Healthy Neighborhood Awardee: Julius Boatwright of Steel Smiling

The Ally of the Year Award is given to an individual or organization that embodies what it means to be a “neighborhood ally” by genuinely partnering and collaborating with Neighborhood Allies to help advance our mission of supporting the people, organizations and partnerships committed to creating and maintaining healthy neighborhoods.

Steel Smiling is an exemplar grantee and partner to Neighborhood Allies. Julius Boatwright and his team have spent well over a year in the Hilltop creating space for Black neighbors to process, share and make sense of their pasts, truths, and lived experiences. The Beams to Bridges program promotes advocacy and awareness around mental health, and builds on-ramps for local Black people to seek culturally and racially competent services, that may otherwise be unbeknownst or inaccessible.

This centering and prioritization of the individual needs of Black community members is a stark divergence from the traditional mental health system’s standard practice, which does little to acknowledge the various ways that race permeates delivery and/or perceptions of service. Julius’ approach, led by Black people and for Black people, advances a person-centered model, and truly seeks to understand each individual cohort participant in the full context of their lived experience and environment. The Beams to Bridges program also empowers a new cadre of resident-leaders, who are referred to as “Mental Health Champions.” Mental Health Champions are past cohort participants interested in sharing the information and resources they have acquired with their immediates spheres of influence, including their friends, family and neighbors. After the incredible success of the Beams to Bridges program in the 2019-2020 year, Steel Smiling will be scaling the initiative to four new neighborhoods, all of which are in Neighborhood Allies’ shared priority areas: Wilkinsburg, Larimer/Lincoln, Homewood and the Hill District.

Transcription:

I'm having way too much fun talking to the awardees of the Neighborhood Allies 2020 Healthy Neighborhood Awards. This is Jonathan Kersting with the Pittsburgh Technology Council and TechVibe Radio. So happy partnering with Neighborhood Allies to do these interviews, having these conversations with you folks, I just did not know we're out there. And my mind has been open in so many cool and positive ways. It's getting me pumped up just to realize that Pittsburgh is truly blessed to have men and women that are just giving it their all to help their neighborhoods and help their communities. And I think today, right now, who we're talking to is Julius Boatwright of Steel Smiling. He's the ally of the Year award. I think this is like the creme de la creme or something. I feel like you're the ally of the year. And people need to know the Allied the Year award is given to an individual organization, that bodies wood needs to be a neighborhood ally by genuinely partnering and collaborating with neighborhood allies. And man, I'm telling you what, you have done some crazy cool stuff, Julius and I can't wait to learn more about it. Thanks for talking to you today. Definitely. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So first off, what's your background? Who is Julie's boat? Right? Wow. Um, I'm a I'm a husband. Okay.

I am a black man. I am an empath. Now I love people. I'm a big listener grew up in small town in western Pennsylvania, our high school football team was actually the Steelers as well.

Nice, okay.

With the Steelers, a sports background as well. But mental health is my passion. And that that just, you know, shines brightly and shines through through through the work that I do such an important topic that often gets brushed under the carpet, and there's often a lot of stigma around it. And there's no need for that, because it is an illness like any other and needs to be treated and recognized. And the work you're doing around that, to me is doing all of that. So tell me about Steele smiling and what you're doing in those regards.

Yeah, so we were birth in 2015. And at the time, I had no idea that it will grow and become what it is today. So our mission is really simple. Okay, so we bridge the gap between black people and mental health support. Okay, do we do that through three, three distinct ways through education, advocacy and awareness. So, you know, if you wanted to get connected with a therapist, if you wanted to participate in one of our black mental health workforce development programs, if you just wanted to, to learn more about D stigmatizing mental health issues, and you would get connected with us to do that.

Very cool. I mean, this is so important, because when it comes to things, I'm not to help, people just don't know where to always go. Right. And so knowing there's like this connector, that's within steel smiling. I think it's just absolutely fantastic. Cool, cool. So if you started in 2015, how is this thing grown in the past five years? I'm sure it's been a blur, right?

