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OK, name is Woodrow Bailey. Uh I grew up right in this neighborhood, uh, used to be called South Central Los Angeles. South Los Angeles. Now I grew up maybe a mile from here. Uh, was in the neighborhood until the time I was about maybe 1314. My

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parents moved but I was always coming back here to Normandy Church of Christ in the neighborhood. Most of the, most of the buddies I grew up were in this neighborhood. You know, at first we, it was a resistance to it because yeah, but any time you

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talk to somebody and told them where you were from or from South Central, it didn't really matter to the core group of us growing up, even our parents and stuff when they decide to make the switch. I know a lot of older people said, where's that?

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South Central carries such a negative connotation due to some of the events that happened in the sixties and the nineties. We've all, I've gotten accustomed to saying, well, where I'm in South Los Angeles, somebody asked me a question. I'm in South Los Angeles. I grew up

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on Slawson and Hall Dale. I was there from the time I was about four until I was about 14 Slawson Hall Dale. Now it's identified because the slaw and swap meet was over there. It wasn't there when I was a kid. It was a f in

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life factory. So those demographics kind of start changing. Some friends of mine grew up right up the street from here on 64th street. I grew up right down the street from the church. See, they'll say those things moving forward. But for myself in the neighborhood, some

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of the childhood memories was example, walking up here to church, we walked to when I got old enough, me and my buddies would walk on Sunday morning, Sunday night, Saturday for the youth groups. Now I live in the view park section of uh, well, that's south

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Los Angeles as well. It's uh northwest of this area that we're in now. So I've been there the last 20 about 20 plus years. I'm a social worker for the County of Los Angeles, Department of Public Social Services. So I've been a social worker in that

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department for 25 years now. And reluctantly, I wasn't gonna do any of it at first. Uh my career got started. I was at the, it was at L A Unified School district. I was on track to become a teacher. Figured that might not be the profession

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for me. Then I decided to be a, I was a peace state, peace officer. For three years. I, that might not be the profession for me either. And, you know, kind of stumbled into the social work. Real once I got into the department I noticed I

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do work well with people trying to resolve their issues every day, I'm resolving somebody's issue and some days most people do to their life, life circumstance, they just want somebody that's gonna listen to them. Most of the people that I deal with, they'll call a service

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ticket and just to talk to me, I was like, well, you know, I'll call, ask them what's wrong with your case. I said, no, I just wanted to talk to you because nobody talks to me. You kind of, you listen to me, you understand. So I

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get that dynamic by wisdom and maturing. This is my chosen profession. So, like I said, I've been in almost 40 years now, all my philanthropy, I'm always helping somebody with the nonprofit, I'm helping people with my fraternity. I'm helping people. That's kind of who I am.

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That's just I'm just that type of person that's going to always reach out for my fellow man and help them. Yeah. My parents uh did the great migration in the early 19 sixties. You know, my father came out, he hadn't finished high school yet. He didn't

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want to get caught being put into the military. Like his older brother was, did jobs, worked at a car wash, he did all that stuff. Went back to finish high school, married my mother in 1963 and they migrated out. She couldn't, he came back out here.

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She, the, the Amtrak team went through Dallas and stopped and it had to be checked. They checked everything they wanted to search. She said you can't search my baby because she had to, you know, because she didn't realize that that had just been when John F

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Kennedy had been assassinated. So they were checking everything. Their parents lived in rural Louisiana. So we would go back in the summers three day car ride. When, when we got older, they started leaving us down there for the summer and we hated it because we wanted

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to be here. All our friends, what we did in the neighborhood was here when we moved out of the neighborhood, like in the late seventies that devastated us cause they're like we're moving somewhere else. Why I didn't get to go to the junior high school that

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all my buddies went to. My parents said they didn't want me at that. Uh junior high school. They wanted me somewhere else. So it was a culture shock to me to be around the these individuals. I don't know them, different cultures. I don't know them. It

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took me a while to adjust to that my family now. Uh I've been married 35 years just, I just just celebrated that last weekend. Uh me, my wife in college. Uh So two grown Children. Now, my daughter is an attorney by trade. She lives in North

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San Diego County. She grew up here at the church as well. My son is 28. He lives in Inglewood. He's a project manager. You know, I've been extremely blessed to have a family when I was first working in the Department of Social Services. I was dealing

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with that element all the time. You know, I deal with people every day. Their families are fractured, single mothers, grandmothers, and I never thought about it that it is a blessing to have an actual nuclear family. I met my wife at the University of Southern California.

