The Healer, The Warrior, The Advocate

Our WellSpring

In this episode, Alicia Smith, Executive Director of The Junction Coalition, joins our host Uva Coles. Junction Coalition supports communities for a better quality of life built on four pillars - economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, and peace education. Alicia shares her lived experience, beliefs, and core values centered in healing and peace. We can all learn a lot from Junction and Alicia’s approach to legacy building, authenticity, and freedom.

Our Guests

Alicia Smith is a proud native of Detroit, Michigan, and mother of three. She and her family currently reside in Toledo, Ohio, where Alicia serves as the Executive Director for Junction Coalition. She lives, works, and enjoys the Junction community’s natural social environment with neighbors, friends, family, and visitors. Alicia’s passion flows from her belief that all citizens need information to thrive. As such, she works to build the capacity of each family. She believes that Justice work is not limited to the Environment but touches on issues of Social and Economic Justice with the goal of promoting Peace, Public Health and a better quality of life for all citizens. To reach these goals in the community, the Junction Coalition created the Junction Neighborhood Master Plan in 2018, the first of its kind since 1968.

In 2020, Alicia was awarded the UWLN Environmental Justice and Equity Expert Award. For the past year, she’s also been an invaluable member of the UWLN Equitable Development and Anti-Displacement Collaborative, hosting the Community Wealth Building as an Anti Displacement Strategy Peer Call in April 2021.

Our WellSpring Host

Uva Coles, Chief Learning Officer

Uva Coles serves as Chief Learning Officer for Spring Point Partners. As the organization’s external learning steward, Uva’s leadership ensures that equity, human-centered leadership, and narrative change are woven through every aspect of SPP’s partner-based learning deliveries. A writer, speaker, inclusive organizational strategist, and lifelong learner, Uva believes every room we step into is a classroom. Sometimes we are teachers; sometimes we are students. Our best learning happens, she believes, when we can be both.

Takeaways:

• Public deliberation and discourse are part of democracy.
• If you want to fix something, find those spaces and people who are most tattered and harmed. When you prioritize and address their needs, you address the whole.
• Pay attention to the children and the elders. The coming into life and the going out of life. Pay attention. Pay attention to the beginning and the end. It makes a difference for the middle.

*Episode Notes: Alicia's mentor is Fania Davis. Also, when Alicia referenced conversations with community members, she was referring to Ms. Bush and a 96-year-old woman who supported her along her journey.

Resources:

• “Today, I believe there is nothing more subversive than helping to midwife a new evolutionary shift of the human species into an era where we will no longer be entranced with socioeconomic formations and ways of being and thinking that produce disconnection, domination, and devastation. Instead, we can be present upon the Earth in ways that bring healing, wholeness, and a sense of the sacred in our connection with one another and with all of creation." - Fania E. Davis (quote)
• Young Sheldon (TV)
• I Am Enough by Grace Byers (book)
• Dr. Imani Michelle Scott (scholar and consultant)
• Joel Spring (author)
• Frankie Beverly (music)
• Indie Arie (music)
• King George (music)