Ana Rodney wears many hats. As a doula, poet, activist, and mom, Rodney is also the founder of MOMCares, a program that provides postpartum support to black mothers in the NICU. Her work, in general, delves into a topic that rarely gets acknowledged: the maternal health and mortality of black women. We talked to Rodney about how her personal experiences were as the catalyst for starting the organization and why it has become her mission to save the lives of black mothers and children.

How did MOMCares come to be?
I’ve been a doula birth worker for 11 years now and, since 2014 when my son, Aiden, was born, I’ve been doing the Neonatal Intensive Care (NICU) work. First, I had to live it and now I’m standing in and holding space for moms in the NICU. Aiden spent four months in the NICU, two months in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) and we only moved to the PICU because we encountered some discrimination and bias during, and right after, the Uprising.

After he came home, I decided that I needed to process what happened when I was in the NICU. During my pregnancy I was fat, black, single, and while in the NICU I decided to stay with my son. Then all of a sudden, I became unemployed and all of that gave rise to its own bias in the care and I ended up feeling unsupported and appearing unsupported while in the NICU.

I started a healing circle, talking to moms about birth, trauma, and self-care and then I was awarded seed money, through Baltimore Corps’ Elevation Awards, and MOMCares expanded. We built out a suite of services to support moms based on my experience and what I have seen in the NICU. For example, providing transportation to and from the hospital. We provide services like that, and we also provide advocacy in the hospital.

Does being an artist inform your work in the medical community?
I hope this doesn’t sound morbid, but there’s artistry in our pain in that everything is connected. As a writer I have always felt like, if you could see the vision of what I was saying, then I then I have done my job. When I go into a board meeting, or when I go into a hospital, or when I talk to a group of people, I am still very much using words to paint that picture.

But now that that picture is around the black maternal health crisis, and mothers dying, and babies being underserved in the black community, I definitely use that to my advantage. By using my way with words, I am able to drive it home to people who don’t have to think about that every day. They don’t have to think about that when they go into a doctor’s appointment or when they’re driving down the street. They don’t have to think about what role their identity plays in their survival.

NICU advocacy is not new but the work you are doing to address the narrative for women of color is what has been missing. What challenges do you face while doing this work?
There are a couple of things that have been difficult, I think on the one hand being so connected to the work and committed to the work, but also having a 4-year-old that doesn’t care about the work can be hard at times. Mom guilt is a bitch and it’s hard to be out here doing the battle cry for moms of black families and then come home and Aiden’s like, “I’m hungry” or “You didn’t play with me enough today.” So that’s difficult.

As far as actual deliverables, it has been two years this month since my sister died. We were pregnant that at the same time, and she had a health issue that was very small, an issue with a gallbladder that started right after she gave birth. It was neglected because she didn’t feel like she had support and she died suddenly. At the same time that she passed away, I was also holding space for a mom that I just helped deliver a little girl and her baby passed away. So, I’m helping a mom go through something that I can’t fathom while dealing with the guilt of not being able to help my sister the way she needed. My sister was a part of my work and it’s difficult to be like, “Of all the people that I wanted to save, that I wanted to help, that I wanted to impact, I did not.”

This work touches everybody in such an acute way, but I signed up for it. I signed up to do that. And it’s one of the reasons why I went through the grief training with Roberta’s House—because I know that the work I am going to be doing will involve some level of grief, and I need to be equipped to handle that.

What advice would you give for future social entrepreneurs and activists?
Get organized. Organize because your passion is important, but you can ignite someone else to want to support you and if you don’t have the capacity to respond to them, it’s like you didn’t say anything. Make sure you are ready to jump when it’s time to jump and trust yourself. There’s a reason why you have approached whatever work it is that you’re doing. There’s a reason why people are listening to you and engaging with you. So you need to trust yourself before you can ask anybody else to have confidence in you.

What’s in the immediate pipeline for Ana Rodney and MOMCares?
I will be releasing Energetic Motherhood in March, a book that tells Aiden’s birth story. The book reveals the process I created to foster a bond with my son after his premature birth and my being deprived of common mother’s rites of passage. We also have a giving campaign to collect donations to continue to bring services to more mothers well into the New Year. I am also currently accepting speaking requests for speaking engagements and cultural competency presentations.

Where do you see yourself in the next 10 years?
I would like to be recognized as a national advocate for black mothers around birth and maternal health. I’d like for MOMCares to be a national and international name in the fight to correct the crisis of maternal health in this country.

As a consummate storyteller, Devlon Waddell’s mediums range from memoirs to mudcloth, as he stands on stages and also stages beautiful spaces. The founder of furniture company Knot You Vintage, Wadell works out of his home studio to create one-of-a-kind furniture from repurposed fabrics and uses those functional art pieces as a way to tell stories up and down the East Coast.