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She was that came in a year under me. Actually a buddy of mine I grew up with mentioned it that there was another person from sc in our neighborhood where I was living and went around her and met and met her one day, didn't do well

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in that conversation, saw her on campus two days later, was talking to somebody else and, and was getting ready to talk to her and actually dropped my textbook in the trash and was looking at that's excuse me, I gotta open this up and get this out

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the trash. I got out of school four years later, start talking, you know, we started talking then uh moving forward because she really didn't like me at first because, you know, I was giving off a different, different vibe. Then than what I'm doing now. And so

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we got married in 1988. Uh moving forward. Now we've reached a new phase. Now, we have a, a young grandson. He's six months old. The wisdom of my grandfather imparted on me was I wanna listen to it and then know, ride with him in a raggedy

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truck, cutting grass every day in the south. I, you know, a lot of that stuff is instilled in me. So I said, I'm gonna instill that in him that the first day I was in high school, I went into the college advisor's office and a nice

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lady, Miss Jackson. I said, well, I wanna go to us c so how can I get there? And from the time I was 12 years old I wanted to go to, that was my first choice. And she said, whoa, I've never had a kid ask me

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that question. So she gave me a road map of what you need to take to get into a university. And I went back down to the counsel's office ID D classes. I just started following the road following the road map from there. But when I walked

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on campus the first day because I was arrogant about it. I didn't go to the, the student orientation for freshmen got there the first week and ended up doing all the stuff I shouldn't have been doing. So that first semester was rough because it was in

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a justice another culture shock. But once I, you know, got it together, start piecing things together, got myself around a core group of thinkers which are fellow students. You know, I was able to graduate uh in four years every year, they do something called S Senior

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Recognitions Awards. They only hand out 500. Remember that school graduates about 10,000 people. So they hand out 500 of these. So I was one of the seven African Americans to win it. My senior year, only seven got it. Um I got a master's degree from Cal

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State L A. So it was in uh a few things. It was actually in film and television. So I did that in 93 or so because I was gonna get into all of that moving forward. So I went there. I'm actually working on a master's degree

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at Mount Saint Mary's University now, Masters of fine Arts and creative writing. That's kind of where I wanna go is start writing these stories. You know, I got back into some visual stuff and I wanna start writing these stories these about my neighborhood. So I put

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one book out already and I had the anthology that I put out. The name of the book is Freedom. And it's with Vagabond Press. So it came out in February, put together another anthology with some other African American writers and poets called 1619 Speaks poetry. So

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that came out in April. So the smallest kid I knew Pepperdine University was on Vermont. They used to do something called the tent meetings in the summer where the church of Christ congregation to get together all across the street from there. They had a huge parking

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lot and it was tent meetings there. But then when we got a little older, we started walking around Pepperdine's campus. We, we don't wanna be there. We start walking around the campus. And when I got to my last year of high school, I took a P

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classes there. I had English and history there at Pepper nine. So now it kind of gave me a sense. Oh, wow. This is a university. But it's in the neighborhood. And then when they finally moved away and went to the Malibu Council, I said, oh, no,

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it's no more. It's no more. It's not. There's no more Pepper Nine. And then it made me think about the tent meetings and going up there for classes and those type of things. And I, I've been to the Mavi campus several times but it doesn't seem

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like the old Pepperdine campus. To me, it's a great campus. Don't get me wrong. It's spectacular, but I'm kind of nostalgic for the old Pepperdine campus. And what I knew it as when I was a kid in this neighborhood, particularly the neighbor, you know, the neighborhood.

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It was that sense of community. When you think back 19 seventies is 50 years ago. All the mothers knew one another, that type of, you know, parental grouping for lack of a better term. They had kinda gave you a sense of comfort. We didn't think about

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crime and all of that stuff because, you know, the mothers are around, the fathers are around. We're kinda isolated from that stuff. You, we didn't even think about that type of stuff until you start getting a little older. Something happened to someone you knew you had

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to be aware of your, your surroundings basically moving forward. That's what I start thinking about. You know, there's no more isolation buffers. Even when I was at sc that was in that, in the neighborhood. I used to tell fellow students, I'm out, they didn't understand the

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concept or I, they ask you where they from, they'll say from different parts of the country, different parts of the city. Oh, I'm from the neighborhood. What, what does that mean? This neighborhood? I'm from this neighborhood. I grew up to two miles, three miles from here.

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I'm from this neighborhood and they're like, oh, there's really four institutions that kind of envelop these neighborhoods, the institution of homelessness, the institution of incarceration, the institution of drug abuse and those type of things and the institution of public assistance. Because most of them, that's where

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they become the social economic slave type. Somebody's gonna give them something when they're gonna get it and what they can do with it. We've had I've had people walk up and say this box of groceries will help my family for the next two weeks. I'm using

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all my money to pay rent, what my kids need. I have no money left. And you think about the concept where all 80% of your salary that you're earning has to go to rent. That's a dysfunction as far as not only neighborhood, this entire society right

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here. It used to be a point where when I was a kid, even a handful of criminals, they wouldn't mess with older women walking to the store. That was a, that was an out of bound, all that's gone. Now, if someone thinks they get something from

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you, they're gonna take it, they're gonna make a shot at it. And that's sad. Uh And this n some of the important events, you know, at this point is our, actually our grocery giveaway that we do every 1st and 3rd Saturday. We've done other community events,

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we've done task force, we've had police and politicians coming. There's gotta be some type of collective group of thinkers that's gonna help these neighborhoods. If these people could help themselves, they would be more than happy to, to do it. But who is going to help them?

