Habari Gani! Ujima! Hey Jordan. How are you? I'm doing well, how are you? I'm doing great. Hey y'all, we are back at it again today I have Dr. Sachelle Ward
with us today and her principal is Ujima. Ujima.
So Ujima essentially means collective work and responsibility, which
means to build and maintain our community together and make our brothers
and sisters problems our problems to solve them together, and so I wanted to
ask you what this principle meant for you? I love Ujima, I think it's a really really beautiful principle. I think
this notion of collective works and responsibilities for each other and for
making each other's problems our own really helps us to understand what it,
what it means to be in community with each other. It's not just to be a
community because you share an identity where there's a task at hand that you're
working on together but to truly actually be in community
with one another. I think Ujima teaches us that. While I thought of Ujima is when it says making our brothers and sisters problems
our problems and find a way together to get through our problems instead of like
that individual mindset of "oh I can do this on my own", when you actually need your
community and I feel that what Kwanzaa is teaching us as well,
like we need our community, it's okay to be independent but at the same time can
you lean on your brothers and sisters? You know? Yeah. I also would ask you in
what ways have you personally exemplified Ujima? What ways that I personally exemplified Ujima.
You know, I think that in the work that I do here I think to really be effective
and to do it well and to do work that is worth doing I think you need to kind of
draw on Ujima, right? So I think that's at the heart of the Mate Masie
series that we do here and the dissertation writing workshop and to do
that I essentially could have asked folks and asked folks in our community
you know what problems are you having? What kind of help do you need? And then I
put my efforts in my energy into kind of thinking about solutions. How can we kind build a program
or have initiatives that's going to help other people.
So they're saying things like they need help with writing RB protocols, help
finishing dissertation which is a huge huge kind of marathon of work,
grant writing, but so if they need help crafting a grant applications to get
funding for their work right then we do a grant or a grant writing workshop, okay.
So I think that that really kind of exemplifies Ujima. Thinking of other folks problems
and kind of keeping keep them as my own, finding solutions for them, it takes a community to do that.
And you've made this your work. Yeah. That's my work here in the center it's really a
privilege and honor to use my work for the communal good. Yeah.
And I think that ties into Sankofa. Going back and fetching which you have
forgotten. Yeah. You know especially for you being new here, the amount
of work you've done in order to give back to like a grad student and if
students who are planing to graduate, it's really incredible because it's like
you showing so much love and the responsibility for it though it was our
coming after you know. Thank you Jordan. Yeah, so for our final question
I wanted to know in what ways were you exemplified Ujima in the future? You know
in my personal life, there are some folks who are close to me who I just think do some fantastic, fantastic work in the community
they do some really hard work establishing these resources for
under-served communities and they mobilize folks, they create their own
networks in the communities, and then next year I want to learn from
them. I want to learn how to kind of operate, and be
in the a community and work as a collective in ways that I haven't so far.
One of my favorite activists and intellectuals is Angela Davis, and
something that stands out to me about what she said is
you know she joined the movement because she realized there is only so much you
can do as an individual to really do the real work you have to
do it as a collective, so I want to learn more this next year. A proverb after proverb, one stick will break,
but multiple sticks won't bend. That's outstanding. That's kind of what they do. I wanted to say thank you. Thank you Jordan.
and we would like to end the videos with saying Harambee. Harambee!
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét