South Side Talks

In this episode, South Sider and founder of the Haitian American Museum, Elsie Hector Hernandez, shares her story of how a trip to Haiti made her determined to change the narrative told about her home country.

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You can learn more about the Haitian American Museum at their website.

This episode picks up where the last one left off. We suggest you listen to them in order.

At age 18, Marshan Allen was sent to prison with real murderers where he was supposed to spend the rest of his life. But he was determined that it would not be the end of his story. So he fought for his freedom.

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You can learn more about Restore Justice at their website.

It’s easy to pathologize and label people and places when you don’t know their story. In this episode, Marshan Allen tells his story of how he went from being a kid who enjoyed riding his bike to facing life in prison at age 15.

In this episode, DeAndre Brooks tells his story of how he came to be running a farm in Englewood that grows fresh produce in a food desert.

DeAndre Brooks is a Woodlawn native who took an unlikely path to urban farming. Today he is the farm manager at Growing Home, a farm and job training program in Englewood.

You can learn more about Growing Home at their website.

In this episode, Roseland native Rayshauna Gray tells her story of how she went from Roseland to Harvard, but not in the way that you'd expect.

Rayshauna Gray is a Chicagoan living in Cambridge. She's thrilled to be living her childhood dream of being a time travelling storyteller. She loves researching with Tufts University's history department, Harvard's History Design Center, and petting all the good dogs in Boston. She’s currently putting the finishing touches on Roseland, a book about the last 200 years of her family's history through the last seven generations of women in her family (out with Belt Publishing in Fall 2019).

Follow Rayshauna: Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and her website.

Here's more info about Rayshauna’s upcoming book Roseland (Twitter thread // Video // Google Boston Talk).

So much of what is said and written about Chicago's South Side is negative. South Side Talks Podcast is changing that narrative. The South Side is more than headlines and statistics. South Side Talks is a podcast that will bring you stories that represent ALL of the South Side. Stories of joy, pain, success, failure, humor, and everyday life. By telling these stories, it allows the residents of the South Side to be seen as they are and should be—as regular people who face life with the same ups and downs as anybody else.