Communities That Care Coalition
Promoting health, well-being, and equity among young people in Franklin County and the North Quabbin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Richardson
Desmond Richardson is an American dancer, actor and co-founder, and co-artistic director of Complexions Contemporary Ballet. He has mastered a wide range of dance forms including hip hop, classical, modern, classical ballet, and contemporary ballet.
He remained the principal dancer at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1987 to 1994.
https://www.thespicesuite.com/about-1
Angel is a mommy, home cook, activist and educator with a knack for blurring the line between food and fashion. In 2015, she walked by a vacant store front with no plan or desire to be a small business owner and decided on the spot to turn it into a spice shop. That spice shop has become a dream incubator and haven.
Amid the pandemic, entrepreneur and activist Angel Gregorio made a huge bet on herself and fellow Black-owned businesses in her native Washington, D.C. And it has been paying off.
Dr. Melissa L. Gilliam became Boston University’s eleventh president on July 1, 2024. Dr. Gilliam is an esteemed and award-winning interdisciplinary researcher in medicine, public health, and the humanities. Dr. Gilliam joined Boston University from The Ohio State University, where she held the Engie-Axium chair and served as executive vice president and provost overseeing 15 colleges and six campuses and the Office of Academic Affairs, including undergraduate education, graduate education, international affairs, diversity and inclusion, external engagement, online learning, and information technology. She placed a keen focus on issues of access, affordability, and reducing student debt.
https://research.umd.edu/articles/meet-dr-maze
One of the most recent graduates of the University of Maryland is Dr. Alena Maze, who is believed by members of the academic community to be among the world’s first Black Ph.D. holders in the field of Survey Methodology, if not the very first.
Reflecting on the milestones she has achieved, Dr. Maze said that, from a young age, she was encouraged by her family to take an interest in mathematics.
The Crown Makers: Historic and Contemporary Black-owned Milliners
On certain Sundays in Black America, a hat is not an accessory so much as an announcement.
It enters the room a half-second before the wearer—wide brim first, then the ribbon’s quiet logic, then the feather that seems to have been persuaded into place rather than attached. In the best examples, the hat does what architecture does: it directs attention, establishes scale, implies ceremony. The body becomes a building. The aisle becomes a runway. And for a few hours, in sanctuaries and fellowship halls and repurposed storefronts, the world’s hierarchy feels rearranged.
That rearranging has always been part of the Black milliner’s work. The popular story of American fashion still tends to treat hats as a seasonal flourish—here for Easter, gone by summer—or as a quaint relic from the era when men wore fedoras to work and women wore pillboxes to lunch. But in the places where Black milliners have made their living, hats have been a persistent technology: of self-definition, of respectability politics navigated and subverted, of grief ritualized, of joy engineered.
And, crucially, of entrepreneurship.
Because the hat business—unlike most mythologies about glamour—has always been about money: who can borrow it, who can lease space, who can buy felt in bulk, who can afford to stock trims that might not sell for months, who can withstand a slow season. Millinery is art, but it is also inventory management and customer acquisition and—particularly for Black women and men who were denied easy access to mainstream credit—creative finance.
https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/zeek-tiktok-musician-chinese-restaurant-delaware
A Delaware musician is striking a chord with millions online. What started as a way to pass time turned into a viral sensation thanks to a lonely piano, a cellphone and the power of TikTok.
In between the sizzling sounds from the kitchen and the cash register at the front counter, the sound of a piano plays inside a Chinese restaurant called New #1 Chinese Food in Newark, Delaware.
The musician behind the keys is 32-year-old Juan Z. Leonard, who goes by the artist name ZEEK.
https://www.why-not-prosper.org/about.html
Reverend Dr. Michelle Anne Simmons, a single mother of two children, has overcome many challenges throughout her life. It is through her faith in God that she has persevered and is able to share her story. She has received a number of awards for her leadership, advocacy, heroism, and humanitarianism that have afforded her opportunities to travel the world, sharing her experience and ministering to others.
Rev. Simmons currently holds a Doctor of Ministry and a master’s degree in Clinical and Counseling Psychology as well as a bachelor’s degree in Human Services from Chestnut Hill College. She is also a Certified Allied Addictions Practitioner and a Human Services Board-Certified Practitioner. Rev. Simmons is the Founder and CEO of Why Not Prosper, Inc., an organization dedicated to helping females in prison make a smooth transition back into society after their incarceration. She founded the group believing in the importance of giving women a hand up, not a handout.
https://vocal.media/art/ballet-without-permission-from-pavlova-to-pavement
Back in the winter of 2015, I laced up my pointe shoes, headed to Bushy Park near Hampton Court Palace, and asked a friend to take a few photos.
That spring, to celebrate my (now inactive) YouTube channel reaching 1,000 subscribers, I posted En Pointe In Public (EPIP)—a short piece about a boy dreaming of dancing en pointe in a world where that wasn’t the norm. The idea was simple: pointe work should be open to anyone with a love for ballet, regardless of gender.
Kadeem Hosein, 25, says: “I studied ballet for about three years before I started en pointe. I was aware that it would help to strengthen my feet. Second, and more importantly, I enjoyed watching pointe work so figured why not?” He now lives in London and although he’s not a professional ballet dancer, still trains en pointe. “I think it would be interesting to see performances where roles are allowed to be performed by either male or female,” he adds, “not by force, but by the dancers’ own choice.”
https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2025/12/16/before-fashion-looked-to-africa-africa-tailored-itself
In Bacongo—Brazzaville’s neighborhood of narrow streets and loud afternoons—style arrives before the person. A flash of lemon-yellow sock. A jacket with shoulders as sharp as a thesis. A cane used less for balance than for punctuation. The movement has choreography: a half-turn to catch the light, a palm over the lapel to show the lining, a pause that dares the onlooker to admit what they came to see.
To outsiders, La SAPE can look like an aesthetic contradiction—high fashion in low-income streets, luxury labels against corrugated metal. The misread is common and revealing: that elegance must be purchased, that it must be quiet, that it must be sanctioned by the people who already have power. La SAPE rejects all three. Even its name—Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, “Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People”—frames dress as a social function, not a private indulgence.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/12/19/g-s1-102766/grammy-fela-kuti-afrobeats
On December 19, the first African musician ever awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award was announced.
The honor goes to Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat pioneer and activist who died in 1997. He joins an elite group of legends like The Beatles, Johnny Cash, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hedrix, Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra — all recognized for making “creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording.”