Putting the "neighbor" back in the neighborhood

A Q&A with Gerrel Jones, Founder & Executive Director of Renew Birmingham

We’re doing something a little bit different with this week’s Q&A. I’ve invited Daniel Marshall, Co-Founder of Lamplight Summer Camp and a former Connective Tissue interviewee, to assume our esteemed interview duties. He sat down to talk with his friend and collaborator, Gerrel Jones, who is the Founder and Executive Director of Renew Birmingham. They’re a faith-based organization doing powerful block-by-block community-building work in Birmingham’s Ensley neighborhood.

All of this emerged from a panel that Daniel invited me to speak on last month in Guntersville, Alabama. It was basically the exact opposite of the Aspen Ideas Festival — in the best possible way. Gerrel,

Zac Hyden

(Mechonomist, Automotive Free Clinic), and I had a conversation about “community” in one of the most genuinely cross-class, cross-geography, and intergenerational spaces I’ve been in since leaving ASAP. Throughout the panel, I kept thinking, “We need to feature Gerrel and Zac in Connective Tissue at some point.”

The nice thing about having a newsletter with no money, no staff, and no organization is that you can make these things happen pretty quickly — and, less than a month later, Daniel’s conversation with Gerrel did not disappoint. Gerrel describes how he’s building community in Birmingham’s neighborhoods based on the skills he developed while building community in prison. He talks about how Renew Birmingham’s work helps reduce crime by cultivating cohesion, accountability, and responsibility. And he explains how communities can only be revitalized from the inside-out — with proximate leaders consistently investing their time, attention, and relationships in particular places — and not from the outside-in.

I found myself vigorously nodding along as I read the transcript of this interview, and I’m guessing many of our readers will too. Now, over to Daniel for the full conversation!

- Sam

PS - If you’re interested in learning more, consider checking out Renew Birmingham’s website, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Photo of Gerrel Jones, courtesy of Gerrel Jones

Daniel: How did you come to be doing the work that you're doing now? What was your pathway to doing this, and why do you think it's so important?

Gerrel: Before I was in prison, I never thought of being beneficial to anybody. I was raised in an environment that was very hostile to the soul. My reaction to that was to become a complete hedonist. Pleasure was the way you felt good. Clearly, there was no God, because I saw the people who worshiped Him. They were crazy.

When I got to prison with a life sentence, it was depressing. I attempted suicide. I could not see any reason to be alive. But with a life sentence, you start to get contemplative. I was in a treatment program and studying psychology. I started reading about Jesus because I was trying to prove that these Christians are crazy people. But the book that changed my life was Viktor Frankl's Man’s Search for Meaning. I'm reading this book and a light comes on. He's a Jew — and the more I read, the more I could see the correlations between what Jesus was saying and what Frankl was saying about how to save your life. He saved his life by investing in the people that were dying around him. There was that selflessness principle again.

That was the turning point for me. I decided to invest myself in the guys around me. The natural expression of that was to build cohorts of people — essentially, little communities of discipleship. Then we started building bigger communities called faith dorms; I was getting good at building these communities. Miraculously, 20 years after going to prison, I was released from prison on parole. When I got out, building these communities was the only skill I had.

Four years after I got out, I built this organization called Pneuma Gallery. I was trying to convey the message that there are more ways to see God than this church thing. Our mission statement was reducing violence, recidivism and family dysfunction while building community — with an emphasis on building community. That's how I got into this work.

Finding my way through the nonprofit world, I realized that a good bit of it is a giant money grab. That was disappointing, but I knew I didn't have to be that person. So I bought my house in the neighborhood that had the highest number of homicides in my hometown of Birmingham. And I started to facilitate the relationship- and community-building that I learned in prison. Really, I believe that God taught me. Jesus Christ, to me, represents the idea of a person who is absolutely, thoroughly selfless and committed to the people around them. And I said, “I can die with that as a purpose.” It’s this purpose that’s at the core of my work with Renew Birmingham.

Can you say a bit more about how Renew Birmingham emerged from those other projects?

I created this template called “Putting the Neighbor Back in the Neighborhood.” It calls for heavy community engagement. My theory at the time was that the government can't change culture, and no organization can do it without engaging and investing residents in their own community revitalization.