Oh, wow. Yeah, we're putting that five year mark, December 10.

Okay.

When we first started out,

it just started out as like a, like a blog. Okay.

I hopped up on my social media the other day, and it was like, Hey, I'm thinking about starting this blog called still smiling. Does anyone know of any topics I should write about? And I'm like, it's definitely not a blog.

Exactly.

It started out with just like, how can we identify resources and articles and literature and share it with people to educate them to now being one of the the region's only black mental health workforce development program, where we connect with people in specific neighborhoods and partner with neighborhood allies to provide these weekly training opportunities for opportunities? So when these community members go through this year long program, they become community mental health advocates?

Wow, that's cool.

Get them out there and connected right?

I love exactly right. So now when they're at, at the barber shop, when they're at church, when they're at school, picking up their kids or nieces and nephews, and may stay, they can assess, right they can identify the signs and symptoms not only in themselves, and they can feel comfortable and confident or

not diagnosing. Right, they're not. They're not medical professionals. But they've got their antennas up. They've got you know, they can really in have those conversations, conversations and be compassionate, and empathetic and be able to connect people to the appropriate level of care or just provide peer support. Just say, Hey, I'm a non judgmental listening ear. Yeah, tools and skills to help you feel heard and work through whatever it is that you might be dealing with at that time. That's powerful stuff right there. super powerful stuff. Tell me more about how you've been working with neighborhood allies.

They've been Unbelievable. So the past year is when we started our partnership formally, okay, our fiscal sponsor partner, so they're helping with board governance, financial management, strategic operations. So we were busy prior to our partnership with them just doing the work.

Okay? Can I live in the community Exactly. roll up the sleeves, man and kidnap you to get dirty. And then we partner with them. And it's like, all the infrastructure things, right. So we've we've like master level one. And now we're like, we got to get the level two, because there's a different level of impact. Now we're, they've, they've helped us go from one neighborhood to now being in five neighborhoods. Okay, that's our first significant programming and catalytic grant, to really help us start to like, compensate community members provide emergency financial support for them. And they just allowed us to be like, way more strategic about how we're expanding. And I just think, well, people over there need help go help them, people over there need help. It's like, it's really mapped this out from a neighborhood to neighborhood perspective, build with the leaders who are already there. Think about Community and Economic Development at the same time, but have mental health and wellness be at the core in the center of it. I feel like it's that missing piece to a certain degree to that's kind of magic that can really make a lot of this happen. Because like I said, without your without your smarts about you, for lack of a better term, knowing that you're completely stay learning to deal with with this world. And we throw an average of a lot these days. Like it just doesn't happen. So I feel like you're working these magic channels here that just don't get see. As far as that is, that's just amazing work all the way around. And especially, you know, with with with COVID, and all the stuff that's been happening, it just seems like having been this is stressing people out to degrees, they've probably never been stressed out. So there's more money than ever right now to make sure people know those resources. Because Because I mean, everyone's just feeling stressed out about all the turbulence that's going on in the world right now. It's impacting people in ways they didn't even know and like, I'm feeling terrible about this, or can I go and talk it out with somebody or some and this is doing that it's connecting?

Absolutely. And we've had just to speak to that. So we had a GoFundMe page set up that had raised $6,000. In in like, four years. Okay. A lot of money. Right? Right. All the things that have been transpiring over the past six to seven months started to happen, right? People found our organization, okay, and started to donate to.

Are you serious? Number, what's the number is probably above like,

$125,000 at this, my gosh, and you see me in like six months. And then what that results in, in at simultaneously, right? More people are reaching out to your point. They're saying, I need help. Right? And it's like, expedited that process for people. They're like, this is too much. I'm stressed. I'm anxious. I need help. still smiling. I heard you guys are offering help. Can you help me? So it was just like, the blessing of getting the resources came at the same time that we have the influx? Yeah. Wanting support. So it was like, the alignment was couldn't have the timing couldn't have been better.

