Willie Gilchrist
(Mr. Gilchrist speaking during We Are Family’s 2015 Community Walk, wearing his “ancestor shirt”: “It makes me feel proud and reminds me of the work still to do.”)
As a senior leader, volunteer, and Board Member of We Are Family, I have worked alongside Mark, Tulin, and many outstanding volunteers for the past 5 years. We Are Family is an incredibly important lifeline for my neighbors in the Hubbard Place Apartments, as it is for hundreds of other lonely, low-income seniors.
My roots in community activism run much deeper than that, however, back to my childhood, growing up in a segregated Washington DC. While Brown vs. the Board of Education made segregation in America’s schools illegal, it took Julius Hobson suing the DC School Board to get it implemented here in the early 1960s.
I was going to Garfield, an all-black elementary school in SE DC, but I asked so many questions there that I was nicknamed “the Mouth”! Maybe that was why I became one of the kids selected to integrate nearby Stanton Elementary.
It was an eye-opening experience, going from an all-black school to one that was about half white and half black. I saw the lies of “separate but equal” from the other side, because Stanton had a much better building, new books and many more resources, as well as an active PTA and lots of support from outside groups. I learned a lot there, but always wondered about those who didn’t get that chance.
Segregation—or “Jim Crow” as they called it then—was like mind control. When I was young, I couldn’t try on clothes in the downtown department stores, and my family couldn’t live in many parts of DC. For example, my mother delivered flowers to the Cavalier Apartments in Columbia Heights, but had to enter through the back as blacks were not allowed to live there, or even come in through the front door.
Today this is different. I now live at the Cavalier (re-named Hubbard Place after community activist Leroy Hubbard) and was the president of the tenants association for many years, starting in the 1980s. The building was a rough place, with drugs and violence all around. I got involved to help change that, and together we did.
Now crime is down, and the building is fixed up–but the rents in the surrounding area have gone sky high, and the waiting lists for affordable housing like Hubbard Place are years long. People have even camped out overnight outside the building for the chance to get on the list. The line went all the way around the block!
I survived being shot in the 1990s and have gone through so much. Still, I am deeply troubled by what I see today. How can folks like me hope to be able to stay in the neighborhood when rents go so crazy? I live off only a bit more than $500 a month, and know that many seniors like me often can’t afford both food and medicine by the end of the month. Like other “retired” seniors, I am now looking for work to supplement my slender income. In the meantime, I do whatever I can to help others.
This is where We Are Family comes in. It is a high to help with We Are Family–it is all about the power of the people! I‘m inspired by how it breaks down barriers that can divide us, bringing together all types of people to provide vital services to low-income seniors who need a little help.
Seniors don’t just “get” either—we also have a lot to give. We Are Family doesn’t just work for seniors but with us. Seniors have common sense, mother-wit, street knowledge, and young and old can do it together. Through delivering fresh produce, Thanksgiving turkeys and other groceries, I have gotten a glimpse into the desperation that many seniors face. Now many turn to me when they need help — and this is what We Are Family is all about, each of us, looking after one another.
I also love working with the younger volunteers, sharing with them some of my experience, and also learning from them. We Are Family is multi-generational, multi- ethnic prototype of a grassroots organization that we are going to have more of, not just in this city, but across the country, in order to protect the people.
Hunger for seniors is still a big problem, even with food stamps. The bureaucracy can drop you in an instant. Trying to go to through the system is sometimes like torture, a test of endurance. At the food stamp office on Taylor Street, the line wraps around the room, you may have to stand in line for hours just to turn in a document, even if you are elderly, pregnant or sick… it can just be terrible.
That is why We Are Family is there, to be a friend, someone to fight alongside you.
We Are Family talks the talk but it does more—it walks the walk. That’s what really matters. We Are Family is really a phenomenon, and I am proud to be part of it.