Your life’s work has been about storytelling. How did you get the point where you began telling stories through designing furniture?
What I have found in learning that I was creative only about 10 or 15 years ago, is that I do the things and then I backtrack and figure out why. Find that narrative thread that led me to wherever I am. So, with the furniture, it was about opening a vintage clothing shop and instead of doing the traditional retail fixtures I was like, ‘Why not buy old stuff and make it suit my need?’ It started with bookcases and a couple of chairs and my wife, who works in public health, would get fabric from programming folk who worked in places like Tanzania, Nigeria, Egypt, and I am like, ‘Well, I have this, what can I do with it? Let me put it on furniture.’

In terms of the storytelling, I guess the idea that the pieces tell me when they are done or ‘right’ is what leads me to believe it’s about the story because several pieces of furniture will have four or five iterations so I will have posted a piece fully and then feel that something isn’t right about it, strip it down, and do it again. I am not sure what the bigger story I am telling is. It may be as organic as the right person for this piece of furniture is out there and the universe is telling me that I haven’t created what that person needs.

You are commissioned to do work for some of the most talented and powerful people in Baltimore. Tell me the most interesting story you have come across when designing for someone’s home. 

What is interesting to me is the deals that don’t happen. There are often conversations, sometimes they get very specific, sometimes they get to the point of invoices being generated and they just don’t pan out. The conversations are hilarious because it’s all about ‘supporting artists’ and ‘supporting black business’ and doing all of those things to edify community. But when it comes down to brass tacks, folks don’t want to come off the bread—and that’s fine. I am not one who believes that everyone has to have my work.

I do believe sincerely that, if you do work with me, you will get an experience that is broader than just a piece of furniture being delivered. But the idea that folks somehow feel like they are doing me a favor by some superficial engagement that doesn’t result in the business being done is just fascinating to me. Everybody likes to be affirmed. Everybody likes the ‘like’ button on social media but when it comes down to it, what business is happening? You know, folks talk about ‘support black business.’ I’m all about doing business with black business.  

Your main demographic is people of color. Is that because you are located in a 64-percent black city?

So, my best client in terms of dollars and cents and also giving me a certain freedom is not a person of color. This is interesting because I am unapologetically black and I have no qualms about expressing that, but my goal is to work with people who appreciate, truly, what I do and the effort that I put into making things for them as individuals. Wherever you land on the racial spectrum matters little when you are authentic and you understand what I do.

Do I enjoy working with black folk? Yes, because I understand throughout the different iterations of my creative career that there are things that need to exchange broader than the tangible. There are energies that need to be exchanged more between black folk just because of the trauma we suffer specifically in this city, because this is where I am from. I think a big part of my work in that storytelling or that narrative approach is about making connections toward deeper understanding and general healing.  

Are you operating in your full power and capitalizing on your capacity in the stage you are in now with your art and your entrepreneurship?  
Absolutely not. One, in terms of entrepreneurship, it is challenging for me given my personal demons to give myself the credit to take myself seriously enough. Until I can work from a place of ‘yes,’ will not be operating at capacity. I am getting better. Am I getting better at a rate that satisfies me? Not necessarily, but there is growth. Creatively? I believe that if you feel like you are working at capacity creatively not only are you not growing, you are regressing. I feel like you should always be pushing yourself to do more, to do better.

Where would you like to see yourself in 10 years?
I would love to be able to say, ‘being a designer of things.’ Maybe having a shop, maybe having multiple shops, but designing the furniture and not having to do the work. In 10 years, I want to embrace the fact that I am not only a storyteller in the things that I do but also in the most literal sense, being on stages and sharing my stories.

The life of Kariz Marcel has stretched and unfolded like an accordion and neatly fits back together to make the beautiful sound of success. Born in Rochester, New York, and raised in Baltimore, Kariz’s process is one for the big screen from homelessness to building a nonprofit and countless radio spins this man has accomplished what most people only dream of and he is still going.
 

We recently spoke with the producer, DJ, and founder of nonprofit Innovation Echo Alliance about his struggles with school, fatherhood, and the “angel” experiences that led to his success.
 

You have a hot song on 92Q and 95.9 FM entitled “Hey Baltimore” with Eze Jackson and Rufus Roundtree providing the vocals. How did that come about and what has come from that exposure?

