Eunique Jones Gibson has been impacting the culture in a positive way since 2013 with her award-winning platform and campaign ‘Because of Them We Can’. The content producer, photographer, author and activist created ‘Because of Them We Can’ to shed light on the black community’s rich history and the promising future we are headed toward.
Gibson is also the founder of Dream Village located in Hyattsville, Maryland. The coworking community provides individuals the opportunity to work towards their dreams and build their village. Gibson spoke with Blavity to share her thoughts on the importance of impact and community activism in the black community, brought to you by AARP-Disrupt Aging.
How do you define impact?
I think impact is the ability to move people. I think impact is the ability to effectuate change. I think impact is the ability to really extract what’s on the inside as far as your gifts, your talents, your thoughts and your ideas, and being able to apply them in a way that touches people in the same way that it moved or touched you.
I definitely think it’s the ability to shift. It's the ability to awaken. The ability to disrupt. The ability to touch people and, hopefully, in a positive way. You can have a positive impact and you can also have a negative impact, and I think whatever we aspire or strive to be, you should always aim at the positive side.
Do you have a legacy of activism in your family?
I think activism, resilience and really knowing that it's bigger than me is embedded in my DNA. My grandfather was a preacher, and that in itself is a form of activism when you’re constantly, trying to impact the community and help your members overcome obstacles so they can be their best selves. So, I think that he was a great example of an activist.
My father, he was a police officer for 35 years, but not in today’s sense, like the sense where my dad really believed in being a part of the community that you are responsible for protecting and really serving.
I believe that my grandparents and the stories of my great-grandparents and the ways in which they just did not accept mediocrity or just any kind of treatment whether it was on their jobs, whether it was in the community, whether it was in the streets, they demanded excellence and fair treatment, not only amongst another, but from other people as well. So I’ve been bombarded with stories like that all throughout my life. I think that it definitely influenced what I’m doing now.
How do you reach back and pass it on when it comes to your activism?
I think my activism is more so breadcrumbs and to leave content and to leave tools that people of all ages can consume. In a sense, I can pique their curiosity and really start a conversation. I think that my goal and my agenda is to do it in a way that crosses colors and crosses the boundaries of age. Whether you’re a young person or you’re an adult or you’re an elder, I work to make sure that my content is consumable for all types. I think that’s the type of content that doesn’t expire. When we think about just black history, it’s something that we’ll always talk about, but in a way that is refreshing, new and unique is important and that’s what I strive to do. I think that the legacy becomes the people that remember your story or the people that are touched by the way that you transfer that information to them in a way that stuck.
What is one piece of advice you would give a young activist who is looking to create a platform similar to yours?
I think you just start! The goal should always be impact. I think if the goal is to impact, then it doesn’t matter if you’re impacting the local community; if you’re impacting your neighborhood; or if your impact grows into a national movement. If the goal is always to impact, then it’ll keep you focused on what’s important and it will remove the temptation to incorporate vanity into what you’re doing. I think that is a big temptation in this social media driven world that we live in. I think that you start and build where you are, and you know, eventually, the more people that know about your work and the stickier it is, the more people will share it and the more it’ll grow. But, it’s not an overnight process. So, I think you have to know why you’re doing it in order to be able to continue and sustain it whether people pay attention or not. The goal should always be impact and it’ll grow as it is supposed to.
What does long-term success in black communities look like to you?
It’s the rebuilding of the village. Long-term success in the black community means really being able to rebuild our village. To rebuild our community in a way that allows us to reconnect and be self-sufficient. To also bring back the banking and the entrepreneurial efforts and the corner stores and the community vibe that allowed us to look out for one another and to really make sure that we supported each other’s endeavors, but we also took an active interest in one another’s success and failures in a sense that your problem is actually my problem.
I think that long-term success in our community, you know we’re doing well as it relates to small businesses and being innovative and just really getting it. But I think that in the long term when we take the steps to make sure that that bleeds into our community in a positive way so that we can rebuild our village, I think that’s what long-term success looks like because then we become a sustainable people. Like that Black wall street where it’s like we’re good whether or not the people like it, whether or not the people help. We are good because we rebuild our infrastructure and we’re fortified amongst ourselves. That’s what long-term success is going to look like for us.
How do you inspire more young folks to get involved, especially around the midterm elections?
That’s interesting because I guess given the current climate that we live in like if you don’t get it, I don’t understand what will get you there. For millennials, it is probably the most toxic that we’ve ever witnessed right in our age group, but I think it's really about understanding the opportunity that we have to cause another shift and understanding that you know, when you see these underdogs now taking these longtime seats–these highly coveted seats, the seats that have been owned by certain parties forever. When you see newcomers rising up…that’s inspiring, that’s invigorating and that’s motivating.
