On this week’s edition of Money, I’m Home, Lynne is joined by Eric Brown, the brand new CEO of the West Michigan Urban League. Tune as they chat about the critical work that’s happening at the hands of the Urban League, as well as some of the exciting things to come.

 

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0:00:06.6 Lynne Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Money, I’m home. Welcome in. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. Thanks so much for being with us this week. From finance to fitness, we have it all, and we’ve got kind of like a finance guru joining us today, who is also a really large community leader. We’re so excited to have you. I saw Eric… I know you guys can’t see, but I saw Eric kind of raise his eyebrows when I said finance guru, but you are. Eric Brown, he is the new CEO of our West Michigan Urban League. Eric, thanks so much for being with us.

0:00:37.4 Eric Brown (EB): Thank you for having me, Lynne. I’m very excited to be here today.

0:00:40.1 LJJ: Well, you raised your eyebrow when I said financial guru, but I do… Your background says it all. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve been doing. And you really are a great numbers guy, which is awesome.

0:00:52.5 EB: I really appreciate that, Lynne. Most of my background comes from public accounting and finance, and particularly in the real estate industry. Most recently, I’ve been working, I’ve spent about four and a half years at LINC Up, a non-profit housing association. My role really focused around, obviously, taking care of the finances, the total finances for the organization, as well as working on our various real estate developments in LIHTC and using other programs. Yeah, we got into the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on various projects. So previous to that, I had 8-10 years or so in public accounting, working with small individuals, doing auditing, doing that kind of stuff. I’ll take that, and a little bit of a financial guru, I’ll take it.

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0:01:35.1 LJJ: Thank you so much. Well, you know what, your story is so fascinating to me, and I’m going to start way back at the beginning, if you don’t mind. Eric is the new CEO of our West Michigan Urban League, and over 200 applicants were up for this position, and Eric… The one thing that I can tell you that got me just grinning, I was very honored to be on the nominating committee, is the fact that as a young man, that is where you started your Urban League journey. Tell us about it.

0:02:08.1 EB: I was fortunate to be a summer intern here in 1992. Well, I guess maybe I’m dating myself a little bit, but during my college years, I was a summer intern here under Brenda Moore, but I didn’t know a whole lot about the Urban League at that time. I knew about a lot about some of the other civil rights organizations and civil rights leaders, but I wasn’t familiar with the Urban League and its nationally known leader, Dr. Whitney Young, until I came here as an intern. I did intern stuff, so obviously, a lot of mailings, a lot of purging of files, a lot of putting old files down into our basement here. In doing so, I ran across a couple different posters, but one in particular that stuck with me was there was a poster of a distinguished gentleman who I wasn’t familiar with, and he was looking out over a group of protesters or picketers that were picketing for better wages on their job. So that led me to learn a little bit more about who this person was and who this organization is. So, then that’s when I found out about Dr. Whitney Young and learned a lot more about the Urban League and how it’s involved in the civil rights movement.

0:03:08.5 EB: And even how much Dr. King and Dr. Whitney Young were friends and they worked together. One of the things that Dr. Young liked to focus on was that the protest needed to happen, but also policies and strategies needed to happen as well. So, the protest brought awareness to the problem. And once that was done, policies had to be analyzed and had to be changed in order to make those things come into law. So that’s what attracted me to this organization. Learned a lot more about it. That was just an awakening time for me, to learn about this organization that focused on civil rights, but on the economic fullness of the individual, and particularly African Americans. Our vision is to see that people or our mission is to see that people achieve full economic self-reliance, parity and civil rights. The economic self-reliance, I think that’s just been ingrained in me. I think that’s just been something that was put in me from birth, that I wanted to see everyone, everyone, not just Black folks, but everyone be able to fully realize their self-actualization when it comes to economics. I want to see everybody reach their full economic potential.

0:04:12.4 LJJ: You’re hitting something that we really focus on here on our podcast relentlessly, and that is the focus on everyone who does learn about financial education and the steps that it takes is absolutely critical to understand how to use money. And what we have found is, especially if there’s roadblocks in the way, it’s even more important to talk to those who can help with that jumping over that roadblock or finding out how to open doors versus having that roadblock in the way. And so what you’re talking about is exactly what we do every day, and every single person, as you just said, is afforded that opportunity and must be afforded that opportunity. So, you’re spot-on with that. I know that I’ve been involved with the Urban League for many years, and one of the things that I think that people just don’t really realize is the feet on the ground that we have as far as helping the youth, health, you’ve already talked a little bit about housing, but I will have you back to talk more about that, especially with the changes that are happening in cities across West Michigan, and making sure that there’s affordable housing.

0:05:27.2 LJJ: That’s so critical. But then also, what I think that I love that you started to talk about that you now are taking the helm over is the advocacy of helping people with safety. And you talk about that very clearly and did in all the processes up to where you’ve been hired, and now here it is, we have Cure Violence coming to the table. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

0:05:52.6 EB: I’m so excited about Cure Violence. I did not know much about it coming in, only what I could get out of the press and things like that, obviously, but now that I’ve had a little bit of time to come in and learn a lot about it, I am so excited about it. It’s a program that has been very successful in other cities. It’s been shown to, in some cities, decrease violence from 40 to 60%. So obviously we don’t have the amount of violence that goes on in some of the large cities, so that if we’re able to have those type of decreases, that’s going to be very significant. If you think about violence, if you think about safety, what it draws me to is Maslow’s hierarchy of self-actualization. If you think about safety, safety is on the second pillar, or platform, of self-actualization needs, just above food, shelter, and clothing. Going back to what I said about economic self-reliance, there’s no way a group of people can achieve economic self-reliance, which would be towards the top of that hierarchy, if safety isn’t even taken care of.

0:06:51.8 EB: So, the violence that’s going on in these communities is something that needs to be addressed in order for people that live within these communities to be able to realize self-actualization when it comes to, particularly, economics and civil rights. It’s a unique approach to violence, and it’s a very interesting approach, and I talked about the success that it’s having elsewhere because it’s such a unique approach, it’s approaching violence from a healthcare standpoint. So, we’re right in the middle of a pandemic, hopefully on the tail-end of a pandemic, but if you think about how… This is how this model got realized, was a doctor over in, I believe it was Africa, addressing pandemic issues and what needed to be done in order to keep the pandemic from spreading. So basically, it was derived that first thing needed to be done is that there needed to be an immediate response to that, to whatever that health crisis was. So that’s the same thing with this Cure Violence, we need to make immediate response to violence. And then there also has to be… You have to identify those populations that are at-risk, or as we would say here at The Urban League, at opportunity, those folks that are at-risk, we have to identify them and try to have some preventative measures that go in place, we heard about preventative medicine.

0:08:05.3 EB: And then just like in healthcare, once those first two things are taken care of, the acute issue, and then any preventative issue, then long-term, you want to make those long-term changes within your healthcare. Same thing as it applies to safety when it comes to violence, we have to then change the norms that are happening within society in order to have lasting impact. Why I’m so excited, Lynne, is because as I’m finding out more about what this is really all about, those three initiatives along with using people that are from those communities, just like you use a healthcare professional, using individuals that are actually from those communities, have familiarity with the community and quite honestly, have familiarity with a lot of folks that are causing some of the violence, but can speak to them and their level with their words in a way that they can understand to help redirect them. Being able to use them.

0:08:53.9 EB: Why I’m actually, again, even more and more excited is because not only can we do that, our interrupters and our outreach workers, they’re so excited because they are within an organization that is not a stand-alone organization, but we also have all these other things that it is proven in the Cure Violence model that those individuals are going to need. They’re going to need employment or some type of ability to make an income, they’re going to need housing, they’re going to need support services, they’re going to need probably referrals in some cases to either mental health or some things like that, which we refer out. But so many of those services we can provide in-house that it’s a one-stop shop kind of deal. And in those services we don’t have, we can refer out to.

0:09:34.8 LJJ: The collaborative effort that is taking the City of Grand Rapids, and all of the policy makers, and everybody’s saying, “Okay, it’s time that we bring and build a program of trust.” And the only way that can happen, as you just mentioned, which I think is the crux of this program, is having people who are already trusted in their communities to be able to help and outreach and learn where the needs are to help fill those needs. So Eric, it’s just an awesome opportunity. Hey, tell us really quickly your vision. You haven’t even been on board for, what? How many days now? It’s not even been a hundred for sure, but…

0:10:13.7 EB: It hasn’t been even 30 working days yet, I’m probably in my 20s in my working days. So October 14th was my first day, so not even 30 working days yet, not even 30 calendar days. One of the things, I think, a couple of areas that I really know that I want to focus on within the next several weeks would be to increase our advocacy. You kind of mentioned that a little bit earlier. I think the community is very interested in knowing, wanting to know what the Urban League thinks about various policy issues that are going on within our local government, one of the things that would affect them. So, being more involved around what’s going on with our educational system. When I say our, I’m talking about Grand Rapids Public Schools, possibly Kentwood and other surrounding districts that have significant populations of African Americans. So that would be an area. Another area is really looking at what we’re doing in housing. Historically, we’ve done a lot of referrals, and we’ve done a lot of mediation, or helped mediate between landlord-tenant issues and preventing homelessness. I really wanted to drill down at the root cause of why housing is just going astronomically out of reach for a lot of folks, which is obviously availability of housing stock and the factors that are looking there.

0:11:25.7 EB: So there may be some things coming up down the line that I want to propose is that where we can really have some hands-on effect of providing more housing stock that will hopefully be able to keep the cost down. And then other factors, helping individuals join the labor force, because that’s another reason why housing costs so much, is because the lack of availability of labor. So, helping more laborers come to the field of construction, be it in-house employees or subcontractors, so increasing there. And then the last thing, social enterprising. As an organization, we have to look at areas that are going to be, help us be sustainable long-term. There’s a lot of money flowing now with the American Rescue Plan, a lot of social justice issues, initiatives by even private companies. And going back to 2020, what happened around social justice is that time in our history. But we still need to become more sustainable as an organization, and there are so many opportunities for social enterprising. For those that might not be aware, social enterprising is partnering with groups or individuals or companies to be able to have, share in profits of what’s going on within that entrepreneurial space. So yeah, those are some of the high areas, Lynne, that I would want to tackle in these next, say, 90 days or so, 95 plus days.

0:12:47.7 LJJ: Well, Eric, we cannot thank you enough for your time. I know it’s valuable right now, you’re being… I hear you’re going to become a news star now and… [laughter]

0:13:00.5 EB: Just what I was looking for, [laughter] but anyway.

0:13:02.2 LJJ: On a serious note, we really are so thrilled with your leadership already, Eric, and thank you for the time today.

0:13:08.7 EB: Thank you for having me, Lynne. I look forward to spending some time with you again.

0:13:12.4 LJJ: And thank you for listening. If you have a topic that you would like to share, just send it along our way, we’d love to hear from you. I’d like to make a shout out to Jake Esselink, our producer. And hey everyone, have a wonderful week and it’s Money, I’m home with Lynne Jarman-Johnson and Consumer’s Credit Union.

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