|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The holiday season was fantastic! It was a time of giving and sharing. We distributed toys to students in my region. We’ve done it every year since I’ve been elected and continued during the pandemic. It’s a tradition for the seniors in residential Seat 4. The lady that spearheads that initiative, Ramona Exum, passed away in February. The one thing that we all took away from working with her was, when you are called to do an assignment, never take for granted that you’ll get tomorrow. Do everything you can, especially when you feel passionate.
The Prosperity Bags giveaway is another one of my favorite events. We gave away a beautiful spiral cut ham with collard greens, rice, and a baked sweet — all of which are symbols of wealth and prosperity for the upcoming year — to almost 100 residents.
Community Engagement
We’ve been working really hard to prepare our community for Formula 1 to ensure that everyone is safe and that traffic flows well in and out of the City during the event period.
We continue to work with the Leslie Estates community. Following a community meeting, they agreed to get legal aid to assist in organizing their homeowners’ association so they can work on improvements to their roads, drainage, lights, and street signs. We did a community cleanup on NW 67th Avenue, where there was an old farmhouse, and now it’s no longer an eyesore. Gas prices were on the rise, so I did a gas giveaway. To help offset the pain at the pump, I assisted with $41 of gas to the first 100 or so residents who participated.
In February 2022, I started a marketplace designed for our non-brick and mortar businesses to sell to the community, and the feedback has been very positive. On the third Saturday of each month, our goal is to have community-related market events e.g. spring cleaning in April, special Mother’s Day edition in May, etc. There’s a generational gap when it comes to using the internet, so for marketable products, this is the place where the community can touch and feel them.
Supporting our residents
At the end of March, I presented a workshop on buying and flipping houses, and I’m working on another project to help seniors with repairs to their homes because some of them can’t afford to hire anyone.
Our HBCU Sports Combine will be the first of its kind here in South Florida. We’ll bring HBCU coaches from around the country to Betty T. Ferguson Recreational Complex on June 10 and 11 to preview our student athletes. We’ve also invited some of our alumni who went into the professional arena to talk to students about the importance of attending college and how to do business. For those kids who are not going away to school, there’ll be workshops with CareerSource and Miami-Dade County Public Schools to discuss other opportunities. This effort is in partnership with Dr. Steve Gallon III and Dr. Dorothy Bendross-Mindingall, two (2) school board members, and Mayor Rodney Harris. We hope that this initiative will get a lot of our young men, in particular, on a positive track.
There is also a vast demand for the celebration of Juneteenth. It takes a lot of our time to plan, and we are working diligently to coordinate a successful 2022 event!