Wow, that record really took off! Once we finished it we started sending it to all of the DJs we knew and Rufus went to school with DJ Class and so he let him hear the record. This was a big deal because DJ Class had the No. 1 club record in 2008 entitled, “I’m the Ish,” which eventually featured Kanye West. He loved the record and began spinning it everywhere. Once that happened, 92Q caught wind of it and began playing on their station. KW Griff, of the legendary 9 o’clock mix, began spinning it and once he transitioned over to 95.9 FM he began spinning it there as well.
 

There have been times when I have been in my car and I’ve heard it on both stations at the same time and that’s wild! As far as what has come from the exposure, our song has been the most played song from a local artist on the radio in 2017, we have performed it live for the Light City Festival: Neighborhood Lights and at the Red Bull Amaphiko Festival. The soul of the record is about creating opportunities and so we made a lesson from it where we have kids break the song down and rebuild it. So there is a kids version of “Hey Baltimore” out there and that goes along with my years doing Math + Music=Money and Innovation Echo Alliance, the nonprofit I am building.
 

What initially sparked your interest in making music?

I was born in New York, first of all, and New York was just so hip-hop, so my aunt dated DJs and music people and I just remember seeing it around. Eventually, it was all about, ‘What can I do to get girls?’ I had to figure it out! I wasn’t a ‘hooper,’ or super funny, or anything like that so I started writing rhymes and that led to making beats. But overall what happened between all of that is an injury happened. The bones were shattered throughout my arm and I had a compound third-degree fracture in my arm in the third grade, and the injury was so bad they had to pull me out of school through the fourth grade. I had to be home-schooled, my friends would bring me homework home, and my mom was working two jobs. I missed a couple of those years in school. So I asked my mom to buy me a keyboard and I started making beats with a big cast on my arm and I started performing more. Then I came to Baltimore.
 

How did coming here affect your journey into music?

When I got here, it was so different because I didn’t really know how to maneuver. Once again, I fell back on music, ‘You rap? Ok, then we can be friends.’ If people were creative, then it was easier to connect because at the time I was still doing a lot of painting. I would connect a lot with the artists and we would paint and then that would turn into music.
 

My grandmother bought me a computer in 1997 and I was the first guy in the neighborhood to be recording on a computer, nobody had seen that before. People were like, ‘What!? How are you recording from your computer, yo?’ My grandmother has always been my angel, my secret weapon, and once she got me that computer—that’s when I became the coolest kid in school. Having the computer allowed me to go to MARS [Music and Recording Superstore] with my mother and get the Cakewalk program. There was no YouTube back then, so once I figured out how to use it, that next day, I was walking around school with a boombox playin’ my own shit. I was telling people I had my own studio and I would charge $2 to record at my house. 
 

What has been the most difficult part of your process as a creative?

Nothing is difficult about being a creative, but everything is difficult about aligning a business structure around your creativity. Here’s the thing about it: I started making money off of beats before I even knew how to make beats. After high school, I left Essex to go to a two-year art institute in Manhattan and I went there with all of my friend’s beats. I would go to any open mic or borough and try to sell the beats. 

New York City got me in spaces with stars and, when I came back to Baltimore, I realized everything that everybody was doing here was wrong. I felt like I had a leg up and I decided to pour all I had into it. But yeah, the art ain’t hard—it’s trying to figure out how to put all the pieces, all the experiences, together to try to make money off of it.
 

What motivated you to step from the background, not only to start DJing and performing but to create the new sound that is Afro-EDM?

There are so many sources where it came from, but then this angel thing happened. Lenora King, my sister and artist I was creating music for, introduced me to this guy she was working with from Philly because he wanted to know who was making all of her music. He told me that he wanted to hear everything I ever made and I was like, ‘That’s going to take 10 hours’ and he was like, ‘That’s okay.’ So he came over the next morning and was patiently listening to everything I ever created and telling me to put different songs in different folders. He then said, ‘Do me a favor, that folder at the top, open that folder for me. That’s who you are. That’s the one thing you’ve got in you catalog that sounds like nothing that exists. Do more of that and stop making everything else and start DJing.’  I have never heard from this man again, his phone doesn’t work, email no response. He just disappeared.

I didn’t know why I was going to listen to a stranger, but I bought DJ equipment and I stopped making all of the other genres I made. He was a 50-something-year-old man, an industry vet and he knew what he was talking about. I then started DJing parties and it wasn’t until now that people can hear my music online.
 

It’s crazy because I didn’t call it Afro-EDM but other people started calling it that when they would come down to our parties on Calvert Street. To me, it’s still world-hood, but Afro-EDM is definitely something the world recognizes.
 

How did you first start blending your music with curriculum to create the Kariz Kids?

