(bright music) - We have got a great show coming up for you on "American Black Journal."

Focus Hope is expanding its outreach to senior citizens who need help putting food on the table.

Plus, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts talks with us about the connection between the arts and healthy communities.

And, a Detroit filmmaker is recognized for her film about the city's Nigerian immigrants.

Stay where you are.

"American Black Journal" starts right now.

- [Announcer] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

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Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for journalism at Detroit Public TV.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal" in covering African-American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal," partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

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(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm Stephen Henderson.

The civil and human rights organization Focus Hope, is making it possible for more senior citizens in Southeast Michigan to receive much needed food assistance.

The nonprofit's Food for Seniors program has expanded to include 43 new sites in cities all throughout southeast Michigan.

Seniors can register at these locations to receive monthly food boxes, which contain staples like milk and cereal and canned goods.

I got all of the details from Focus Hope's director of the food program, Frank Kubik.

Frank Kubik, welcome to "American Black Journal."

- Thank you, I'm glad to be here.

- Yeah, so tell me about Food for Seniors, which is this program that you're expanding, but also tell me about the current climate for hunger and food scarcity right now and how different it looks.

I imagine that that has a lot to do with the decision to make this available to more people in the metro area.

- Exactly, we have the Commodity Supplemental Food Program here at Focus Hope.

It's a national program funded by USDA.

It's for low income seniors who are 60 and over and have a monthly income of 1580 a month or less.

So, you get a nutritionally balanced food box.

The nutritionists at USDA put the package together, canned fruit, meat, juice, vegetables, cheese, pasta, peanut butter, beans, et cetera.

It's meant to supplement what you already have.

And what we're seeing with a lot of seniors is unfortunately, this is not a supplement.

It's more of almost a majority of the food that they have each month, so it's difficult for seniors.

And with the rising number of seniors who are food insecure, you've got 7%, 7.1 million, I'm sorry, of seniors in this country are food insecure.

These seniors have worked all their lives.

They've contributed so much to this country and make it the country it is today.

But many of 'em worked at low paying jobs or jobs didn't record their earnings.

So when you look at a social security statement each month they really don't get a true value of what they put into this country.

And here, in your golden years, you shouldn't have to worry about where your next meal's coming from.

So programs like this, that are senior-only programs through the USDA, they were geared to the seniors who needed a boost in their balanced food and it's just balanced food to keep 'em healthy.

This is a great program for them.

What we've seen with the need is it's growing, and this is, again, the fastest rising group of hungry in this country, is that there's so many seniors are isolated and home bound, and the challenge we have is reaching those seniors.

And I think that challenge is the same whether it's in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Alaska.

I was at a national conference, and we heard about Alaska and some of the challenges they faced.

And I think, man, I have to worry about getting from one side of town to the other, and they cross rivers to get food to seniors.

So, the program operators are really dedicated to get this food to seniors, so it's important now.

We see the cost of everything going up.

I went and got my oil changed.

I was shocked at what that was from the last time.

(Stephen laughs) Look, if you're living on a fixed income, you've got your utility costs, putting gas in your car if you have a car, paying for other food, again, this is a supplemental amount of food.

It's not meant to carry you through the whole month.

Your medical cost, your home repairs.

We go into so many homes, what do you see, a leaky roof.

There's so many things that a senior has to deal with and on a fixed income.

Programs like this are just super important.

So, we've seen the growth.

This program started as a moms and kids program in USDA.

Focus Hope got involved in 1971 when it was a moms and kids program.

And Eleanor Josaitis, one of our co-founders, would tell this story that she got a phone call one day from someone and someone who needed food, and so she's bragging about this great program.

Well, Focus Hope has this food and come to Focus Hope.

And she said, the senior yelled and screamed at her, "I'm 79 years old, do I have to get pregnant to get food?"

And so she said that kind of woke her up to the plight of the seniors and led Focus Hope to take the lead to become a seniors program per CSFP.

and do (indistinct) navigating for it.

So I think as we've seen the program now evolve to a seniors-only program in the 2014 Farm Bill, that need is out there and it's growing, so programs like this are really important to get that food to those seniors.

