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Chris wears many hats right now – including a full-time job, grad school, and leadership of a community empowerment organization -- and he credits SVJ for giving him his start, describing SVJ as having been “the golden thing on my resume” when he was an undergraduate. Like many of our interns, he came to SVJ having only ever worked in a service sector job, in his case, at a Publix supermarket. As a political organizer with SVJ, he developed his political muscles and learned to make digital political ads for social media – something he excelled at, despite having no prior experience. Encouraged by his SVJ mentor, he used his SVJ background to apply for a role with the re-election campaign of the mayor of Tallahassee and was made an assistant campaign director with responsibility for creating TikToks for the campaign. That led to an internship doing audio and video production for the Florida Association of Counties, which then turned into a full-time job when he graduated from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) and started working on his master’s degree.
While still an undergraduate, Chris also built on his SVJ internship experience to start a community-empowerment organization called Helping Black Communities Unite Inc. He explains that he was inspired to create HBCU Inc. by his experience working on the mayoral campaign. “Seeing the condition of our community, just in terms of how few people voted at FAMU, I just thought it was my duty, honestly, it was my purpose to continue this mission of getting out the vote on campus and continuing to educate students politically, because there's nobody else doing that on campus. And luckily, with Students for Voting Justice, I was throwing postcard parties with different organizations on campus, like the Big Brother, Little Brother Mentoring Program. [Those organizations] were later able to partner with Helping Black Communities Unite Inc. to do some postcard parties. We just took off from there and we've been doing our thing ever since then, just getting bigger and bigger.”
HBCU Inc. now has six chapters, including one at Howard University, and it continues to find ways to empower Black youth, including get-out-the-vote drives, creating community gardens, encouraging entrepreneurship, and marketing a children’s coloring book. Chris’s message to other young people is, “If you don't like what's going on in the current government, then you have to get involved. It's the only way to change things.”
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