H.O.L.L.A
The forces of racism and white supremacy manifest in the system of mass incarceration. Without dismantling these driving forces behind injustice, black and brown people will continue to be disproportionately harmed by a prison system that has been designed to target them. H.O.L.L.A, a New York based organization that helps young people challenge these unfair norms, aims to fight against this injustice.
H.O.L.L.A, which stands for How Our Lives Link Altogether, works to educate on the history of racism and how to fight against it through a system of healing justice. They hold workshops and specific programs with a unique curriculum in order to help young people learn to confront white supremacy in a healing way. According to H.O.L.L.A co-founder Cory Greene, there is an ongoing war against racism in this country, and H.O.L.L.A aims to help black and brown youth through this struggle in a way that helps them through their pain rather than drown them in it.
“We're just trying to figure out how to heal and how to love ourselves through that,” Greene said. “That's where I come from: some of those pains and the fight to still be here and smile.”
Greene feels that he did not always understand the war he was a part of and the way the war impacted people’s communities and homes. Now, he sees the way the war is ingrained in the system and the way the mistreatment of black and brown individuals has led to so much tension and trauma today. When people are mistreated over and over again, it’s only a matter of time before that trauma explodes due to immense frustration.
“We got kidnapped from islands, from Africa, Puerto Rico, from Trinidad, from Haiti, and brought to America to be workers, to be slaves. And they smashed our language and...our spirituality,” Greene said. “Yeah, they was trying to hurt us. Same thing they do, and they put us in prison.”
A Queens native, Greene was one of the last co-founders to come to H.O.L.L.A. Through this organization, he works to help others heal from their trauma while encouraging productive ways of managing overwhelming frustration at an unjust system. This way, the war can be better fought. Greene works with newer members of H.O.L.L.A. in order to ensure that the organization’s legacy can be passed down.
Alex Davis from Brooklyn has worked with H.O.L.L.A. for close to six years, and Machlie “Mach” Edouard has been involved for five years. Together, they are helping to create a future for H.O.L.L.A. Both were involved in H.O.L.L.A. programs and workshops which they credit with helping heal through their own trauma.
“Basically, [we] just learned about ourselves, doing a lot of relationship building, definitely working through traumas, and working through how we can step closer to healing,” Edouard said.
Like the other founders of H.O.L.L.A., Greene had his eyes opened to the war and the racism built into the incarceration system through his own experience being incarcerated. At 21 years old, Greene was imprisoned and saw his story mirroring the stories of so many other young people from his neighborhood. He saw the way that outside factors were causing this hardship.
“I've seen how the confusion, the generational poverty, the separation from elders and ancestors, and how dehumanization creates situations where you don't care about yourself, [so] you do things like this,” Greene said.
While incarcerated, Greene met the other co-founders of H.O.L.L.A., and they compared their stories. They all realized they were from the same seven neighborhoods in New York, with the same family structures, and the same uncontrollable sources of struggle in their lives. These seven neighborhoods are Southside Bronx, Jamaica, Queens, East New York, Brownsville, Bed-Stuy (Bedford-Stuyvesant), Harlem, and the Lower East side. Though all the H.O.L.L.A. co-founders were from somewhat different circumstances and areas of New York, they realized that their lives were linked together through outside factors forced upon their communities.
After discovering this, Greene and the other co-founders reflected back on their lives and wished they could have heard more voices encouraging them to be better, and they wished that they would have been more able to listen. This inspired them to begin a program where young people could be encouraged to not just overcome their circumstances but go back and try to actually change things. ‘
Since then, H.O.L.L.A. has helped to educate and inspire young people, connecting them with their roots and teaching them their history. One of these young people was Alex Davis. Davis had their own experiences with the incarceration system, spending two months on Rikers Island, waiting to be sentenced. They were finally sentenced to seven years of probation, and they were then continually watched and forced to engage in regular searches as well as drug programs and anger management programs.
“I felt like I was in prison. I had to go get my pills every week. Like, it was just regular. It was just regular. They came to my crib every week,” Davis said. “They came to my crib with guns every week. You understand? Like, going through metal detectors all the time? Like, it's just regular...I wasn't incarcerated, but I definitely just went through that...just like systematical shit.”
While on probation, Davis got involved in the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, which is where they met Cory Greene. Greene showed Davis the way their lives linked together and how they both grew up in the struggle and in the war. Through working with Greene and H.O.L.L.A., Davis was introduced to the concept of healing justice, and they were inspired by the stories of other young people and formerly incarcerated individuals.
“I was building with other young people like me, who was just thinking about doing the work and organizing,” Davis said.
From there, Davis worked with Greene and learned with H.O.L.L.A.’s 18 month curriculum. As Davis describes it, this curriculum is for young people in order to teach them about their ancestors, their history, oppression, politics, how to build relationships, how to build a movement, and how to organize. Davis has seen how H.O.L.L.A. members have had “aha moments” through this curriculum, and the program often ignites a spark in many young people.
Davis especially emphasizes the way H.O.L.L.A. magnifies young people’s voices and allows them to be heard in a way they may never have before. H.O.L.L.A. has its members work in groups and teams, participating in healing circles where everyone gets a chance to share and cultivate strong bonds amongst participants.
“We do a lot of healing justice. So a lot of it is also learning about how we heal from the traumas and oppression that we go through,” Davis said. “This is like real friendship on a different level. It's like friendship development on a different level.”