- Yeah, 43 new sites throughout Metro Detroit, and we should stress, it's Metro Detroit.

People think of poverty, and they almost always think of Detroit, and that's true.

We do have an acute problem with poverty and food insecurity and housing insecurity and all those things here, but that's true increasingly in other communities and to an even greater extent than in the past.

- Yeah, and I think what we've seen, we cover Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Washtenaw Counties.

There's not a sign that says, "End of Hunger" when you cross Eight Mile.

That need extends beyond Eight Mile.

I think 10% of the seniors in our metropolitan area are food insecure.

So we have to get out to those seniors as we've mentioned with the limited resources and just the fact that it's hard for seniors to get out.

We have to get to Rochester.

I can't have a site here on Oakland Boulevard and say, "Okay from Ann Arbor, come and get it.

"Mount Clements, here we are."

It doesn't work that way, so it's up to us to make sure that we get on those communities.

So now we're reaching out to, we're in Utica, we're in Rochester, Ann Arbor, Roseville, Ypsilanti, our whole service area, we're getting more sites.

So when you hear about the additional sites that we've added to our program, we look into even adding more, because what we don't want is someone not to be able to get the food that they need.

So, it's on us to make sure we get that food to them.

- Yeah, it's also a reminder, I think, during the pandemic, I think we were all made much more aware of the needs that exist, and they were made worse during the pandemic.

And I think people really stepped up in ways that they hadn't before to try to make sure that folks could get through.

Now we're at least talking about being in post-pandemic, but those needs don't really go away for everyone, and the awareness that the pandemic raised for all of us, I think we gotta maintain that.

We have to stay in that space and understand that there are folks who, all the time, are gonna need help.

- Yeah, and the pandemic brought it home, I think, to a lot of us, and there is no normal anymore.

The normal is not to be normal, I suppose.

And what we had to do to adapt to the pandemic in terms of even serving the seniors, we went from a system where you would come into our sites and pick up food, to one where you pull up in front and open your trunk, and we put it in there.

And so, the things that happened then have not gone away.

The seniors have not become instantly hungrier, and the issues gone away.

Just like around the holidays, when you see an uptick in folks that are volunteering and helping, and we appreciate that, it means so much, especially that time of year, but it doesn't stop on January 1st.

And so now that we're out of the pandemic, hunger hasn't stopped, and I think the awareness that has created that people we're stepping up and helping their neighbors and their friends and their communities and their families.

We tell folks, "Look at those who are closest to you," 'cause sometimes we don't see it, that the people that are closest to us are the ones that are most in need.

So that hasn't gone away, but the awareness that the pandemic did bring to the issue of hunger, we wanna make sure that people don't forget about that and keep doing the things they need to do, so we take care of our seniors.

- Okay, Frank Kubik, Focus Hope, congratulations on expanding the program and thanks so much for being on the "American Black Journal" with us.

- Thank you, appreciate your help and your support, thank you.

- The National Endowment for the Arts made history last year when Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson was appointed Chair of the Independent Federal Agency.

She's the first African-American and Mexican woman to lead the NEA.

I sat down with her for a wide-ranging conversation about her career and the importance of arts and culture in building healthy communities.

So, tell us what you are up to at the NEA, most really important institution in terms of, I feel like, girding the arts maybe is the phrase that I would say, making sure that this is perpetuated and made available, accessible to so many different people and to places where, without the NEA, you might not have the same kind of awareness and access to the fine arts.

- Well, certainly accessibility is a really important part of what I'm committed to in this role as leader of the organization.

There's a concept that I've been promoting that has to do with making the arts part of our everyday lived experience.

And I talk about artful lives and our intention to make sure that everyone in the country has an opportunity to have art in their lives.

And it's an elastic notion from my perspective, which includes the things that people usually think about, which might be going to a museum or a concert or seeing a play.

I think it also includes though everyday lived experience and practice in actively creating art at whatever level.

So whether it's making, doing, teaching, learning, the aesthetic qualities of being in family, being in community, those are all really important.

So it's an elastic definition that I think has a lot of on-ramps for people to nurture their creative side and be expressive as full humans.

- Yeah, yeah, so when I think about my own early exposure to the arts and things that made me love art and music and museums and all of the things you were just talking about, there are a couple spaces that come to mind.