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Beyond that? I used to work at Continental Cablevision because I was working on when I was doing my master's degree. And when that happened that night, I was at my job on March 3rd 1981 saw that and they're like, well what in the world? And you

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know, you just stunned on, did they beat that guy? Couldn't, you know, you didn't think about it cause I was two years old when the Watts happened. Riots happened in 1965 and my grandma was out here then in 19, in August of 1965. So she's from

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the south so she's accustomed to this type of stuff. She didn't think it would be here. So I, you know, driving around things are burning when they got to those levels after the verdict and that type of stuff, why are you burning your own neighborhoods? Now,

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most of us ask these questions but you understand where the re the aggression and anger from generations of not being able to do and then this like where everything is on a video camera and these officers get acquitted, the neighborhoods burned. A lot of them burned.

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Uh places, churches became sanctuaries for people, for example. So the repair process took a couple of decades. So I, I don't think in my lifetime, I'll see that again. I hope not. When you destroy your neighborhoods, you're gonna suffer on the back end. That was what

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I start seeing. Ok, normally Christian School, I'm the president of the board of directors and I've been there for about five or six years. Now, I came into the board about 10 years ago, started working, you know, as soon as I got in there started doing,

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you know, monthly breakfasts, tried to engage the parents things I would get from my nonprofit. I give it to the school. We do try to do ice cream for the kids. Once a month, a few years ago, I think three or four years ago or three

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or four years ago, one of my fraternity brothers worked for Food Network. So he gave me all of this fruit and I went over and talked to the principal and the teachers and said, you know what, this can be a moment where we can teach these

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kids about fruits and vegetables. They said, have them come over to the garage. I said, bring the, bring the, bring each, bring three, all three classes over and the parents came with them. So they turned it into a whole event. And the amazing thing is most

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kids thought that there was only one red apple, 11 orange, orange. They had never seen different colors of apples, oranges and pears. They, they didn't think about it. That's what I use as a teachable moment because I, we thought that way. So I'm always donating books

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and those type of things to get them reading, telling them that you have to be able to read to survive in this society. You don't want to be a person that can't read and think for themselves. So I kind of go that approach with them moving

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forward. And so I, that's why I've been doing that since I've been on the board back then. It was a few places. For example, I mentioned Kwan's Market that used to be kind of the epicenter for the neighborhood. There used to be a little burger stand

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that was on the corner of just before you got the Normandy and uh Slawson, it was called EPPS old, real nice old lady that she used to, you know, homemade hamburgers. Everybody ate there. You know, my mother would go get some on a Friday night if

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we were good. She also owned a store up the street from that. So she owned a couple of businesses. Most of the neighborhood people tried to shop in her store. You know, they go to Quad but they would shop at her store. My mother would send

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me up there, go get a pound of ground beef from Miss EPPS. I know she used to do a lot of credit for people because people, some people were struggling there and she didn't mind it. So those are kind of the institutional things that were in

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the neighborhood. I would like people to remember this neighborhood, my neighborhood as you know, it's, it's a, it's still a sense of community even now since the neighborhood dynamic has changed, people still have a sense of they keep their yards clean. They try to keep the

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trash out the neighborhood. So sadly, some people don't have a sense of neighborhood. They just, I'm just, I don't care, I'm gonna do whatever I need to do. And that's unfortunate as well. So, education of that sense of community needs to come back into these neighborhoods.

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The nonprofit that I helped create with two friends of mine that I grew up with is healing and hope for homeless. Uh We started it in 1998. We decided that we want to help, you know, try to feed people. So we were taking our own money

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and buying bread, lunch meat, you know, oranges from the local store food for less. And we were making these sack lunches to take them originally downtown. So then we decided in 06 to start the 501 C three Park, which is the nonprofit to go through the

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United States Department of Agriculture, the USDA to get the food to pass out. And the original three of us and about four more of the people opened in August of 06. And we didn't realize what we were getting into. We didn't, we, we had 200 people

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out here that showed up waiting in line. So we learned, you know, we started building that nonprofit from there. But what me and my two buddies did before we got that nonprofit start, we started volunteering at another nonprofit that used to do something similar for a

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year so we can learn how to do it. Then there's been a lot of programs that started in neighborhoods in this neighborhood that are unsuccessful. Everybody said nothing ever works here but we're consistent. We're out there every 1st and 3rd Saturday because our mission is that

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hunger doesn't just go away because it's raining. It doesn't take vacations. So I'm kind of embedded into the community, almost like a tree. These trees are planted out here. These trees were planted probably here about 100 years ago. I feel like that I've embedded into the

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community. It's gonna be hard to get me out until the tree. Finally some trees kinda get old. They gotta cut them down. Maybe I'll be that person, too old to do it. But I'd rather be that person than not do anything at all.