Here It Is, The Central Florida Black Agenda
- Details
- Category: Lifestyle/People
- Published: Monday, 27 June 2016 17:18
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by Lawrence A. Robinson
We all know, that the Black community is hurting in many areas. We lack equal housing and we are being foreclosed on more so than others. I have been told by Realtors that 7 out of 10 foreclosures in Florida, are us.
We are not being treated fairly in the justice system. I sometimes go down to the court house, and I see more of us than anyone else. We are given harsher sentences and longer sentences than anyone else. We are treated unjustly by the very police who are supposed to protect us.
Minimal wage job opportunities are growing but career opportunities for us are few. They bring in big box retail stores like Walmart or
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Dollar General, or Family Dollar into our communities, but build medical clinics, laser companies, high tech opportunities into their community.
"Yeah, they got dem good jobs over there."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and others agreed that in order for Blacks to move forward, we must organize, we must talk to each other, we must create a communications network. We know there are over 12,000 Black businesses in Orange, County but we don't know where they are, so we can's support them.
We are always talking about doing business with Black owned companies and supporting each other. We know what to do, we just don't have an agreed upon mechanism to do it.
We need a step by step program to follow. We need a communications system so that we can educate the masses about that program. We need to initiate that program, and we need to follow through with it and we need to do it now.
Community Steeple Media and Urban Orlando Business, in association with The Time 4 Change Organization, have created a step by step program which includes 8 areas of concern.
These 8 areas are:
1. Communications 2. Economics
3. Political 4. Justice
5. Education 6. Spiritual
7. Housing 8. Health and wellness
We start with the communications network component and quickly followed up with an economic element.
We all know, that to do anything major and important in the Black community, we got to involve the spiritual community. The church is the biggest 'industry' in the Black neighborhood.
It seems that the average Black faith organization is struggling to keep the lights on and put a couple of gallons of gas in the van. So asking them for anything is usually nonproductive. So on the contrary, the plan is to give each organization of faith something, A VOICE.
Black churches will receive, at no cost to them, a vibrant full web page that insures a larger more dominate presence in the community. This web page could have images and even a video. Now the smallest of churches will have a large presence.
This is the start of the communications network that is needed in our community. Imagine hundreds of community faith organizations sharing information that moves the community forward through this one channel that WE control. This gives us the ability to share 'one voice' to tens of thousands of community residents in real time. Sharing our truth will create a stronger community and of course a more knowledgeable community.
Church members who own a business, can also create a web page and share their products and services to the community, growing their businesses, growing the community and circulating dollars within our neighborhood because the system is Black Folk Focused.
A Symposium titled, 'Bootstrapping The Central Florida Black Community - It's okay to be Black in Central Florida' scheduled for Thursday, June 30th from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the Village Square Mall, 2nd floor meeting room. Please consider attending.
This Symposium will explain in detail the step by step plan to move the Black community forward. It's already working.