?”

I was part of this pilgrimage, march “100 Women 100 Miles.” They set off from York County, Pennsylvania and we met the second part of the march at Baltimore, Maryland. From there, we walked the rest of the journey to meet the pope in Washington, D.C. We wanted him to be our spokesperson, our voice of all these immigrant communities, that we are facing a lot of trouble, a lot of discrimination. We want him to take our issues to the President, with the Congress and do something about it…that they can give us some relief. A lot of moms and families are suffering from the deportation of one of the family members. We need this to stop.

My name is Mario, and I live in Washington DC. I grew up on food stamps. When I was a kid, my father left my family and my mother was a single mother. She spent most of her time when my father was living with us as a housewife, so she didn’t have many marketable skills after my father left. My mother could only find work doing housekeeping at a big chain hotel. She made minimum wage and she had to pay our mortgage. A lot of nights there were times where we would have to debate if we would eat a good meal that night, a wholesome meal of meats and fruits, or we’d eat Ramen noodles or macaroni and cheese just because the money wasn’t there. We were on food stamps, we were on Medicaid and we were on WIC. But at the end of the day when you have a family of six with $500-600 to feed us for an entire month, especially in our high-cost area of Virginia didn’t make ends meet all the time. We had to stretch our dollars. We went to food banks, we went to various other organizations.

I also benefited from programs like the free school lunch and breakfast programs. Even as a child, the school I went to had such a high percentage of students who were on free lunch. Sometimes the school lunch lines were very long, and there just wasn’t enough time to feed all the kids.

Now, I went ahead and have been able to progress forward and build my life. I’ve come to realize that these programs were able to give me a stepping stone to building a better future for myself. They are so essential to keeping our children fed, which is such an important thing.

When I hear people talking about the food stamp program being cut, or placing restrictions on things like WIC or Medicaid, it makes me angry. It makes me angry because there are programs that benefit so many children. For me, I can’t forget where I came from. There is such a stigma of people being on food stamps. I can’t stand behind that stigma and not speak my mind about these things. I have to go out there and tell people that these programs are beneficial. If people like me don’t go out and speak their minds about this, then these programs will be cut and attacked, because there is no one out there saying “this is what people on these programs turn out to become.”