I think as far as millennials are concerned, we really do have the power to cause a shift and to get the country back on the page that we all know we need to be on. I think that we can all turn on the news or turn on the television or walk past the newsstand and see why that’s so important and so imperative. People get inspired by the opportunity that we have to cause a shift. That alone should motivate us to go out and to use our voice. I think that a lot of times. I’m one of them. Yes, our ancestors died for our right to vote, and while that is a fact and message I consistently raise, I do believe that, for whatever reason, it sometimes falls on deaf ears. Now we have to just look at the opportunity at hand. We have a chance to do something amazing by raising our voice at the polls. And that’s something we will see the effects of for years to come. I think that the opportunity in itself should inspire us to act.
Do you feel like there has been a resurgence when it comes to civil rights activism?
I don’t know if there’s been a resurgence or there’s just more coverage and more of us being able to share our own stories real time given the tools that we have at our disposal now. I think that there is definitely a new wave of interest in people who normally would’ve sat on the sidelines actually realizing that they have to get involved because of what’s at stake. From a civil rights perspective, I think that’s real, but I also think that our ability to amplify and to share our individual and collective effort has also changed, just given the way the world is moving from an online perspective.
You know we’re our own publishers. We could pitch to a major news outlet or try to get an interview on television, but we can also go and grab our own cell phones to share a message. We can go and capture what’s going on and what’s wrong in America, then we can upload it to social media and it can go viral to catch the attention of people who otherwise wouldn’t know about it. Those advancements and how it could go so quickly to market in that way has really opened up the eyes of so many other individuals. If you take away the Internet, take away the ability to utilize our mobile phones as a way to capture and share these things going on in the public then you wouldn’t hear about it as much, but now we have ownership over what’s getting shared, what stories are being told and we have the ability to amplify them with or without the support of major media outlets.
How can social issues impact our aging process?
It's causing us to grow up a lot quicker. I think when we were younger we were shielded. I know as a parent of three small children, I try, to the extent that I can, to shield my children from some of the real ugliness that we deal with on a day-to-day basis, but because it's so rampant and everywhere, I can’t really do that in the same way that my parents were able to shield me from things that were going on. I think Desert Storm was happening when I was in elementary school. There were so many different things going on that I wasn’t really incognizant of and I think that you know, we just don’t have the opportunity with this news cycle and I think that it’s causing us to grow up a lot quicker. It’s causing us to actually activate our voice and realize what’s at stake.
But it's also a good thing because it helps us understand our responsibility…life is an opportunity to discover our purpose, to explore our potential and to make an impact. That’s what life is, and some people don’t tap into that until their 40s or their 50s. I think that it's making us awaken to our purpose, to our potential and to our opportunity to effectuate change a lot sooner than previous generations. That’s a blessing and a gift even though the reason is tough to digest.
How can they accelerate the aging process and affect our mental health if our social/political needs aren’t prioritized?
I definitely think that the weight of is it very stressful and it can accelerate our aging and our ability to cope if we’re not tapping into healthy coping mechanisms. I read something the other day that talked about the growth as it pertains to black people in therapy and counseling. I think that’s real, right? Because it gives us the opportunity to manage the stress, to manage the information overload in a way that won't accelerate that aging process, even if it's something that’s like emotional or mental or physical. We don't have to wear how we feel because we find positive outlets. We can see just the resurgence of yoga, traveling, or things like that giving us healthy outlets and ways to process or to release or to expend that negative energy and to find ways as to tap into something positive. I think that the more that we can do things like that, the healthier we’ll be and the healthier we are mentally, physically and emotionally of course, the more our longevity will increase in impacting.
Why do you think it's important to have platforms like ‘Because of Them We Can’ to promote positivity and a brighter future for our community?
It’s extremely important because we need outlets that remind us of our greatness. We are overwhelmed with false narratives or an emphasis on what’s wrong in our community and yet there is still so much right with it. We need to be reminded of our genius and we need to be reminded that there are still positive things happening in the world amidst all the negative or the challenging or the frustrating. There are still people out there that bring us joy and pride through their mere being or through the remarkable things they’ve been able to accomplish. That’s a glimpse of hope and inspiration that we need now and forever. There are still so many people who are navigating this space, who are navigating these borders and are navigating time in a way that is still uplifting and encouraging and inspiring and we need to be reminded of that just as many times as we’re reminded of the reality of some of the challenges that we face.
For every negative news story, we need seven positive stories to counter that. That's why with ‘Because of Them We Can’ outlets our focus is centered around doing. It's countering the negativity. For every one negative post, we’re trying to work on five to seven positive posts to counter one negative one. That’s what we want. We want that space and that platform to be the positive outlet and it’s because of so much of the news going on, but often times it’s easy to drill into what else is happening around the world, but we want to provide an outlet and spaces for people who are looking for something that's uplifting and that’s still very real and still representative of our community as a whole.
Connect with Gibson and her platforms online at http://euniquejones.com, https://www.becauseofthemwecan.com and https://www.dreamvillage.com/en.
Brought to you by AARP-Disrupt Aging #ReachBackPassItOn #DisruptAging