That's amazing. So when you start this thing up, like five years ago, do you think this is where we'll be going? I mean, that's gotta be so cool to be like, yeah, this idea things are kind of like, whatever. And all of a sudden, it's like, Wow, man, like, you know, it's catching on. It's catching on?

Yeah, I'll tell you the first thing I did. After sort of blogging and putting out digital resources. In March of 2016. I went out into the hill district, that was the first neighborhood and I just I approached somebody like a random creepy stranger isn't the best one to the random, creepy.

I was like, Hey, I'll pay you some money to tell me your mental health story.

Okay, just like the birth of our grassroots work. So sort of these one on one, like, therapeutic street conversations. Yeah. How it has grown and adapted to, you know, having 20 person cohorts, and they're all doing now definitely doing stuff virtually. But we're in person. Because it's a different flavor, virtual flavours matter. But now in the virtual world, they're, they're connected. They're still meeting, they're still doing trainings, they're meeting with mental health therapists, a lot of them are doing their therapy with their therapist virtually as well. So they're like, what one of our cohort members said the other day her her computer or laptop, went on the fritz, and she's like, I need my laptop because I need my method of therapy. Right? Those are my points of connectivity, right? I mean, I thought about that, but what she said her I was like, wow, like this is it's like people's lifelines. At this point, that's exactly what it is. Yeah, I mean, there's the times that we're in where it's like Like, man, like, I'm on my laptop here talking to you right now normally I'd be in the studio doing this actually getting to get to know your face, face to face, like in person. But now it's like, Oh, we got to do it this way. It's like without this, I wouldn't be doing it. And it's the same way around. So what a cool, cool story. What's the future looking like for you guys? What do you want to do next? What do you believe when you have emotional already? What's next?

Yeah, so. So this year, we're starting our scaling efforts. So we started in hilltop. And now we'll be in four more neighborhoods, which is in alignment with neighborhood allies in their neighborhoods. wilkinsburg, Larimer Homewood and the hill district in addition to the hilltop, um, those are adult programs, and then we'll also be doing youth programming in all of those neighborhoods as well. So we're venturing out and piloting high school aged youth programming. So that I, I see that scaling happening over the next five years. Okay, um, and we like to take this thing nationally, you know, like, like something like that can be you can take this, it can be like, replicated in regions anywhere, because it just seems like a smart way to go about this.

That's what we're what we're thinking about the phone call I was on before this, I was talking to Kate, one of their staff members about like, how to write how do we develop the framework? How do we how do we write it plain and simple, so that when we get all the data and we get all the information, we can go to Cleveland, we can go to Akron, we can go to similar cities, and say, Hey, you know, we're not going to do everything exactly the same. But you think we have a framework, you take the basic structure there, and then it can be customized with their particular needs? Maybe? Right.

Exactly. So that that's, that's, that's the long term vision. And, you know, I'm at a point here where I've been, you know, as the founder, I've been here since since the very beginning. But now I'm also thinking about, like, what do I need to do to set the organization up to sustain without me? Like, what happens when Julian isn't around? Here's what I mean. That's a smart thing to do. Right? Because I think you're some of the secret sauce of this thing, right? I mean, this is this is coming from you. So you got to make sure that you can continue to run if you're if your brains not in it every single day.

Yeah, exactly. It just something as simple as like, you know, our our first cohort just graduated and they're moving in a year or two, and I'm actually stepping out more and they're all like, they're like where are you at? nearby?

Here I'm here just like it really empowering them to know like you got it you guys got this like this is your rate you got this you know you don't you like I say you don't need me but you got it. You got everything you need. And that's so cool, man. I love it. I mean, the impact you're making is just phenomenal story I had not heard of before. And to know this is happening here in Pittsburgh is just amazing. Congratulations once again on being the ally of the year awardee, Julius Boatwright from steel smiling, which I think is one of the coolest names you've definitely made my day just so much fun talking to you do is awesome. Thank you. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Mind everybody. This is Jonathan Kersting with the Pittsburgh Technology Council in tech five radio, so honored to be hanging out with my friends and neighborhood allies to tell these very special stories.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai