- Just ahead on "Black Issues Forum," a special feature with a Triangle local who took it into her own hands to ensure that those without a warm meal don't go hungry, followed by an interview with a woman that's fought the wall of political stagnation in Alabama and broken through by creating an organized method to win the battle.

Stay with us.

- [Announcer] "Black Issues Forum" is a production of PBS North Carolina with support from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[upbeat music] ♪ - Welcome to "Black Issues Forum."

I'm Kenia Thompson.

Around the winter holidays, many people become focused on giving.

There are a number of great nonprofits working to make the season just a little bit brighter for those in need, and a lot of us give to those organizations around this time.

But what if you made the commitment throughout the year?

When our executive producer, Deborah Holt Noel, discovered her former hairstylist was doing just that and more, she had to share her story to hopefully inspire others.

Here's more on Martha's Meals.

- Oh.

[bells jingle] Hey!

- Hey, girl, how are you?

- Good, how are you?

- It's good to see you.

[Deborah laughs] Put me to work.

[laughs] Tell me what you're want me to do.

- You can put you some gloves on.

- Okay.

I can't believe you have spent the entire day working.

So you do this how often?

- Once a month, every fourth Tuesday.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

And sometimes more, but every fourth Tuesday is dedicated to the homeless.

[gentle music] I am Melody Council.

I am the founder of Miss Martha's Meals who was named after one of my clients.

She passed in June of 2021.

I never had a client in my life to pass away, so... And she was so sweet.

I used to take her to the store.

We used to go shopping and all kinds of things.

So, yeah, just wanting to do something in her honor.

- [Deborah] So under the name Martha's Meals, Melody gives her time, talent, and treasure to bring warm meals to those in need in Raleigh.

Well, it smells good in here.

You have been busy.

- Yes, ma'am.

[laughs] - [Deborah] What time did you get started today?

- Ooh, I would say about 5:00 a.m. and began to cook pasta for the shelter and also prep the baked chicken, make sure it was cleaned and based and oiled down and seasoned and put 'em all in the pan.

- [Deborah] Melody packages each plated meal with bottled water, socks, gloves, even a card listing the locations of other shelters in the area.

Altogether, it's about 25 packages plus several other pans of dinner.

She also showed me one of the many handbags she collects and stuffs with goodies to distribute to women in need on other nights, but tonight, she delivers the pan dinners to a shelter in Raleigh.

- This is for the Helen Wright.

We've been serving them since 2012, so the last 11 years.

So at 6:30, we go down there and drop it off.

Before COVID, we would serve inside, but since COVID, we just drop it off to them and the food and drink.

And then we hit the streets, and we pass out food to the homeless that's on the street.

Drive up, roll the window down.

Hey, y'all, you need dinner?

You need dinner?

Okay, come on.

Just passing my bag out the window.

It doesn't discriminate, men, women, everybody.

Some of 'em are regular, and then some we've never seen before.

Every month it's somebody new.

- [Deborah] Melody and several of her friends caravan around Raleigh until every meal has been handed out.

I asked Melody what prompted her desire to help.

- Well, back in the 90s was my first time ever seeing a homeless person.

I was in Atlanta at a hair show, and we were driving around to Gladys Knight's Chicken and Waffles downtown, and I saw a homeless person, and I was like, "They're homeless?"

It bothered me.

[gentle music continues] - [Deborah] Melody's philanthropy is not supported by a foundation or a church or any other organization.

I asked her how she finds the resources to give.

- It doesn't take a lot to feed.

I mean, that 40 pound box of chicken was $39, you know, with tax, 42 and some change, and that was enough to feed the 65 in the shelter plus the 25 that we serve on the street.

So it doesn't take much.

Starting off, percentage of what I make outta my salon went to feeding the homeless.

So now some of my clients, they'll cash out $20, you know, or $10 or whatever to, you know, help support the mission.

Big or small, I just try to stay in my lane and do what God has for me to do, you know, 'cause my walk may not be someone else's walk.

- Such a beautiful story of someone who saw a need and decided to do something about it.

Now we're gonna shift to our next guest who also felt led to do something about the injustices in her state.

If you think it's hard to break political barriers here in North Carolina, here's someone who's done it in Alabama and makes no apologies for it.

I'd like to welcome to the show, the founder and executive director of Project Say Something, Camille Bennett.

