qualitylonglifeequality: More than five years of community organizing becomes a basis of a "paying it forward" principle

The Africa Leaders Summit. Source: The White House

President Barack Obama. Source: The White House

The American education system empowers its pupils and students to think while on their feet. As an African immigrant having benefitted from a first class education here in USA, I got this idea and wanted to share it with other friends. When we met it amazed me that they too had ideas about community organizing but they required someone skilled in building translatory frameworks, defining goals, subjecting the people and organization to tests of worthiness. Thus began the African Empowered Communities-USA (AEC-USA). An institution whose goal is to act as a bridge for African communities to smoothly mesh with the American way of life. Yes, I am a co-founder of AEC-USA.

Immigrants or children of immigrants have made this a great country. There are examples in the tens of thousands. But, I want to just list five. One from Austria, the second from India and all the other three from Africa: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Satya Nadella the 3rd CEO of Microsoft, Dr. Bennet Omalu the one who named a brain debilitation called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the gold award figure skating Kristine Musademba and renowned policy analyst and activist Nii Akuetteh. Let us not look upwards to the presidency of the USA. No, let us not go there. But, I am sure you get my point.

It is high time immigrants from Africa copied or xeroxed (no apologies here) what the Jewish Diaspora, the Indian Diaspora, the Filipino Diaspora, Japanese Diaspora or Chinese Diaspora are doing. We need to be part of the grand projects that define the built and technological environment of USA. Let us have the spirit of organizing to have great institutions that provide opportunities for enriched scholarship for our children. Do not get me wrong, the USA has facilitation for education that is superb. What I meant by enriched scholarship is as follows:

1. Our communities must be aligned with the rules and regulations of the larger communities. Our homes must be spaces of nurturing our children as well as spaces where the parents are not absent or harassed by over working. We must be able to socialize or even take the day off when that opportunity is available.

2. Our health comes first. We need to be extra serious about our lives as far as: nutrition, physical activity, dental/medical check ups and mental health go. I have met with community groups and introduced such topics like: anger management, understanding health risks or encouraging people to enrol in self help organizations that hold regular re-education meetings.

3. We should be seen in large numbers during the community clean ups, the call for community meetings should an opportunity for attendance, and joining the volunteer teams that help clean your town or city is not a bad idea at all.

4. Our civil societies should be empowered to see the bigger picture. Many of us came to stay in USA for good. But, we also have ties back in Africa. We have grand schemes to help make that continent a dependable bed of contentment. We want to have a bigger say in the regularity of politics, smooth power transfer, an investment climate that is not encased in brutal tactics and most of all we want mobility that is unfettered.

All this can be possible. We can be part of the NASA engineering teams or HIV Vaccine team. This will be when our community groups are dependable spaces of nurturing and education.

The author has been in several community events, gatherings and campaigns. From cleaning the city campaigns to labor parades. Joining community meetings helps one get the pulse of what matters in USA. Source: African Empowered Communities-USA (AEC-USA)