Transcript:

Maurice Watson:

I am Maurice Watson and this is “The Pinnacle Pod”, a monthly podcast where we dive into the stories behind Kansas City’s most dynamic emerging leaders. Each episode celebrates the spirit of The Pinnacle Prize, an award that recognizes young visionaries sparking positive change in our community, from subtle ripples to citywide movements. Join us to listen, learn, and be inspired. Today our guest is Rachel Jefferson, executive director of Groundwork Northeast Revitalization Group, or Groundwork NRG for short and a 2022 Pinnacle Prize winner. Dedicated to connecting the local Northeast KCK community members with programs, resources, projects, and organizations, Rachel fights to create a self-determined and equitable Kansas City for all. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Rachel committed herself to serving the northeast area of Kansas City after college. As the leader of Groundwork NRG, she works to redress historic disinvestment, redlining, and predatory business practices plaguing her community – problems she and her organization tackle include inequities in economic opportunity, environmental justice, land use, housing, and access to healthy food. Groundworks also works to build a strong sense of community and cultural identity in Northeast KCK. Since 2020, Rachel and Groundwork NRG have spearheaded more than 50 community initiatives, including financial assistance for families facing unfair evictions, coordination of the Dial-A-Neighbor census equity campaign to provide wellness checks and disseminate public health information during the pandemic and leading the Green Team initiative to teach youth about environmental stewardship. All of Rachel’s work embodies a profound commitment to community wellbeing and social change. Rachel is joining us today via Zoom. Welcome to “The Pinnacle Pod.”

Rachel Jefferson:

Thanks so much for having me.

Maurice Watson:

Rachel, as we begin, tell us a little bit about your personal story and your drive to support this community.

Rachel Jefferson:

Yeah, absolutely. This is a well-timed question as I enter my 10th year with the organization in 2024. I’ve definitely been thinking about my story, how I got involved in this organization, and it really all stems from the work that my parents were doing and that my mom still does to this day in Kansas City, Kansas, both around social justice issues and inequities that they saw in their everyday lives as neighborhood leaders and environmental justice and climate justice. When I came back from school, I came back to the Kansas City, Kansas side as my mother had moved back here to her hometown to take care of my grandmother and really didn’t know very much about Kansas City, Kansas, but gradually was drawn into the events, activities, and public meetings that my mother was going to with the idea that those activities, the purpose of them was to basically just understand what was happening, understand what was happening in the community, understand what the local government was doing, what these policies were that were affecting our lives, affecting our opportunities or lack of opportunities. And so, through that exploratory process and through working with my father on an environmental justice issue and our community around John Garland Park, the former sanitary landfill, I became deeply entrenched in the work of the Northeast area. I was also at the time working for a safety net healthcare clinic. So I was directly confronted with the health care and health inequities that we see in our community on a daily basis. And so I wanted to, kind of, move upstream in my work and start to attack some of those systems of oppression that were causing people to be so sick and also causing them not to have the time to address their health concerns.

Maurice Watson:

Give us a little bit more background about Groundwork NRG. What is its history and its evolution.

Rachel Jefferson:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking and great question, one I enjoy answering. So, the organization, Groundwork Northeast Revitalization Group was formerly known as the Historic Northeast Midtown Association or HNMA, a shout out to the dearly beloved Roger Crawford. May he rest in peace for that lovely acronym, but Historic Northeast Midtown Association was founded in 2012 by a group of neighborhood of presidents, one of whom was my mother. So she was one of the co-founders of the organization. And basically, it was these 12 to 13 neighborhoods that came together and said we need to form some type of representation for our interests as neighborhoods, our shared goals, our shared interests, and we need to create what is known in Kansas City, Kansas as a neighborhood business revitalization organization. An organization to support each of the neighborhoods in the 10 square mile service area, an organization to act as a pass through for funding to neighborhood associations, an organization that was going to build its own capacity to represent and advocate and organize with citizens of Northeast KCK. And so that’s what they started and I became the executive director in 2015. And then in 2020 we transitioned to become a part of the Groundwork USA National Network, which is a national network of independent 501c3 organizations like Groundwork NRG, that all have a Groundwork the name, but they operate independent of the body. They do receive funding through task agreements with the National Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency and then also resource sharing through the general network. That decision was catalyzed by the fact that we had grown, we needed to continue to grow in order to support the recently adopted Northeast Area master plan and make sure that that plan was not just another document that set on the shelf, but was something that could actually be activated and implemented in our community. And we didn’t really see anybody else doing that. And so it was, let’s try to increase our own capacity to do that work and to inspect what we expect out of that plan.