Welcome to the show, Camille.

- Hello.

Hello, North Carolina.

- Hello.

- Thank you for having me.

- Of course, it's so great.

I know that it's an hour earlier over there, so it's a bit early for you.

So thank you for joining us.

I'd love for- - Thank you for having me.

- Of course, I want you to tell us a little bit about your organization, Project Say Something.

- Well, I'll start by sharing our mission.

Our mission is to confront anti-black systems and ideologies, promote reproductive justice, and fight against patriarchal violence using education, community empowerment, and advocacy.

We do three things.

We dismantle white supremacist narratives.

So we've done quite a bit of work around Confederate monuments, what they mean, what they stand for, and why they still exist.

We advocate for equitable policy around childcare, which is a part of reproductive justice.

We also advocate for black birth workers because the maternal death rate is in the top, in the lowest five states in the country.

And then we also advocate for equitable policy during legislative session.

- Mhm, so, there's a lot of work that you're doing now for sure, but I know that this likely didn't just spark for you within these recent years.

Talk to us about what sparked the initiative to give back to be a community member as that term really is described as community member.

- My mother, my mama.

[Kenia laughs] You wanna be original, but it's really my mom.

- Right?

[laughs] - I moved to the Deep South from the island of St. Martin in seventh grade, and I remember just being taken aback by the overt racism that I was experiencing at the time I was in Virginia Beach.

And my mother, when I came home, telling her about it, I was in private school.

I was the only black girl in the school, and my mother did not give me an option not to do something.

So, she put on like a week of black culture exploration, had us doing Jane Elliott's green eye, blue-eyed experiment, serving soul food.

The same thing happened when I moved to the Shoals, which is my home in high school.

There was quite a bit of overt racism in high school, and by my senior year, I was ready to start changing policies.

So we weren't allowed to have Black History Month.

Martin Luther King's birthday was celebrated with an actual Confederate soldier.

So it was like a slash kind of thing.

And they were also segregating us still in school activities.

And so I made a really big push to change those policies.

So I didn't get to see them actually change my senior year, but the next year they did.

And it was just wonderful to be there for generations to come.

In college, I won a national championship in poetry interpretation, but the poetry I chose was always centered around black womanhood, black feminism.

I was always challenging whiteness even before I understood what it meant to do that.

And then just as a mom, like I had to help my black sons navigate predominantly white schools.

And one of my children has ADHD and dyslexia.

So that was activism within itself.

And by the time I was in my mid 30s, it was time to start organizing seriously.

- You made a great point, you know, in two of the things that you said about it was senior year, so you didn't know if you were necessarily gonna see the changes and then changes that needed to be made for your black son.

A lot of the work that people like you and Melody do, the young lady that was featured in the feature before, we're not necessarily always gonna see the work when it happens, right?

But we know that we're paving the way for those that need it to benefit from it.

So what were some...

I know you mentioned before, right, we've got reproductive rights, we've had a lot of stuff that happened with Black Lives Matter, police brutality.

I'm assuming those were some of the needs that you began to see that made it imperative for you to start this nonprofit.

What were some other things that made you say, something's got to change?

- I think for us, it wasn't necessarily hot topics like police brutality that were happening in my community.

It was subtle, and there was just a complete lack of resistance.

So historically, North Alabama does not have a strong history of resistance.

So when people think about Alabama, they think about like the Civil Rights Movement.

They think about Birmingham and Montgomery and the bus boycotts.

That's further south.

Up north, black folks come and get jobs and work and we're smaller in numbers.

So there was no history of resistance.

As soon as I started mainstreaming the conversation about anti-black racism, a wave of resistance came.

So it was kind of like kicking or stepping in into an ant bed and just getting eaten up.

- Wow.

- And so that signaled to me that there is definitely a need and that that it was important for us to keep going.

Another thing was while I was building PSS, my husband and I were building childcare centers in predominantly black neighborhoods.

And so when you're doing that work, we're working with predominantly black single women.

You're able to see how not only is your work undervalued, but these women are undervalued.

And then you start to ask why, what happened?

Was it that black women were wet nurses?

Was it that we came into the homes and took care of white children for little of nothing?

So, again, we were able to like come up close and personal and see the needs of our communities because we see these women every day.

And then it was for younger generations.

