To me, charity often is just about giving, because you’re supposed to, or because it’s what you’ve always done — or it’s about giving until it hurts.

Build. Transform. Love. These are words I use all the time as we speak about community building and even real estate development because these are the kind of communities, like, we want to show you don't have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. And when people think about living in a neighborhood, they are not thinking about fight - the community of their dreams, they are not fighting in it, they are not struggling in it. It's not, "Oh, I gotta put on my armor." All the time. I don't want to live like that. I don't.

You know, I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote "smart" kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

I have no interest in arguing with haters, and also, I really don't want to be associated, you know, with a group of people who are only pushing to fight against something and not for something. I do want to be known as different. Period. And I believe in the self-determination of all people and if that's the way people want to define themselves, so be it.

Environmental justice [means that] no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.

To me, charity often is just about giving, because you’re supposed to, or because it’s what you’ve always done — or it’s about giving until it hurts.

It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.