I was a student at King [High School] when I heard about the Men [Who Care of Germantown (MWCOG)],” says Jewel Gadson, 19. “I was a hothead. Sometimes I didn’t go to class,” says Gadson, the third oldest of 15 siblings. Gadson, like his brothers and sisters, was in and out of foster care from
More
Black Birders Week 2022 was celebrated from May 31 to June 5. This year Grid caught up with three local Black birders to hear their stories. Katrina Clark I started birding during the pandemic. Mostly a friend and I were walking. We were like, “We have to get out of the house.” We started walking
More
It’s hard to find someone with anything bad to say about the High Line, the abandoned elevated train track that reopened in 2009 as a park after years of organizing by advocates in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. In 2019, before the pandemic, the High Line drew 8 million visitors a year. It has been a critical
More
I’d been hearing about the South Philly Meadows for some time, so I finally paid a visit. I biked from Center City — a very manageable 29-minute ride — and started to wander. The sound of traffic on Pattison Avenue began to fade with every step into the open, unplanned expanse, and the birdsongs grew
More
Growing up in the ’90s, Lakisha Bullock was bullied for her appearance at her West Philly middle school. “I had big thick hair. My mom didn’t know what to do with it,” she says. At the time there weren’t a lot of Black hair products that weren’t relaxers and straighteners, she says. So, in high
More
Philly Tech Sistas will be hosting a networking brunch on Friday, May 13 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to help women of color break through into leadership roles in the tech industry. Women face barriers to employment in the technology sector at every level, and women of color even more so. Philly Tech Sistas
More
The Schuylkill river, swollen with runoff from Hurricane Ida, was rising fast. Karen Young, the executive director of the Fairmount Water Works, knew it was only a matter of time until the river’s chocolate-brown water flooded the Interpretive Center, the water-focused museum next to the Fairmount Dam. “I was in the center the day the
More
We at Soil Generation have been organizing for land justice for growers of color in Philadelphia since 2014. Community control of land is the foundation of our collective struggle toward liberation. Whether the issue is food, education or housing, community control of resources requires community control of the land. As rapid development displaces community gardens
More
The heartache was still fresh when Fred H. Cartwright emailed us. “Our little slice of heaven is going away, tree by tree.” If you wanted to teach a class about environmental racism, and learn about the importance of trees simultaneously, the deforestation of 100-plus acres of city-owned land for a golf course in Cobbs Creek
More
The FBI kept Hakim’s Bookstore, 210 S. 52nd Street, under surveillance for some time, sniffing around for subversion, says Yvonne Blake, 70. Daughter of Dawud Hakim, the store’s late founder, Blake recounts how her father had done the unthinkable in 1959 by opening an independent Black bookstore, five years before segregation would be outlawed in
More
Pennsylvania “locks up a higher percentage of its people than almost any democracy on earth,” states the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit in Northampton, Massachusetts, that works to end mass incarceration. In addition, more than 40,000 Philadelphians, disproportionately Black and Brown, come home each year from state and federal prisons, according to a January 31, 2017
More