That happened out of demand. I had a wonderful girlfriend at the time, Karen, director of education for the Creative Alliance and she told me that the kids needed to do something and asked me if I could bring my beat machine to the school if they paid me $50. I went there and did it about three or four times and it was cool, but I didn’t want to be anybody’s role model. I wasn’t ready for all of that.

But CitiBank had gotten a big grant to start teaching kids in the ghetto financial literacy, that was the funding trend during that era, and then Karen asked me if I could find a way to blend my music stuff with financial literacy because the kids were literally falling asleep with the CitiBank curriculum. So I took that curriculum and re-worded it with everything in pop culture that was relevant and I brought in a laptop to blend it with that and at the time it was literally just one sheet.
 

Then more organizations wanted me to work with their kids. So then, I got a call from Karen and she asked me if I could do it in four schools. I personally couldn’t, so I decided to train my friends who made beats to teach and they went out there and did it. I remember a kid wanted me to help her with a math problem, and I wrote easy questions that connect math to music scenarios, but I also got other producers to help me write more math problems and studio scenarios. I then got with a Common Core math teacher and he restructured the math problems and then we basically had a textbook for my Math + Music= Money curriculum. I then got an opportunity to sit down at the CitiBank table and that’s when I realized that this was something I needed to take this more seriously and then I took the program to New York and D.C.
 

Kariz Kids is an important next step for you—it involves an app, curriculum created from the music on your upcoming LP The Blackwater Project, and more. Can you tell me more about the Innovation Echo Alliance?
So Innovation Echo Alliance [IEA] has been built up by some partners, business people, who were like, ‘Look we need to build the back-end for your organization up.’ They went in and put their money where their mouth was and helped me build it out. This encompasses my complete vision for what my nonprofit should be. It’s still in the beginning stages, but we are releasing it this month and we will be working alongside different record companies to make it happen.

 

This is what it was all about—bridging the gap. The mission of Kariz Kids was to bridge the gap between entertainment, education, and business. With IEA, our mission is to build and unite artistic professional educators, recording artists, producers, songwriters, musicians and recording engineers who are committed to changing our community for the better by nurturing minds and educating youth while aiding organizations in accomplishing their charitable goals.  We will also be using music from my upcoming release The Black Water Project and the artists on the record to teach a curriculum created from the album in educational spaces and parts of it will be used specifically for the upcoming mobile app. 
 

Where would you like to see yourself in 10 years?

Within the next 10 years I want my son, Jazz, to be a true product of all of these dope platforms that I have developed. I want him to learn on them and build his own product. I want him to be able to take his ideas and put it on the market.

If power and persistence were to exist in the form of a woman, she would be DeWanda Wise, a Baltimore native and the star of Spike Lee’s new Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It. Having grown up in Woodlawn, Wise plays the titular character Nola Darling in the new dramedy series based on the 1986 film of the same name. We recently talked to the actress about her journey full of bullseyes and do-overs, why she fell in love with the character of Nola, and the industry’s need to portray more people of color. 

You started out doing theater in high school. Was it in college that you decided that acting is what you wanted to do? 
Oh yeah, I don’t think I would have gone to college. Before I wanted to be an actor, I wanted to be a therapist but I wanted to be a therapist but the more I learned about the industry, while taking AP psych at Atholton [High School], I was like, ‘Maybe not . . . this.’  I was still a kid and I was still very much like, ‘Black people don’t go to therapy,’ and those were the people I wanted to serve and that’s what it was at the moment. And then I discovered, or rather, Nathan Rosen forced me to discover acting and I was like, ‘Oh this is where it all goes!’

This year it’s like you shot out of a cannon! I know it didn’t just happen in a year, it’s been a process. In 2016-2017, you did Underground, Shots Fired, and She’s Gotta Have It. How does that process work?
While I was doing Shots Fired, I taped for Underground and went to the call back in Savannah, Georgia and that was from August literally through filming She’s Gotta Have It. I wasn’t done filming Underground yet when I started filming She’s Gotta Have It in mid-October and finished early February 2017. So I was filming all of 2016.

Were you in New York for most of this?
I was in Charlotte, North Carolina for Shots Fired and then Alano and I went Savannah, Georgia for Underground and then I was in Brooklyn for She’s Gotta Have It. That was all of 2016 and all of them had been like seeds. Shots Fired was Gina Prince-Bythewood, Reggie “Rock” Bythewood, and the first time I had ever encountered either of them was in 2007 at my audition for Notorious. The second thing I was up for he [Reggie Rock] had a pilot called Gun Hill at BET and I screen tested for that and then I went in for a small role in Beyond the Lights. So this was my fourth time going in for anything with them. I went in for three roles—Sanaa, Ashitey, and Shameeka.