Maurice Watson:

Tell our listeners something more about some of the services you provide through your organization apart from advocacy.

Rachel Jefferson:

Advocacy is at the root of everything we do and my elevator speech has gotten increasingly short over the years. I say that we, we work in the realm of environmental and climate justice as well as housing, food and land sovereignty. And we weave youth and young adult programming throughout all of that. And always surprise when someone says, well, what does that really mean? So for example, our Green Team, which is a group of young adults who are our neighbors and residents in the community work and co-design land based built-in natural environment interventions with our neighbors, with our neighborhood associations, fostering intergenerational learning, as well as making direct improvements to lots and identified land in the area. For example, they are finishing out a pocket park in the Turtle Hill Neighborhood Association and have installed footpaths benches, solar lighting, just everything in co-decision making process with the neighborhood. They also do water quality testing at Parkwood and at Jersey Creek. Another one of our programs is the Northeast Grocers program, which is to bring a cooperative grocery store to the Northeast area, 18th and Quindaro. And our program coordinator for that who’s been with us for almost a year and a half now, has also been focusing on widening his view of that project to include supporting agricultural endeavors, specifically supporting black farmers and black community gardens in the area as a part of that work. Some of our work expands past Northeast KCK, so for example, the anti-tax sale work that we do where we are advocating for the end of the racist and discriminatory policy of the tax sale where we find some of our neighbors who have lived in their homes for decades have paid off their mortgage, are at risk of losing their home for as little as $300 in back taxes. And so, we raised funds for two years now over a hundred thousand at this point, to be able to pay those back taxes for those residents, sometimes offering utility help as well and engaging them in the organizing and advocacy to end that policy that causes for their suffering in a community that that says that it’s concerned about affordable housing. So those are some of the smattering of the programs we do. We recently also were awarded along with the unified government, a $1.2 million grant through the MidAmerica Regional Council from the Carbon Reduction Act to expand the Northeast KCK Heritage Trail from Kaw Point to fifth street. So along with the existing Jersey Creek Trail that goes from fifth to 18th Street and the green infrastructure intervention projects that we’re doing along that trail and new trail that we’re building within Jersey Creek, we’ve also secured funds to build trail from fifth to fifth street, which is a major portion of the planned trail, which I encourage anybody to look at at the Northeast KCK Heritage Trail Master plan in terms of our overall goal of having a trail that goes all the way from the historic Kaw Point, which is the national park site, to the Quindaro town site, which is a national commemorative landmark and the former underground railroad site. So, we do a lot of different things. We’ve done a review of kind of the last 10 years in operation in 2022 and understanding how we ended up doing so many different things and not being a single issue organization. And that’s because we really truly are an organization serving a service area and looking to intervene in all of the systems that disenfranchise people and keep people in both physical poverty but also spiritual and mental poverty in our area. And that means that we do everything from housing to environment.

Maurice Watson:

So as you look back or reflect back upon the last year or so, what is the accomplishment of your organization that you’re most proud of in terms of the impact it’s had?

Rachel Jefferson:

I’m sure if you ask other people, they’ll say other things. For me, it’s a very personal accomplishment. I’ve been very candid in the last two years sharing about the crisis that we face in the movement of having good leaders, burnout of the movement work and what does that look like? Especially for those of us who identify as black and who identify as women, we bear a special burden in movement work of often being the workhorses and the ones who carry these movement values forward and sometimes at risk to ourselves. So the last two years I was in a fellowship program really exploring, researching that reality of burnout. What does that mean? How does it manifest? If you’re already burnout, how do you come back from it? And one of the things that really struck me, one of the facets of it is this issue of isolation. And especially in Kansas, in the middle of the country, we are so isolated from a lot of the really impactful movement work that happens both on the coast, you know, all the coasts, northeast, west coast, southeast, but also globally. We are just isolated sometimes for the things that some of my comrades are able to get past in other parts of the country. It might as well be Mars when we’re talking about getting that type of legislation passed. We still have a lot of climate deniers in our elected office. And so that isolation of doing this work in a geography with people who you feel like you’re constantly having to kind of bring up to speed, it’s a symptom of burnout. It’s a thing that can cause burnout actually. And so working with some of my comrades in the southeast, we were able to curate experience where we were able to offer to our team and members of our community to literally get outta Kansas and engage with other members of the Global South to surface those shared understandings, but also to just be able to treat the trauma that we experienced from being workers in these oppressive systems. And so, we sponsored a trip to Senegal, and we were able to pay for all of everybody who wanted to go their passports, their vaccines, travel, lodging, their time. We were able to meet with ministers of environment. We were able to meet with the orphanage over there. We were able to go back to a place that a lot of people never thought or never intended for us to go back to. We were able to go to Gorée Island, which was the westernmost point for the trafficking of Africans out of Africa into slavery. And at that island, there is literally a door that is named the door of no return. It’s a door that enslaved individuals left out of to get on the ship. Some of them jumped at that point to, you know, to avoid a fate worser than that. And we returned. And so that was a very, very powerful experience that has had just so many ripples throughout our culture, the way we do things, our partnerships, our relationships, how we talk about the issues and our continuing quest to dismantle white supremacy and colonization both internally in our organization and externally. And so to be able to continue to do things like that and build those relationships with other parts of the Global South and be in solidarity with each other is just, I have something I’m so proud of. I have a lot of other small examples of that exact type of work. Building partnerships with our comrades in Puerto Rico with our comrades in the Mariana Islands, Micronesia that helped to combat that feeling of being alone in the work and instead actually rejuvenate and replenish the passion that we have for this work in the Great Plains.