Davis loves the way that H.O.L.L.A. creates a family and a community that can be invaluable to its members who may not have such strong bonds in their own homes.
“I think the 18 month process for everyone is its own healing moment, because...even with our families, we don’t spend a lot of time with our families in general. I know black and brown people don’t have a lot of time to spend with our families. My mom works almost three jobs,” Davis said. “So it’s definitely a thing to know that you don’t get to spend long amounts of time with a certain amount of people.”
For Davis, H.O.L.L.A. is special because it allows them to “engage in love and each other...trying to love each other and struggle through that, and trying to learn with each other and struggle through that.”
Machlie Edouard feels similarly to Davis about the value of H.O.L.L.A. She loves that H.O.L.L.A. allows her to give back to communities and bring healing back into communities. Building with young people and creating better community organizers allows for the possibility of better futures for so many areas.
H.O.L.L.A. makes an effort to teach their young people about how to sustain organizations and movements, teaching them skills like how to budget, talk to funders, hold meetings for funders, and apply for grants.
H.O.L.L.A. is deeply rooted in each of the seven neighborhoods of New York that are most heavily impacted by mass incarceration. H.O.L.L.A. recruits most of its members from these areas, and aims to recruit with an intersectional lens, for example making sure to recruit young women, queer individuals, members of street organizations, and everything in between.
“We're deeply trying to build with young people from the seven neighborhoods in different intersections,” Davis said.
Besides working with youth, H.O.L.L.A. has worked with college students, social workers, and teachers who want to learn more about healing justice and how to fight in the war. The organization has also been building with other national organizations in and out of New York.
The concept of healing justice comes from the idea that it is impossible to heal the world without first healing oneself. Cory Greene emphasizes how healing justice is an integral part of H.O.L.L.A.’s mission.
“I think that part of the movement is saying first...we got to heal and that we can heal ourselves. And I think, just this moment now, lets you know that restorative justice, healing justice is a really popular term...whether you even do it or not,” Greene said. “H.O.L.L.A. is a small part of that.”
As a part of this healing process, H.O.L.L.A. runs healing circles.
“We spent hours and hours building really important curriculum. We emailed and called and reached out to people for our long circles, three hour circles, [and] sometimes people asked us to come back two or three times to work with the young people,” Greene said.
H.O.L.L.A. has run these healing circles all over New York. These circles are held in all sorts of places, including prisons as well as with people and families of people returning from prison. The circles allow for H.O.L.L.A. to take its teachings and create a space where people can discuss the curriculum and relate it to their own lives.
“I think that it’s a movement, like when you actually go teach with people and journey with them,” Greene said. “Be slow and try to learn, and you do that consistently over time.”
Greene recognizes that H.O.L.L.A. is built on the legacies of other organizations and struggles for justice. H.O.L.L.A. builds off of the ideas of systemic racism and the way the mass incarceration system evolved from slavery and convict leasing in order to create another way to enslave people of color. Another example is that H.O.L.L.A. uses the idea that “the personal is political'' which was pioneered by the black feminist movement.
H.O.L.L.A.'s legacy will also live on through people like Davis and Edouard who will be passed the torch from the original co-founders, and one day, they will pass the torch down too.
As Davis said, “This isn’t about some dictatorship of us holding power here. This is about building more legacy.”
Greene, Davis, and Edouard know their work is important and that it is essential to keep fighting the war. According to Greene, New York is made up of about 25% black and brown people, while the prison system is made up of 85% black and brown people. 75% of those people are from the same seven neighborhoods in New York City.
“We look at the layers of the war, which is not just historical, not just policy, not just culture, but it also bleeds into the institutions that dehumanize us, that mis-educated us, that don't employ us, that leave garbage in our neighborhood, [and] that don't give us no health care,” Greene said.
Without addressing these problems and the trauma they cause, the systems can never improve and people can never heal. As Greene says, without healing, black and brown people will continue to be oppressed under the Native American concept of disenfranchised grief.
“When people don't say sorry or when people don't acknowledge your pain, it's like a spiritual hit that goes on to the next generation,” Greene said. Through his work with H.O.L.L.A., Greene can try to stop this ongoing generational pain.
Greene loves the work that he does, and is humbled by working with young people and seeing their fresh perspectives as well as their drives to make a better world.
“The young people are the present and the future,” Greene said.
Edouard loves the work as well. She loves to watch healing happening during the programs.
“When I see the healing just happening in front of my eyes...any moment where somebody is expressing real shit that they really internalized, like, real stuff that they're going through...I see how they, from the start to the finish, in the moments where they start off, just not being vulnerable...and then being able to express like, their pain from like, a deeper level,’ Edouard said. “People just helping each other heal...like that's my favorite part. That's what honestly keeps me in this work a lot and really kind of gives me a boost.”
Davis loves watching these relationships blossom as well, creating stronger bonds amongst members as well as creating stronger bonds with oneself.
“I think how relationships transform, and I think [about] the relationship with myself, because there's so many things that you got to heal with yourself,” Davis said. “When you step into healing and even doing some of this work, you got to realize some of your own issues, some of your own hypocrisy.”The members of H.O.L.L.A. are looking forward to participating in Witness’s July 18th Suitcase Sunday event, where they will be taking the stage and showcasing their healing approach to achieving justice.
Abby Stern