“So often in society we tend to give ourselves over to these kinds of biases that make us believe some people deserve it and some people don’t deserve it,” said Rod Jones, president and CEO of Grace Hill Settlement House.
Jones grew up in a housing project in New York City. His life could have gone many different directions, he said. But thanks to the programs at his local HeadStart and neighborhood centers, he chose education.
Every day at Grace Hill, Jones said, he works to “raise the floor of citizenship in America” and to give everyone a shot at achieving their dreams.
On Saturday, Jan. 11, Jones will talk about how others can get involved at the TEDx Gateway Arch Conference being held at the Sheldon Concert Hall, 3648 Washington Blvd. The conference will be held from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
TEDx are local, self-organized events that receive some guidance from the main TED conference, which started in California 26 years ago and is devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.”
Jones will join 16 other TEDx speakers, as well as some interactive experiences and entertainment, on Jan. 11.
“If we make a concerted effort to strengthen people, we then strengthen cities and nations,” Jones said.
One of Jones’ aspirations in coming to St. Louis was to revive the work of settlement houses. Grace Hill has a long heritage as a settlement, which historically was a method for serving the poor in urban areas by living among them. One of the best-known settlement houses is Hull House in Chicago, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Starr.
“Essentially,” he said, “our mission work is to make sure that even the kids who grew up like me in the housing projects” have an opportunity to succeed.
Grace Hill has two faces – the health center and the settlement house. Together they have a vital impact on the socio-economic sustainability of the St. Louis region, Jones said.
“Our services allow families to participate in society almost at a $40,000 level,” Jones said.
Take the employers who hire people at $9 an hour. If a person makes $9 an hour and has one child in child care, and that person brought home $20,000 that year, $12,000 would have gone to child care – if Grace Hill didn’t provide affordable child care.
Another $12,000 would have gone to a health care plan, he said, if Grace Hill didn’t provide affordable health care. And $8,000 would have gone to a decent place to live, if Grace Hill didn’t provide affordable housing.
“We mitigate the things that prevent people from participating successfully in work, which helps employers to reduce the number of missed days from work, which helps us to prevent the number of children that drop out and ultimately become criminals and incarcerated,” Jones said.
“We help to create and support a secondary workforce that allows us to make St. Louis attractive for employers.”
Jones intends to use his TEDx talk to remind St. Louis how inter-connected it is, and that includes the region’s poor.
“In communities that are really provincial, people believe that as long as my community is okay, there’s no harm, no foul,” Jones said. “I hate to say it, but that’s not going to happen.”
Sweet Potato Talk
Also speaking at the Tedx conference on Jan. 11 is Sylvester Brown Jr., who initiated the Sweet Potato Project to address youth employment and sustainability in North St. Louis neighborhoods.
Using urban farming, the program is designed to teach youth about productive ways to generate income, such as planting sweet potatoes on vacant lots and making and merchandizing sweet potato products. Recently, the Sweet Potato Project partnered with Saint Louis University in this effort.
Brown said he asks the youth in his program “to imagine whole blocks where food is grown in North St. Louis, processed and turned into products that can be used locally and sold regionally or nationally.”
Tickets for the conference are $40 and $75; purchase through metrotix.com. Visit www.tedxgatewayarch.org for more information.
