*music*
My first involvement with Ms. Ford
began when I was awarded a grant through
the Department of Justice Project Safe
Neighborhoods, it's a community grant
that aims to educate youth about
wellness, physical fitness, career
readiness, nutritional fitness, and we aim
to have outreach into youth in north
Baton Rouge in neighborhoods are
particularly vulnerable to crime and
under-resourced and so Ms. Ford was
an instrumental asset to us and helping
us make those connections. She's
director of the Martin Luther King
Community Center on Gus Young here
in Baton Rouge and because the
center is such a treasure there in that
neighborhood it already had great
connections and relationships with
family and youth in the surrounding
neighborhoods. So when we began our
relationship we contacted her first to
see if she might be able to help us with
recruitment and during our visit we had
a tour of the MLK Center and were just
blown away what a wonderful center it is.
It has terrific facilities, a really
friendly warm staff, and so during the
tour we said well could we just have our
program here and she was so generous
and allowed us to be able to work
through that arrangement. So through the
center, being involved in that
location very central to the youth we
wanted to work with and through her
connections and relationships we were
able to reach some of the youth and
families and have them engaged in our
program and so we were able to make the
impact we wanted in the community
because of those relationships. She
helped us recruit, she helped share the
word about the work we were doing
through the program, and she had some
really great ideas for improving the programming we were
offering. So for example there at the
center there's a Senior Citizens Center
associated with the MLK
community center and we have a cooking
class and we teach kids how to cook
nutritious meals and we
traditionally had a sit-down dinner where
we taught business dining etiquette and
she said "Well you know... I think our
seniors would love to have a meal." and so
it was a great idea so then we were able
to expand that curriculum from cooking,
dining, to a social exchange and sharing.
So we cooked a meal for the senior
citizens we all sat down and had a nice
meal together and there was good
storytelling and meeting each other and
youth and seniors together. The staff was
very welcoming of LSU, very welcoming of the researchers involved in our project
and they were able to help us feel at
home.. What a great family feel it has to
it.  It's a very friendly environment, very
safe, very positive feel to it.
*music*