Like there was this group, Millennials and Gen Z.

It was almost as if they were waiting for a platform to speak out in the way that they needed to.

Some of these kids are LGBTQIA and black and in need of a space where they can be free and express and resist the white supremacy that exists in our community.

- That's beautiful.

To me, what I hear is that you are a voice for those who are afraid to have their voices be heard for those that have maybe passed because of some of these impacts on society and specifically in your area.

Let's talk a little bit further about that impact.

What changes have you seen in Northern Alabama as a result of the work that you and your team have been able to accomplish?

- Oh my goodness.

So we just recently won a federal court case against our city for the violation of our first amendment rights.

As an organization, during 2020, we protested.

It was a first sustained protest in the history of our region of North Alabama, but we protested for 29 weeks, five days a week.

And during that time, our first amendment rights were violated in major ways.

We were told we weren't allowed to protest in certain areas.

We had to do silent protests.

They created protesting zones.

All of this was illegal, by the way.

[laughs] And they were using the parade ordinances inappropriately.

So the National Lawyers Guild and Duke Law Clinic helped us create a federal court lawsuit.

And we ended up settling this year.

And what that means for future generations is when they choose to protest, we now have noise decibels, we now have boundaries and ways to make it easier for those future generations.

Another thing that we've done in just our community is provide mutual aid for black women.

So when we do calls to action and they happen almost every week, black women need light bill assistance, or they're getting evicted, single black women, something is happening that they can't get the support of the government for, and what we do is we do call to actions for our community and just say, "Hey, this is what we need."

And people show up, and they support these women.

So, that's another thing.

And I would just say we've seen an overall culture shift.

We started nine years ago.

Now, when something happens and you're black, people, they're like, "Hey, Projects Say Something.

"It's time to go."

And they don't ask us to speak for them.

They're ready to speak for themselves.

- That's great, yeah.

They're empowered to.

- They're empowered to.

- A question that I wanna throw out there is, you know, not knowing that you aren't really violating laws, right?

You said that the region wanted to say that you couldn't protest because you were breaking this, you were breaking that, but partnerships enabled you with lawyers, enabled you to know, you know, that's not true.

So talk about the importance around creating partnerships within the region and in the state and then outside of the state as well.

- Partnerships are everything.

I think that especially out-of-state partnerships are really important.

They help project the message to spaces that need to hear it, that will be empathetic to what we're still experiencing in Alabama.

A lot of times when people live in more progressive cities, they kind of are like, yeah, Alabama, it's kind of like a lost cause, but they don't know that the Civil Rights Movement is still happening, and we're still here and we're still fighting.

And this time it's led by women.

And our partners, for example, the Indigo Girls, they're a famous folk group that found us, but they're our partners.

They help us fundraise, and they created a video about us, and we were in their documentary.

I can't express the importance of having out-of-state partnership and what it does for our funding, for our mission, and for our overall exposure.

- That's great.

That is so great.

So someone out there is thinking, you know, there's something I wanna shake things around, right?

They wanna make a difference in community, and a lot of times people, they stop or they pause because of funding and money.

So let's talk a little bit about funding.

You've done a good job with raising money, but it does take a lot to support the vision.

How do you do it and how do you continue to sustain the work that you're doing?

- For those people that want to get started, want to do something similar to Melody, I started just by doing it, doing the work.

I mean, the first five years, there was no real funding available.

And black women, black women founders, particularly in the Deep South, are grossly underfunded.

Our organization is still grossly underfunded, though we do have funding.

I think it's important to do the work, build it, and they will come kind of thing.

If you want to have a traditional nonprofit, funding is typically very difficult to get without one, or you can have a fiscal sponsor, so another organization that is doing similar work.

You can fall under their umbrella and receive funding that way.

But the funding ecosystem is tricky.

It's complex and it takes time to build relationships with funders and individual donors.

So I would say don't give up, and keep doing the work regardless.

The bottom line is your impact.

If you can show a funder, no, we haven't been funded, but look what we did for our state, that's powerful.

- Yeah, and you are a nonprofit status, but people don't have to be, correct?

- They sure do not.

Absolutely not.

I work with women that have chosen not to be a nonprofit and that choose to organize with their communities, like you were mentioning, handing out meals or doing coat drives or doing pack backpack drives, and they enjoy bringing community together to donate.

