The reverend Luis Cortés jr., 62, gave the invocation prayer at Barack Obama’s 2013 Presidential Inauguration Luncheon, conferred with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about not separating migrant families at the border and sipped tea with Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace. Yet wherever Cortés goes, his heart stays in El Barrio: the streets of North Philly’s
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I was awake, curled in bed in a fetal position, about a year after my son, Khaaliq Jabbar Johnson was killed over a parking space,” says Dorothy Johnson-Speight, founder and executive director of Mothers In Charge (MIC), which assists parents of murdered children. “I had a vision where grieving mothers with bullhorns stood in a
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Since ancient greece, and maybe earlier, humans have shared stories of wounded healers—people whose own injuries seem to confer upon them the gift of relieving other people’s pain. Multimedia artist Terrence Gore, 56, of West Philadelphia seems such a person. “Doctors gave me 30 days to live at one point,” he says. “That was 15
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Covid-19 has slammed all teachers with change. Some have held classes online while others have taught in person—sometimes willingly, sometimes grudgingly, and often tired. “When this is over, we’re going to have collective PTSD,” says Gena Lopata, 48, who is comfortable teaching in person two days a week at The Crefeld School, a small private
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Sometimes it takes a village to stop a youth from having a criminal record. “Two friends, [ages]17 or 18, got into a fight over a girl,” explains the Reverend Donna L. Jones, 64, founding pastor of the Cookman Beloved Community Baptist Church in West Philadelphia. “One guy hit the other with a pistol,” says Jones,
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Music therapy can ease distress at life’s beginning, help us say needful words at life’s end and restore us in rough spots along the journey, according to Scott Horowitz. Horowitz, 38, a board-certified music therapist and assistant clinical professor of music therapy and counseling at Drexel University, offers an example: “Re-creating the soundscape of the
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Suppose you hopped on a vehicle that not only took you to another neighborhood but to a different place in your spirit. For Philadelphians, a journey with such a touch of magic is as close as SEPTA driver Gary Mason’s trolley. Mason tricks out his trolley for different holidays and revels in riders’ responses. Mason,
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The imp of irony plotted an odd course between painter Jane Golden and Philadelphia. If Golden hadn’t gotten a grim diagnosis years ago, the city could have missed out on lots of healing. Since her arrival here decades ago, Golden, 67, executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia, has brought wholeness to many neighborhoods with museum-quality
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Death by Another Name By Constance Garcia-Barrio If she served as the lookout during a gas station holdup, Marie “Mechie” Scott, then 19, believed she would get cash to buy the heroin that helped her blunt deep pain. Raped first at age 5 and repeatedly into her teens, in addition to enduring poverty and homelessness,
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Philadelphia’s quiet heroes include block captains, volunteers who, under the sponsorship of the Philadelphia More Beautiful Committee (PMBC)—a division of the Streets Department—rally their neighbors to keep their blocks attractive. Now, in addition to beauty, some block captains help ensure food and a sense of security for their neighbors in the face of the COVID-19
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