Maurice Watson:

What do you believe is the greatest need or challenge that your community faces in the future?

Rachel Jefferson:

I think there’s a real call for courage. We have so many great people in the movement work, and then we have people who use the movement work as a cover for whatever thing that they’re trying to do and accomplish, whatever that is. And so we really have to, as one might say, clean up our side of the street. We really have to continue to bring that self-awareness, embrace the indigenous practices that have been left behind in some cases are forgotten, but can be reclaimed. Things like somatic practice, things like communal meals together, things like embracing joy, things like recognizing our ancestors who came before us and being not afraid to call out the bad actors that we see people who are in the movement but whose actions are hurtful and harmful and are replicating the same systems which we’re trying to dismantle. And that requires a lot of bravery and a lot of courage and it’s a thankless job <laugh>, but it’s a really, really important work that I do see some organizations and a lot of individuals stepping into and embracing. But yeah, cleaning up our side of the street, stopping the sense of urgency, always being in crisis mode, always responding to everything with the heightened sense of urgency. The problems are there, but us being frazzled, burning ourselves out because we have to answer that email now or make that phone call now is not gonna help the problem, resorting to the worship of the written word instead of having a conversation with someone and really walking them through whatever thing you’re trying to negotiate for the purpose of mutually beneficial relationship is so much more important. Really interrogating these systems that don’t put indigenous and black people first, that create unnecessary barriers for them to have input and feedback and be in the decision making process. So yeah, I think the biggest challenge being within the movement work itself and it’s really a challenge of healing, of reckoning for eventual rebirth. Hopefully.

Maurice Watson:

You were one of the 2022 Pinnacle Prize recipients in recognition of your commitment and work. What motivates you to continue helping others day in and day out?

Rachel Jefferson:

Well, I’m helping myself. That’s one of the things about, you know, my story itself is very much felt harmed, myself, by these systems. Not being able to legally have access to land that we’ve been taking care of for years, having property illegally taken, having to fight that pro se, that’s one of my mom’s stories. So in the end, I think it’s very wise that we all recognize why we’re doing this work ourself. And then seeing that suffering multiplied through the faces of the people I would come in contact with every day. I just have always had a very strong sense of fair and unfair, what’s wrong, what’s right. And my mom would just tell me life’s unfair. And I just never was willing to settle for that <laugh>. I oftentimes say, oh maybe one day I’ll go live on a nice beach somewhere and try to just commune with the local people. But inevitably there would be some type of like coconut extraction scheme. That’s how my <laugh> person is doing up and I’m in another fight over the coconuts and the indigenous farmers helping the indigenous farmers keep whoever out of their coconut field. You know, like it’s just, it’s just in my DNA think. <laugh>

Maurice Watson:

To always get in trouble. I think you know, trouble, you’re, you’re a, you’re a good trouble person. I, I can tell, John Lewis had you in mind, what words of advice do you have for those struggling to make impactful change with and within their communities, folks looking to make a difference as you’ve made a difference in your community?

Rachel Jefferson:

Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean I think it’s, take the ego out of it. There have been so many people before us, people who have, you know, broken their bodies on the walls of these institutions. And I remember when I first started kind of studying burnout at the same time I was burnout and decided to take a month and a half off work. All time, that was PTO time I had accrued, I was not being a good leader in, in exemplifying that we needed to take the time. You know, I tell other people to take their time, but I wasn’t taking mine. I remember them saying in this one workshop I was in, wow, you know, I really thought this was all on me and that I couldn’t take a step away from this problem. But how arrogant that is. I mean, you think of some of these great thinkers and healers we know of, you know, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. And, and they didn’t solve it all before they passed. Right? And I, I don’t like to compare. It’s not like, well they could do it. So obviously you can’t do it. I mean the impossible is possible, but just to be able to put a little dose of reality, what one can really do into it is just don’t think that you’re gonna solve it all. If you are able to help someone stay in their home, or if you are able to get a park’s designation and a zoning code so that a developer can’t come and buy your local park and that takes two years of effort, pat yourself on the back ’cause you’ve done well. You know, one of my most treasured items are the thank you cards that I have from the people have just sent me randomly over the years. They mean more to me than probably any monetary grant or what have you. I mean it’s nice ’cause it keeps the engine rolling, right? Keeps the wheels turning. But in the end it’s our job to work ourselves out of a job where we’re not needed anymore.

Maurice Watson:

You know what’s interesting Rachel, is one of the things that The Pinnacle Prize or winning the Pinnacle Prize enables is for leaders like yourself to have some additional financial resources and funds that may be what you need to enable you to take some time off for self-care. And I think it is important for other leaders like yourself to recognize precisely what you just said, which is you’ve got to take care of yourself because burnout is an issue. It is a concern. And in order for you to continue to be effective and productive in your work, you’ve got to have the strength to do that. And sometimes that requires taking some time away and resting.

Rachel Jefferson:

Absolutely. And we talk about it like, we gotta take this block of time away and it’ll all be better. But I, I did that and it did help, like it helped to just like reset and then I realized, okay, I have to do this more often. Like this has to be a part of my life is taking time, coming up with the routine in the mornings that helps me stay centered, really exploring my spirituality, taking advantage of the employee assistance programs or therapy, talking about therapy and mental health, which is a huge stigma in the black community. Like all these various other things that come into it that are a part of your healing process from that burnout. So it’s not just like, okay, I got two weeks off, I’m gonna go to Barbados and everything’s gonna be good. It’s a great start, but it’s other stuff as well. And I’ll also say it’s not linear, it’s never just A, B, C, D, right? It’s like A, and then you’re back at negative two and then you’re over here at like Z squared. That’s what healing looks like, <laugh>, it’s uh, you know, it’s not linear.

Maurice Watson:

Other than hanging out on the beach in Barbados or organizing coconut farmers. What’s next for Rachel?

Rachel Jefferson:

Yeah,I’m really excited about just continuing to build those relations with the Global South and where that’s gonna take both the organization and me personally to that end, I’m actually kind of dialing back and gonna be focusing on building some relationships at the state level as well, strengthening those relationships. So, we have that really nice throughput from hyper-local to local state, regional and national to global and the just transition, that’s really what I’m focused on as a just transition, which is a phrase that you can Google and look up. Climate Justice Alliance has some great information about it and I’m looking forward to just sitting down for a while and not traveling so much and kind of just writing some things about my experiences here, especially in the last two years, especially with this fellowship program, which was just so transformative in my life. I’m looking forward to a lot of reflection and, and whatever God has in store next.

Maurice Watson:

How can our listeners connect with you and support your organization?

Rachel Jefferson:

We’re on social media at Northeast KCK. Our website is www.northeastkck.org. Rjefferson@northeastkck.org is my email. I can be kind of slow to respond, but I will get back to you. Follow along on social media. We’re always having trainings and programs that we’re offering to the community as well as other opportunities to get engaged. Anybody who does come to our trainings or some of our meetings gets paid $25 an hour; we provide daycare, food, transportation, if we can, depending on the program. Say the website of social media is the best way. But if you wanna chat with me personally, RJefferson@northeastcaseyk.org, just don’t email me saying you’re gonna pick my brain because that is a thing I do not like. <laugh>.

Maurice Watson:

Rachel, this has been fun. Kudos to you for all the great work you’re doing in the community and it has been a delight.

Rachel Jefferson:

Thank you so much Maurice.

Maurice Watson:

And thanks to our listeners. And be sure to sign up for our newsletter at pinnacleprizekc.org to continue to listen, learn and be inspired by dynamic emerging leaders like Rachel in our community.

 

Hosted By Maurice Watson

Maurice is a recognized community leader and has more than thirty years of experience working in law, social and public policy and board governance as a lawyer, advisor, and board member. He is the co-founder and principal of Credo Philanthropy Advisors.