Of course, school, after school, after school programming, which was a really big deal when I was a kid in the latchkey era.

And then I think of summer programming through rec centers and other things that my parents made sure I participated in.

And if you think of those two things, or all of those things, a lot of 'em don't exist in the abundance that they did when I was a kid.

Some of 'em don't really exist at all, and the ones that are left are under real threat.

We have a real struggle right here in the city of Detroit to make sure that the arts are part of the public school system.

That's not a given anymore.

I imagine that from your chair, some of what you're dealing with is just the retraction of opportunity, the diminishment of that opportunity for people to become fans of the arts in the way they used to.

- I think that the trends that you point to are on point in many places.

I also feel like there's a lot of opportunity right now to think more expansively about the role of the arts at the intersection of other fields.

You mentioned education.

I certainly think about education.

I also think about health and community development and how the arts are imperative to do well in any of those fields.

I personally think that the arts are often a precondition for so many of the things that we say we aspire to as a nation of opportunity and justice.

We just can't achieve it without figuring out how to integrate arts, culture, and design into so many facets of our lives, so many different areas of policy and practice.

So I'm very interested and excited about the opportunity to more intentionally look at the connections, say between arts and health and wellbeing, or arts and how we think of healthy communities, how we continue to develop communities in ways where all people can thrive.

I think the arts are central to that.

- Yeah, yeah, let's talk a little about you and your background and what brings you to this position.

It is a milestone, an important milestone, the fact that you're sitting in the seat you are.

- Well, it's been a journey that has a through line, and I think the through line is that I really do believe that the arts are critical to building healthy communities where all people can thrive.

And my commitment to the arts started early, and it started at home.

And it wasn't because my parents were artists or benefactors, or collectors, or anything like that, but I think that my parents resorted to the arts as a way to help my brother and me understand who we were and where we came from.

I think they also looked to the arts as a way to make sure that we were proud of the cultures that we came from, that we knew that we were connected to people who were capable of genius, and that was really important to them, and not to just know it intellectually, but to feel it, which is what happens through the arts when we get to express our full humanity.

So, I think awareness that the arts are essential to expressing that full humanity, to reclaiming that full humanity, I think that that has always informed my understanding of the kinds of cities and towns and communities that I wanna participate in helping to build.

So my professional training is in urban planning, but in all of that, I don't see the arts as separate from that.

I see it as essential, and perhaps too often not considered enough but essential and certainly inadequate without the inclusion of arts, culture, and design.

- Detroiter Ozi Uduma is among eight emerging filmmakers of color whose works are featured in the Homegrown Future Visions Project, which is presented by Firelight Media and the Center for Asian American Media.

Uduma's film, "Detroit We Dey," examines the social club that was founded by Nigerians who immigrated to Detroit in the 70s and 80s.

BridgeDetroit's Orlando Bailey hosted an "American Black Journal" virtual watch party that feature the filmmaker and other local Nigerian Americans.

Here's a portion of that discussion.

(bright music) - We want to welcome you to the "American Black Journal's" watch party for "Detroit We Dey."

How are you feeling after seeing this again?

- Of course, being the director, I've seen this film in so many different iterations, and so to get to this point to share it out in the world, it's both the warm fuzzies and also the nervousness of people seeing it, because it's coming from the heart.

- Deeply nostalgic.

When I look at those clips and those pictures, they take me to very specific times in my life, very specific events.

I can look at clips of some of those parties and remember my family came maybe like 10 minutes later.

So to be able to see us so deeply connected, looking at these throwback clips.

Also, I'm curious about what didn't make the cut.

- Being Nigerian and being a Detroiter and having that story encapsulated so artistically and yeah, seeing people that I recognize from church growing up, it's just really beautiful.

- Loyalty is probably the one word that I think of right now.

Folks that have asked me, "Why are you raising your family in Detroit?"

And if you understood how I feel about my family, how I feel about the Nigerians in Detroit, how I feel about the Nigerians in Michigan, how I feel about the Detroit story as we get to have at least a small part of it, I can't see anything more meaningful than trying to connect back to what's giving you so much, so loyal.

I feel that this exemplifies why are we loyal to this place and why are we loyal to each other?

- I really wanna talk about specifically, this was mentioned in the film, the isolation of immigration, and the origination of the Obin Dey Association.

Ozi, first of all, that line was so powerful, "The isolation of immigration."

I think you made so many people feel seen just by that line, but also connect that and thread that to this unction to start something to build community so that we're no longer in isolation.

- I think with this group, what I've learned, and with many of the other Nigerian social organizations in Michigan is that you see someone who is from your area, you see your brother, you see your sister, and so that feeling of wanting to gather.

And so people become family who you probably would've never met, because the town is big, so maybe they would've resided on one side of the town, if only for this circumstance of having to leave home, and coming to the conclusion that you're going to stay in this new place, then you come together and create community, and it makes everyone feel less alone, or at least that they have family, even if they're not blood.

- When I, some of my earliest memories were that realization that I had to navigate two different cultures out in the world and at home.

I've always felt like a Detroiter.

I've always felt like a Black person who is Nigerian, and I never saw those things as separate.

When I was in school, very young, and we were learning about the slave trade, it was just very clear to me that we are all connected, related, together.

Sometimes there were cultural values butt heads, being young and American or Americanized was something that I felt like wasn't always celebrated in my household, because my parents, they wanted us to speak the language.

They wanted us to be deeply invested in and carry on the legacy of the culture that their ancestors had instilled in them.

- I did, as I got older, understand there was an insecurity, I think at the base of a lot of the Nigerians that are here, this idea that you may lose what it is that you came here with.

And I then, I think the feeling of, if I don't pass this culture onto my children, what is it that I'm actually doing in this country?

Is it this loss of connection that will never be brought back or is there a sense that I can do something, I can bring to bear an identity that melts into the external that I can't control.

I can't control that my children go to school.

Indeed that's what I can do is what my father does, educate us as to what is the African-American struggle, what is the African-American struggle, distinct from the Nigerian struggle?

- As the elders pass on, there's a Senegalese proverb that says, "When a elder passes, a library has burned."

So what is the job of the griot?

What is the job of the citizen to make sure that culture is not only preserved, but it's preserved through documentation, video, voice, photo.

- There's this igbo proverb, and it roughly translates into English that, "Don't let me be forgotten."

And so, the importance of not only the archives and digitizing archives and making it accessible to the community, but it's also telling stories.

Building intergenerational conversations, an actual community is intergenerational, right?

So it is sharing the story.

It's passing on the recipes, (laughs) all of all of these things.

It is truly being in community with each other and this ability to share.

- Naming is very, very important to me.

If you know anything about Nigerian cultures, there's so much in a name.

My grandfather's first name was Onwenu, and he wanted everybody who came across him to know his name through his children, so he made it his last name.

Because I have a daughter, my daughter has a Nigerian name.

Being able to pass those names on and being able to have a story to go along with it, and I feel like that's a very good way to have the conversation and be able to be intentional about passing culture down.

- As an artist and vocalist and storyteller generally, I think, like Nina Simone said, it's our responsibility to reflect the times.

And I think that in order to accurately reflect the times, you have to have a certain level of commitment to understanding the legacy of the people who made it possible for you to be here, and also, the people who are in your artistic lineage.

- I think it's not just the Nigerian story or the American story or the Black-American story.

I think any one of us, where you come from, it's important to be intentional about what you think should be happening next.

It's on your shoulders.

You have a responsibility, and if you take it passively, those will be the results you live with.

And what I would like for us to do, if you're in the arts, if you're in education, if you're in business, is to remember that a story needs to be told in your life about how you got to this point.

However you go about telling that story, that's on you.

- And "Detroit We Dey" is streaming on PBS.

We're gonna have a link to the film at americanblackjournal.org.

(bright music) That's gonna do it for us this week.

You can find out more about our guests on our website and connect with us anytime on Facebook and on Twitter.

Take care, and we'll see you next time.

(bright music continues) (bright music continues) - [Announcer] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for journalism at Detroit Public TV.

(bright music) - [Announcer] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal," in covering African-American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal" partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Announcer] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you, thank you.

(bright music)