In your story, I hear a lot of persistence. I hear you saying that you’ve got to just keep going and keep trying.
You do and I feel like there are a lot of artists who are uncomfortable with the business component of it because it’s just like, ‘Listen I just want to create my art.’ My mom reminds me that I was such a theatre snob and that I was like, ‘I want to only do theater’ when I was in school which was so dumb. Unless you are on Broadway every week you are not making money in American theater. You can’t support yourself. 

But that’s not the point. The point is she reminds me that really what I was experiencing was that I didn’t believe that the work existed in film and TV that was compatible with what I wanted to do or what felt like what I would do.  It all goes back to say that having an understanding of the business of how casting works is important and that it’s really not personal. It wasn’t a blow to my spirit or psyche and I feel like that kept me in it more than anything. Then it became a matter of being like, ‘Oh let me find my tribe. Let me find people whose work is compatible with what can I contribute.’

How do you prepare for a role?
Physically, I try to workout in a way that’s organic to the characters I’m playing. For Nola, that meant spin class and yoga because she’s always riding her bike and goes to dance class with her friends. In terms of research, I was also an Urban Studies major, so I was fortunately very familiar with the major themes of the show. Outside of that, I do my actor work and trust the collaborators around me.

You are very transparent on social media about what your needs are as an artist, how important is it to have the proper guidance in your industry.
Everyone before the show came out were like, ‘Are you ready? Are you ready?’ and what’s beautiful about stepping into the skin of Nola, as a ‘Type A’ human being, is it opened my process up and it opened me up to being less controlling, to being more open in a way to what things are and not being presumptuous about what it was going to be. There have been a ton of things in my life that have been like that. That have been like, ‘Maybe don’t walk into this with preconceived notions.’ Maybe don’t walk into it like, ‘This is who I am’ because who I am is constantly evolving. 

So all that is to say there is no real preparation for someone who comes from a for real place and comes from a working-class background for what Hollywood is. In terms of my transition to where I am now, I have had the grace and the fortune to see my husband become a principal actor on a show and I have had close friends that have ‘blown up’ before my eyes. There is a lot of peer engagement, there are a lot of people who this is happening to at the same time, we call it ‘hatching.”

I can bounce ideas back and forth with them, but when it comes to that intergenerational conversation, people who have already moved through this space, it is presumed that they don’t have the time [to mentor]. I am trying to make sure that I am transparent about younger actors and younger activists knowing that I am making the space and the room for them and also not being afraid to reach up and be like, ‘Is anyone up there making the space and the room?’ When things come up it would be nice to have someone who [already] moved through it to help.

What motivates you and your husband, Alano, to do the independent film work that you do? What informs that work?
It speaks to working with Gina, she has an indie film background. It speaks to Spike and I being kindreds—he is still even at 60 still so inherently indie-minded. My first project, I was still in college, was an indie called Spinning In A Butter and it was about the undercurrent of race relations on a predominantly white campus. I think that in my bone and marrow and by the will of God, the stories that I have wanted to tell have always been through an independent lens. 

In the very beginning, I was hit on multiple fronts with challenges in my career path. We had the writer’s strike, the recession, there were a number of things that forced me even further into an independent space. If I wanted the work to exist, it wasn’t paid. I have a ton of short films that were just for the love of story, for the love of art. In addition to any formal theater you see on my resume, I was a part of several small theater companies in and around New York. So it has always been an aspect of my career and it always will be. 

I am literally filming an indie right now. A director I know was like, ‘What are you doing in December?’ and I was like, ‘We makin’ a movie?’ So doing indie film came from a need, a hole in the industry of stories of color, underrepresented marginalized communities, people we just do not see. My need to create in an independent space has always come from the recognition of something that is lacking.

There is so much going on with the #MeToo movement and women’s empowerment. She’s Gotta Have It couldn’t have come out at a better time.
What I was drawn to in Nola is seeing a woman in process. I do think it is very easy to see her and have strong feelings about how messy and not graceful she is in the midst of that process, but I think throughout it all what struck me and what continues to encourage me is knowing that it is okay for us to be in process. These narratives about us saving the world or being strong and resilient and beautiful women we are, while that is very important and it’s in our DNA, it’s also okay for us to be fragile and vulnerable. 

Many of the women that we look up to, the Michelle Obamas, the Maxine Waters, the Oprahs were all at once and still are, even though we don’t see it behind the scenes, ‘in process.’ We shouldn’t get so caught up in the whirlwind of trying to ‘make it’ that you don’t take up the space to be. 

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Creatively, I would love to be producing more in 10 years and be providing opportunities for other artists. I anticipate a great deal of public service and philanthropy. And still madly in love with Alano.