Project H.O.O.D., a Chicago group targeting poverty and violence, says his group has many of the ingredients of what experts consider an equitable organization. The organization’s staff and leadership are racially diverse and include residents from the Woodlawn and Englewood neighborhoods on the South Side that it serves. A dozen former gang members work full time for the group’s violence-prevention program — community residents aiming to solve problems facing neighbors and friends. Recently, the organization was hailed for a gender-equity success: The first all-female class graduated from one of its construction-trade programs, preparing would-be electricians for jobs in the male-dominated field.
Still, Pastor Corey Brooks, the group’s founder and CEO, is cool to rhetoric about racial equity or equity programs targeted at race. “The moment we start allowing race to be in the forefront of everything, it’s going to always divide us,” says Brooks, who’s also the founder and senior pastor of New Beginnings Church in Woodlawn. “We can’t always make things about race.”
Too often, he says, equity campaigns are built on the assumption that equity can only be won when it is granted. He points to an effort to force Chicago’s trade unions to diversify training programs, a drive he sees as a distraction. Better to stick to his organization’s core work: training men and women in construction trades, coding, and other skills to earn a good living, become entrepreneurs, and take care of their families and communities.
“We’re more focused on accountability and self-responsibility,” Brooks says. “Instead of trying to fight the unions and force them to let us in, we create our own construction companies, our own training programs, our own opportunities. We’re not waiting for someone to give us what we have a right to as American citizens.”
Nationally, Brooks has won attention for criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement as well the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of essays in the New York Times 1619 Project. That journalistic attempt to center slavery in the national narrative, he wrote, sullied the “beautiful story of America’s founding.”
In 2012, Brooks camped out for 94 days in the dead of winter on the roof of a Woodlawn motel that was home to drug dealers, gangs, and prostitutes, earning the nickname “Rooftop Pastor.” That effort helped raise the money to buy the hotel and raze it. Now the organization is raising the cash to build a new community center on the property that will house Project H.O.O.D’s array of programs — training in entrepreneurship; the construction, automotive, and hospitality industries; and the performing and culinary arts.
His views may mean Brooks is out of step with many in the nonprofit world, but he sees things differently. “We feel like we’re a step ahead.”
In a radio interview with KLOVE news, Pastor Corey Brooks tells the story of how he started his anti-violence group in Chicago.