The Greek word for “repent” in the New Testament is metanoia, and it means “to change your mind.” To change a community was to change people's minds, and to do that was to be in close proximity and relationship with them. I started knocking on people's doors and inviting them to my home, doing fish fries, yard parties, and canvassing the neighborhood. I got some crumbs from the city council. I got some crumbs from some donors. My budget was never more than $10,000 a year. But I was consistent, consistent, consistent.

That was from 2017 to 2022. Then my friend, Mark Martin, called me one day. He was talking to some wealthy white men from over the mountain. Mark is white, and he's the founder of Build UP, which builds urban prosperity. And he called me saying, “Hey, man, I'm up here talking to some rich white men, and they're talking about what they want to do to help Black people. Please come here.” That never works out well. *laughs*

But, I decided to have that conversation, which turned into several conversations over several months. I told them about all that I was doing through “Putting the Neighbor Back in the Neighborhood.” Eventually, the guy who was the major fundraiser asked, “What will it take for you to come do this bigger — full-time, with staff support, and to make the impact you really think you can make?” I told him what we needed, and he went on to raise $1,000,000 based on his relationships alone. Renew Birmingham was born February of 2022.

Tell me a little bit more about your block-by-block work. How did you build your constituency and community from the ground up?

The first thing is shrinking the service area. We serve four neighborhoods — about 8,000 to 12,000 people. If you have too big of a service area, you can't cover it effectively. We ensure that everybody gets access. Access is a big deal. We're aggressively pursuing clients, versus waiting for them to come to us. Some people don't know how to ask for help. They don't know where to begin. If you don't bring the access to them, they'll never get it. Canvassing is a big part of it. We knock on those doors, we phone bank.

We also incentivize people to invite neighbors to their spaces. When you have somebody in your home or on your property, you feel a certain responsibility for them, and that's a necessary element for community development. People have to feel responsible for the people around them. It's neighborly. We'll give you $100 if you invite 25 of your neighbors to your yard. We'll bring the food, the music, a tent, and our case manager and some of our service providers to your yard. We literally make it an access point for the resources we provide — housing, adult education, workforce development, youth services, jobs, transportation, community health and wellness — and you get to be a hero.

But the third part is especially important: we ask them to barter their volunteer effort and their sweat equity to get these services at a rate of about $20 an hour. We give them volunteer credits and then they can pay their delinquent bill, they can get critical repairs, and the like. We use a collective impact approach to provide these services and pay other organizations to do the services in our neighborhoods. We pay them per client or per service, and then we distribute these services as neighbors volunteer their time, creating cohorts of people working together in their community.

But we don't want you to keep coming back and having us pay your bills, we want you volunteering. It might be canvassing, it might be picking up trash, or it might be painting houses. It might be coming to a yard party, it might be hosting an event, or it might be going to schools. We send people to every activity that schools have — basketball games and football games, concerts and plays, whatever it is. We believe that the community needs to support their local schools, and when they don't, they're asking for trouble. Our volunteers are working together on a common goal, creating a community, and affecting the community around them. Some people just enjoy being in that space and contributing; they volunteer just because they want to be there.

Photos of Renew Birmingham events in action

I know you're cautious to claim any causation with the drop in crime. But what's the theory behind all the activities that Renew Birmingham does, like what you just mentioned, and crime?

We believe that culture is what produces crime. Criminals come out of families, just like judges and mayors. There are four systems in a community: one is the family system, one is the business and nonprofit system, one is the faith system, and the other is the school and government system. When those systems are working together well, you have a healthy, cohesive culture.

Our mission statement is to inspire community cohesion and collective advocacy via holistic networking and social service resourcing. We make everything available and pull people together to use their social influence to create social controls. These natural social controls start to develop because of the accountability, responsibility, and common goal that our neighbors work toward. When you have more people doing that, you're inspiring hope.

Murder, robbery, crime: all those things come out of a need for power. If you look at Maslow's Hierarchy, most people in underserved communities never get to love and esteem — and they definitely can't get to actualization — because they're so worried about food, shelter, clothing, and safety. That's why you have 14-year-olds walking around with pistols. They've been taught that you can't be afraid. But it's actually fear, apathy, and dependency that are the cultural drivers of this behavior.

We believe that our system attacks these cultural drivers. We're putting people in cohorts to work on shared projects. When you have responsibility and accountability to do something together, you become less afraid and less apathetic. You’re also less dependent because you’re working towards something; you’re not begging for anything, you’re contributing. Our theory is that camaraderie, accountability, and responsibility will reduce crime. And we have experienced more cohesion in our neighborhoods and less violence.

One of the stories that you told me that always stuck with me was about a drug dealer who moved in the neighborhood. Can you share that story?

I bought my house in the neighborhood that had the highest number of homicides to prove our model. It was just little old me and my wife. But all that door knocking and introducing myself to people — it was different. People paid attention to me, they watched me, and they started to depend on me in the community. I became a natural leader.

When a drug dealer moved down the street into a rental, we saw the traffic. But I hadn't formulated a plan yet. I was prompted to take action by my elderly neighbor across the street, asking, “Hey, did you see all that traffic down there?” Now I've got the challenge and accountability: “How do I protect this old lady that lives across the street from me?”

I turned to the model: I went to the drug dealers’ house, I knocked on their door, I introduced myself, and I talked to them. They thought I was a preacher. Somebody drove up to buy drugs. They tried to wave them off. I said, “No, don't worry about it.” This is uncomfortable for a criminal (I know because I was a criminal). It's uncomfortable when somebody comes and sits on your porch to talk to you, and they don't mention the things that you're doing wrong. They’re just letting you know that they're your neighbor. It spooks you. If you’re a criminal, you move into neighborhoods where you know people ain't going to mess with you. You mean mug your neighbors. You use fear and intimidation. But I wasn't afraid. That made them nervous, and 10 days later, they were gone.

This is basic physics: a container can only hold a certain volume. Say you've got 10 percent negative people in the community that are causing havoc. You got 8000 people, 800 of them are criminals. Well, you've got another 7200 that are not. If you mobilize the 7200, the 800 can't stay there. You don’t need to run them out. All you need to do is create positive spaces to crowd out the negative spaces. The criminals are either going to convert or they're going to leave.

People say, “That doesn't happen, oppressors never leave without the rebellion of the oppressed.” But what I’m talking about is a form of rebellion. It's the same form that Gandhi, King, and Jesus were talking about — it’s bringing positivity and love, but proactively. I believe that compassion is proactive. Compassion can't sit back and watch. Compassion is a participant in social change.

You said that one of the reasons people commit crimes is the need for power, and that the need for power comes from fear. I think of power as being something that's inherently collective: power is something that groups of people have when they come together. How do you see the model of community building offering an alternative form of power to people, rather than the power they get with crime?

When we talk about crime and other social ills, we have to understand that we produce them collectively, as a community. Whether you're rich or whether you're poor, you're still connected. Thinking “I don't live over there and I don't mess with those people” is actually contributing to crime. Mutuality is the universal law: what affects one person directly will affect others indirectly. If you're not actively pursuing health, you're actively contributing to dysfunction.

In our mainstream culture, the definition of power has been given to us all wrong. When a person thinks of power in a hood, he thinks of it in terms of the things that he can do: he can fight, he can shoot. When a country thinks of exerting power, it’s the same thing: we can fight, we can shoot, we can drop bombs. This idea of being powerful is inherently connected to violence.

But that’s not real power. We try to help people in our neighborhoods understand that the most power you have is in your ability to influence another person for their good. That will open doors for you. I'm the example of that — a convicted murderer, robber, crackhead — but all of my successes are directly related to me investing myself into broken people. I became this “powerful person,” but it's all related to empowering other people.

For people who are reading this, who might be across the country, what advice would you give them if they both hear this and get inspired to try to do something in their own community?

If you're interested in revitalizing a community, understand that it can't be done from the outside. America is almost 250 years old, and she has never seen a revitalization program that worked from the outside-in. If you want to revitalize a community, it cannot be done without getting your hands dirty. You’ve got to engage the affected population. You can't do it from a distance, or a single “day of service,” or a “three-day revival.” That's not how you change a community. It has to be consistent.

The Bible talks about “word becoming flesh.” Whether you’re religious or not, the essence of that message has to be in the model. We're immersed in the community. We're not coming into it; we live here. You affect your community from the inside-out. It has to be done through you and the influence of your social capital — which is your time and attention. If you don't pay with your time and attention, it doesn't matter how many checks you write.

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