And it's hard work.

It's hard work, but when you get into policy advocacy and you're trying to like change policies and you're in legislative session and you're challenging governmental systems, that's when the funding becomes important because it's so much work.

You need staff.

- Mhm.

Now, are there different types of... Well, are there different benefits to being funded nonprofit-wise or just funded on your own?

And then going back to partnerships, are there any benefits to certain types of partnerships in diversifying that partnership bank?

- I would say when you're talking about traditional nonprofit funding, there's what's called the nonprofit industrial complex.

So that's when you have foundations that are white led that are choosing initiatives for black organizations.

And that itself is a challenge for obvious reasons, right?

It is basically white people telling black people how to emancipate themselves and then giving us money for it.

[chuckles] And as an organization, we have chosen to resist that model.

But there are other founders out there that understand that black led advocacy work, we know what we need, we know what we're doing, and they will give us unrestricted funding.

So we work to find those partnerships.

I can't stress enough the value of individual donors.

People who are watching this show, shameless plug, [laughs] can donate to Projects Say Something.

But I think that relying on foundations alone is problematic because foundations aren't fickle.

For example, pre George Floyd or post George Floyd, like the, the push was racial justice policing, all of that.

And then one day when Stacey Abrams flipped Georgia, funders were like, okay, now we want you to work on voter registration.

And then a lot of us are like, well, all these things are important, but we have a mission, and our mission is this.

So it's a really complex issue In terms of partnerships, I think partnerships are critical.

So if you do find those funders that are willing to give you those unrestricted funds, they believe in your work.

I think it's really important to build relationships with them because they will introduce you to their friends.

They will work to make sure that you get the funding that you need on a consistent basis that's multi-year funding.

And then I also recommend just diversifying your funding, you know, not not just relying on foundations, but also talking to your community, making sure they understand what you need and why you need it.

And it doesn't have to just be in your state.

Again, most of our support is across the country.

- Mhm, now that you've learned the differences of your funding sources and the difference that those sources can make, does it influence the way that you do your work or shape your work, or you just stay steadfast to what you're here for?

- We stay steadfast.

I think that that's the trick, right?

A lot of times when you start off with a mission and then you see $250,000 available for voter registration, but you know good and well you have not done any of that work, you've been doing this work, the temptation is to shift, right?

Because you need the funds.

And I think that that model can't work because racial justice is such a vast system.

It's such a vast ecosystem.

You have environmental justice, reproductive justice, black feminism, police brutality.

The list goes on and on.

And if everyone keeps switching gears, right, we're not gonna be able to attack all of it, and that's what we need.

- That's such an important point because I think, you know, we're putting on the lens here of racial justice.

We put on the lens of homelessness before, but it could be anything that someone sees as an issue in their community.

And I think if we let the dollars lure us into a different direction, that's almost another systemic ploy, right, to say, well, let's give them money here so that they can stop focusing there.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

So anyone who's doing work that they are passionate about, that they wanna continue doing, I always say stay true to your mission.

- Mhm, well, you made a shameless plug earlier, so I'm gonna give you some time to share with folks how can they get in touch with you if they would love to learn more about what you do and potentially have partnership here at North Carolina?

- You can go to our website www.projectsaysomething.org.

Everything's there, all of our programming, how to donate, our bio information, We have a well crafted website that we've worked for years on to make sure it has all the information on there.

So our website is the best place to go.

- Wonderful, and about 30 seconds left.

What's next for you?

- Oh my goodness.

Well, as we know, the election season is coming up, and though nonprofits are nonpartisan, we still have to deal with the backlash of the election cycle and how white supremacy is gonna impact Alabama.

So we are preparing for that, preparing for legislative session, preparing to kill bills like anti-CRT and anti-protest bills, - So much good work.

- And continue to do the work.

- Wonderful, well, Camille Bennett, Project Say Something, thank you so much for the work that you do and hopefully the collaboration you can have here in North Carolina.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

We invite you to engage with us on Instagram using the hashtag #BlackIssuesForum.

You can also find our full episodes on PBS NC slash "Black Issues Forum" and on the PBS video app.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Kenia Thompson.

I'll see you next time.

[upbeat music] ♪ - [Announcer] "Black Issues Forum: is a production of PBS North Carolina with support from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.